Hiltzik: Republicans want to turn the clock back, to the red-baiting Fifties
Republicans are reviving 1950s red-baiting against Democrats, even as actual communism has all but vanished from the world stage.
Republicans have dusted off an epithet that should have stayed in the Cold War attic: calling their Democratic opponents communists.
The charge lands with particular force in an era when communism, as a living ideology or governing system, is effectively extinct across most of the globe. Yet the label persists as a political weapon, aimed squarely at progressive policies on taxes, regulation, and social spending.
This rhetorical return to the 1950s red-baiting playbook ignores a basic reality. The Soviet Union collapsed more than three decades ago. China has morphed into a state-driven capitalist machine. Cuba and North Korea remain outliers, not models anyone in mainstream American politics seeks to emulate.
The persistence of the slur says more about the accusers than the accused. It conjures a vanished enemy to rally voters, substituting nostalgia for argument. When actual communist parties command negligible support even in Europe’s most left-leaning democracies, the term functions as pure historical cosplay.
What makes the revival striking is its disconnect from measurable influence. No major Democratic figure advocates collective farms, one-party dictatorship, or the abolition of private property. The debate is instead over marginal tax rates, healthcare access, and the size of the administrative state, hardly the stuff of Politburo manifestos.
The harder Republicans lean on the communist smear, the more it reveals their own ideological exhaustion. In a world where the ideology they claim to battle has already lost, they are left shadowboxing with ghosts.
Original reporting: LA Times.
Original reporting: LA Times, Business.
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