US President Donald Trump delivered a speech at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial focused on the dangers of communism, as part of his America 250 weekend. Trump linked the fight against communism to the upcoming midterm elections in November.
The speech comes as Trump's Republican party is on course to lose at least one and possibly both houses of Congress in the midterms, and as his personal job approval ratings continue to plummet.
Zohran Mamdani was elected last year as the mayor of New York on a Democratic Socialists of America ticket. Neither Mamdani nor any of his Democratic Socialists colleagues are remotely close to being communists. Many of those being tarred with the brush of communism, like Mamdani, are no more than moderate social democrats by historical standards.
Anti-communism does not require the existence of actual communists to retain its power.
A weapon with a long and bloody history
Anti-communism has huge appeal within American political culture, particularly for the generation of voters who grew up on cold war propaganda. It also appeals to some voters from immigrant communities, especially from the Latin American diaspora from places such as Cuba and Venezuela.
Historically, anti-communism has been a persistent and powerful force in 20th-century history. Britain and its allies invaded Russia in 1919. Anti-communism 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. It underpinned the rise and popular appeal of fascism throughout Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. Britain's fight against Malaysian independence in the 1950s was driven by anti-communism. It was used to justify mass torture and disappearances during the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s.
The UK's welfare state was built to encourage the working classes to resist 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 greater urgency than the fight against their bosses.
For Trump, anti-communism links communists and illegal immigrants. For the Nazis, anti-communism linked communists and Jews. Hitler's obsession with 'Judeo-Bolshevism' culminated in the Holocaust. In the Spanish civil war, fear of communism proved a more powerful ideological glue for Franco's supporters than fear of fascism did for the fractured Republican side.
While there were plenty of Jewish communists and socialists in early 20th-century Europe, the idea that all Jews were communists was an antisemitic fever dream. Most of those killed in the anti-communist massacres in Indonesia and Latin America were not card-carrying party members.
A global revival
Anti-communism survived the end of the cold war, embedded itself within far-right ideology, and is reemerging as a central plank of global politics. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declared at his first inauguration that Brazil's flag would never be red. Colombia's president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella denounced his reformist opponent as a 'radical left Marxist'. UK conservative Suella Braverman shares 'cultural Marxism' conspiracy theories.