{"id":1220,"date":"2026-07-28T16:23:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T16:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/07\/28\/donald-trump-has-launched-another-red-scare-in-the-us-its-a-favourite-tactic-of-the-right\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T16:23:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T16:23:51","slug":"donald-trump-has-launched-another-red-scare-in-the-us-its-a-favourite-tactic-of-the-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/07\/28\/donald-trump-has-launched-another-red-scare-in-the-us-its-a-favourite-tactic-of-the-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump has launched another \u2018Red Scare\u2019 in the US \u2013 it\u2019s a favourite tactic of the right"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump\u2019s recent speech<\/a> at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial was a key moment in his carefully choreographed America 250<\/a> weekend. Though partisan and rambling in typical Trumpian style, the speech stood out for its focus on a theme which has increasingly dominated his rhetoric over recent months: the dangers of communism.<\/p>\n

Communism is back, the US president argued \u2013 a resurgent menace and mortal threat to American liberty.<\/p>\n

He linked the fight against communism to the upcoming midterm elections in November. Trump<\/a>\u2019s Republican party is presently on course<\/a> to lose at least one and possibly both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, the president\u2019s personal job approval ratings continue to plummet. <\/p>\n

This attack on communism might seem so ludicrous as to be easy to dismiss. It is partly a response to the success of Zohran Mamdani, who was elected last year<\/a> as the mayor of New York on a Democratic Socialists of America ticket.<\/p>\n

Neither Mamdani nor any of his Democratic Socialists colleagues are remotely close to being communists. But Trump has clearly decided that the best strategy for the midterm elections is to whip up a new Red Scare<\/a>. <\/p>\n

He may well be right. Anti-communism has huge appeal within American political culture \u2013 particularly for the generation of voters who, like Trump, grew up on a diet of cold war propaganda.<\/p>\n

Ironically, given the connections Trump has regularly made between communism and immigration<\/a>, it also appeals to some voters from immigrant communities. For much of the Latin American diaspora in the US, particularly from places such as Cuba and Venezuela, anti-communism is even more politically powerful than it is for the rest of the country.<\/p>\n

When we think about the history of anti-communism, we probably think first about McCarthyism and America\u2019s last major Red Scare in the 1950s<\/a>. But anti-communism was not limited to the US or the cold war. It was one of the most powerful global political projects of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

Anti-communism drove Britain and its allies to invade Russia 1919, and provoked a rightwing backlash against the rise of the Labour party in the 1920s. It fuelled Christian politics and parties in the interwar period, particularly in the Vatican<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anti-communism also underpinned the rise and popular appeal of fascism throughout Europe in the 1920s and \u201930s. It drove Britain\u2019s murderous fight against Malaysian independence in the 1950s, caused up to 1 million deaths in the Indonesian genocide<\/a> of the 1960s, and was used to justify mass torture and disappearances during the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s.<\/p>\n

It also underpinned many features of 20th-century politics that are widely regarded as progressive. The UK\u2019s welfare state, for example, was built to encourage the working classes to resist the siren call of communism. Social democratic parties existed to offer a reformist alternative to revolutionary parties to their left. Many trade unions, in Britain and elsewhere, pursued the fight against communist rivals with even greater urgency than the fight against their bosses.<\/p>\n

Anti-communism, in short, was a far more persistent and powerful force in 20th-century history than anti-fascism.<\/p>\n

Manufacturing an \u2018enemy within\u2019<\/h2>\n

There are three reasons why anti-communism was, and remains, such a powerful project. The first is the ease with which hatred or fear of communism can be yoked to hatred or fear of other outsider groups.<\/p>\n

For Trump, the link is between communists and illegal immigrants<\/a>. For the Nazis, it was between communists and Jews. Hitler\u2019s deranged obsession with \u201cJudeo-Bolshevism\u201d<\/a> culminated in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

The second reason is the ability of anti-communism to unite people across the political spectrum, from traditional conservatives to the wildest fringes of fascism.<\/p>\n

In the Spanish civil war, fear of communism proved a more powerful ideological glue for Franco\u2019s supporters than fear of fascism did for the fractured Republican side. And throughout history, there have been plenty of examples of liberals and social democrats who, when push came to shove, chose to line up on the side of the fascists when the threat of communism loomed.<\/p>\n

The third reason is that anti-communism doesn\u2019t require the existence of actual communists to retain its power.<\/p>\n

Many of those being tarred with the brush of communism, like Mamdani, are no more than moderate social democrats by historical standards. Similarly, most of those killed in the anti-communist massacres in Indonesia<\/a> and Latin America weren\u2019t card-carrying party members. And while there were plenty of Jewish communists and socialists<\/a> in early 20th-century Europe, the idea that all Jews were communists was nothing more than an antisemitic fever dream.<\/p>\n

We can see all of this at play in the rise of the global far right over recent decades. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declared at his first inauguration that Brazil\u2019s flag would never be red<\/a>. Colombia\u2019s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella<\/a>, denounced his reformist opponent as a \u201cradical left Marxist\u201d.<\/p>\n

Even mainstream UK conservatives such as Suella Braverman<\/a> are prone to sharing \u201ccultural Marxism\u201d<\/a> conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

For all these reasons, it\u2019s important not to be blinded by the seeming absurdity of Trump\u2019s anti-communist rhetoric. Anti-communism is back \u2013 indeed, it never went away. <\/p>\n

It survived the end of the cold war, embedded itself within some of the most extreme ideological currents of the far right, and is now reemerging as a central plank of global politics. It is powerful, persuasive and dangerous, and we need to take it seriously.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

David Brydan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump\u2019s recent speech at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial was a key moment in his carefully choreographed America 250 weekend. Though partisan and rambling in typical Trumpian style, the speech stood out for its focus on a theme which has increasingly dominated his rhetoric over recent months: the dangers of communism. Communism is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}