Why Is Everything Communism Now?

The past and present of a scare tactic

In his 1950 California Senate race against Democratic Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon did not need to prove that his opponent wanted to turn Orange County into a Soviet wheat collective. He needed voters to wonder whether she was somewhere on the wrong side of the color wheel. Douglas had already been smeared in her Democratic primary as the “Pink Lady,” and Nixon’s campaign happily kept the shade alive. To that end, Nixon accused Douglas of being “pink down to her underwear” and distributed hundreds of thousands of pink flyers comparing her voting record with those of liberal members of Congress.

Subtle? No.

Effective? Very.

Douglas responded by calling Nixon “Tricky Dick,” which, as nicknames go, aged spectacularly. Nixon won by nearly 700,000 votes.

By 1961, John F. Kennedy was warning that the move had become a formula. “They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism,” he said at a Democratic dinner in Los Angeles. The chain was simple, sticky, and devastating. The Soviet Union had the bomb, China had fallen to Mao, communism had been fought in Korea, and the Cold War was becoming the organizing fact of American life. At home, a communist accusation could end a career, ruin a reputation, and turn almost any policy fight into a loyalty test.

Over six decades later, American politics is turning pink again — or at least Republicans are trying to make it so.

President Trump has suddenly started talking about communism almost everywhere he goes. After a string of left-wing Democratic primary wins in June, Trump invoked communism 81 times in two weeks. At Mount Rushmore, he warned of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” called communism “a mortal threat to American liberty,” and said it was a greater danger than “World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.” At the National Mall, during the country’s 250th birthday celebration, he compared communism to a cancer that needed to be cut out fast.

House Republicans and conservative media have moved in the same direction. The Democratic Party, they argue, is being captured by “communists,” “Marxists,” and “godless” radicals. Speaker Mike Johnson has painted some Democrats as “radical candidates” who are “self-described, self-identifying Marxists.” Rep. Richard Hudson, who runs the House GOP’s campaign arm, gleefully said, “The Democrats are making this easy for us.”

The trick of communist labeling is old. The question is why it is working its way back into the center of American politics now.