A communist under every bed
The current GOP is trying to reanimate the corpse of “Tail Gunner” Joe McCarthy. Trump conflates Democratic Socialism with Communism and believes his base won’t understand the difference.
I’ve known people who grew up in the Soviet Union, mainland China, East Germany and Communist Poland. They all laugh out loud at the idea that there’s any significant communist party in America.
Trump and his cult (the GOP, Fox News, Newsmax, etc) refer to all Democrats as “leftists,” “left wing,” “socialists” and “Marxists” as well as communists. They’re using these words as epithets, not according to any useful definition of the terms. The reality is that the Democratic Party is a bog ordinary center-right party.
“The actual operational Democratic Party is a specific set of people. Its Senate leadership, its House leadership, its state-level executives, its mayors, its policy shops, its think tanks, its legislative directors, its floor managers, its committee staff, its campaign apparatus, its donors, its consultants, its lawyers, its judges, its endorsed nominees. The people who actually run the party and hold the party’s power. Every one of these people, when examined honestly by any comparative standard, is a boringly conventional center-left liberal. Some of them are more progressive than others. Some of them are frankly conservative in the older sense of the word.”
*snip*
“The result is a media environment in which the American public’s mental image of the left is a composite that no operational Democrat resembles. This composite includes: the Marxist lesbian with the blue hair, the professor who tweeted the bad take, the protester who broke a window, the HR manager who mandated a pronoun training, the college dean who caved on a speech controversy, the campus activist chapter that endorsed a bad statement about Israel, the crank in the school board meeting, and the drag queen the algorithm has decided to feature this week. Each of these composites is a real person somewhere. None of them holds office. None of them writes policy. None of them, individually or collectively, has the operational power to affect a federal budget line, a Supreme Court appointment, a treaty, a rule at the SEC, or the direction of a single one of the fifteen departments whose budgets shape American life.”
Same with the media. You can *find* examples of left-wing—indeed, communist and socialist—publications, but they are small, poorly funded and disconnected from political power. The media that Trump and his minions whine about (PBS, the NYT, WaPo, CNN) are all conservative bothsidesism outlets. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao would call the Democratic Party and the mainstream media what they are—servants of western capitalism.
Don’t fall for the propaganda. The only communists in America today are in the perfervid imaginations of the GOP.
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-radical-left-mostly-doesnt-exist?utm_source=substack&publication_id=3163842&post_id=208690416&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=2133ns&triedRedirect=true