Commies EVERYWHERE!

It’s getting so I almost miss Joe McCarthy.

Liar, drunk, fabricator of conspiracies so absurd that he accused U.S. Army leaders of communist sympathies, McCarthy shared with the young Donald Trump a consigliere—Roy Cohn—who counseled both never to be held back by mere facts, nor to apologize for any outrage they had committed.

But at least there was an actually existing communist power, with a small number of American adherents, when McCarthy was raving. There was the Soviet Union, headed by a paranoid monster named Stalin.

More from Harold Meyerson

You wouldn’t know it if you listened to the dregs who constitute today’s Republican legions, raving as they are about the communists among us, but there is no such communist power today.

There’s China, a Leninist-verging-on-tech-infused-Stalinist state capitalist power, but it boasts no virtually ideological adherents either in the States or abroad, and certainly not within the Democratic Socialists of America. It does have spies, and thugs who intimidate dissidents in the Chinese diaspora, but it lacks any support within the actual American left. To be sure, China’s rise to economic world power was fueled by offshoring American companies, but they went to China at the prompting of Wall Street as a way to boost their profit margins, Chinese labor then being dirt cheap. In other words, it was our leading capitalists, rather than any American socialists or communists, who sold out the industrial Midwest.

There’s also a small number of lesser communist states—Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba—but again, none of these are models for the young people who dominate our new New Left, though you could assemble a small retirement community of Castro nostalgiacs. And it’s the same crop of American corporate CEOs who flocked to China for its low wages who are now relocating factories to Vietnam (though any low-wage South Asian nation, apparently, will do).

In light of all this, the most preposterous recent diatribe against the revived American left was the Wall Street Journal op-ed last week by former New York City Councilman Andrew Stein and pollster Mark Penn, who famously counseled Bill Clinton in the mid-’90s to move as far to the right as Grover Cleveland (which counsel Clinton only took in smallish doses). In their column, they wrote, “Lawmakers, law-enforcement agencies and journalists should investigate the DSA to see if it is being funded by foreign governments and interests.”

The absence from this charge of any particular foreign governments that might be funneling cash to DSA is telling. To the extent that DSA has focused on a “foreign” cause, it’s that of the Palestinians, which really has become a signature cause of American young people much as Vietnam was the signature cause of my generation when we were young. But just as neither Moscow nor Beijing nor Hanoi gold was funding the massive anti-war demonstrations of the ’60s and ’70s, neither Hamas nor Fatah nor Hezbollah nor Iranian gold is behind the growing support for Palestinians nor the waning support for Israel’s wretched government, which has managed to alienate not just the American left, but much of the American center and right.

To be sure, America’s leading socialists have foreign models to which they point: the social democracies of Scandinavia. Listen to Bernie or AOC or Zohran, and the policies they promote—universal free child care and college tuition, affordable social housing, and the like—are the policies of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, whose citizens, by the evidence of repeated global polling, are the world’s happiest. In the two speeches in which he defined his ideology—those in 2015 and 2019, on the eve of his two presidential campaigns—Sanders positioned himself as fulfilling those portions of the New Deal that never moved beyond the blueprint stage, citing the Economic Bill of Rights that Franklin Roosevelt proposed in 1944 as the promise he sought to deliver.

The move by Trump and his sewer-mates to resurrect the communist canard is partly the result of his—for lack of a better term—geriatric instincts. It’s of a piece with his affinity for coal and for the demographics and power distribution of 1950 America, before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the feminist and other causes it spawned began to erode the supremacy of white men.

I suspect that Trump is misunderstanding the advice that Roy Cohn gave him. Cohn told him that lying is not just fine but also that big lies work better than small ones if sufficiently repeated. But Cohn surely did not tell him to repeat the same lies that Joe McCarthy told, since there really was a worldwide communist movement then, subservient to the needs of the Soviet Union and Joe Stalin. It didn’t follow that once Stalin, the Soviet Union, and the worldwide movement were gone, Trump could continue to weave the very same tales of subversion that McCarthy had spun. He’d need to find other targets.

Instead, Trump, the garden variety of Republican electeds, and Rupert Murdoch’s minions of misinformation apparently believe that what worked in 1950 will work today. If they’re at all right, we’re in even worse shape than I had thought.