The Red Scare Revival

Cold War liberal Jonathan Chait joins the committee

I see Jonathan Chait’s gone all in on Red Scare II over the rising Democratic Socialists of America. My eyes were glazed throughout — though they crinkled with laughter sometimes, like when he sputtered that DSA member and now Democratic House nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier “called Joe Biden a ‘rapist’ and wrote ‘Fuck Kamala Harris’” before winning her nomination. Apparently Chait is one of the very few people who gives a shit, which constituency does not include the Democratic voters in Chevalier’s district.

But my glazed eyes got double-glazed as Chait described the transformation of Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists, which in Chait’s telling were once all about “democratic norms,” into a rotten commie cell a few years back thanks to COMRADE BERNIE SANDERS:

A decade ago, the excitement generated by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign on the left and the frightening rise of Donald Trump spurred an influx of tens of thousands of young members. Some of the new recruits were Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw the DSA’s growing membership as fertile ground...

... In 2021, eight founding DSA members similarly warned that far-left factions were attempting to gain control of the group.

The communist influx threw open the question of whether the DSA would support authoritarian parties and states around the world.

Record scratch! Communists? What does he mean? Well, Chait says Chevalier “repeatedly praised communism” — linking to a CNN story about DAC’s old tweets, which “included phrases such as ‘seize the means of production.’” And... not much else; there were those Marxist-Leninists; who knows where they are now — maybe they’re off winning a primary somewhere.

Ask me if I care. Or, let me ask you: Why should I care?

What fucking country is Chait living in? I’ll tell you what country I’m living in. It’s ruled by fascist goons who kidnap people off the streets and whose leader plunders the treasury and takes enormous kickbacks from his hyper-rich enablers.

The means of production would seem to be pretty well spoken for. And I’m supposed to worry about communists?

Also I’m old enough, and educated enough (not bragging, it doesn’t take much), to know what Red Scares are for, and that they’re not about preserving “democratic norms.”

There were communists in America and in the American political system in the early and mid 20th Century. You hear about them, if you do hear about them, not because they had much effect on U.S. policy, at least in the positive sense; rather, you hear about them only because they were blacklisted, imprisoned, and executed.

Possibly, you also heard about a lot of people like Helen Gahagan Douglas who were never communists but who were accused of it and chased out of public life, back in the original iteration of Chait’s current campaign, because that became a popular gambit for conservative shitheels to muscle their way into power.

If you have an ancient relative or one who’s a serious rightwing activist, they may tell you that purging the commies, and anyone suspected of being one, was necessary to save America. Chait himself tells us in a Red Channels whisper that the old Progressive Party, home of FDR’s second Vice-President, “was secretly run by Communist Party loyalists.” I guess he’s happy FDR jettisoned Wallace for Truman in his fourth term. But what would Wallace have done differently as President? Maybe tried to negotiate a settlement to the Cold War? Your old and/or deranged relative will tell you Wallace would have sold us out to Stalin and we’d all be wearing scratchy Russian uniforms and waving Mao’s Little Red Book. Same as if we let Dalton Trumbo have his name in movie credits!

From this distance it’s pretty obvious that America was never in any serious danger of becoming a Worker’s Paradise — and if you can’t see it from history, you can see it from the workers’ nightmare that America has become under successive generations of capitalist cheerleaders, from McCarthy to Nixon to Reagan to the current Red Scare Revivalists, all of whom helped bring us to our current parlous state.

Whether many people see that or not, I can tell you that people living in America 2026 are looking at the people trying this Beware the Communist Menace racket like they’re warning them about Rosicrucians or the Boogie Man. Partly it’s because they don’t even know what a communist is. (And if the new Red Scarers tried to explain it to them, they might decide that, compared to what they’re living with now, it doesn’t sound half bad.)

Who, in this oligarchic dystopia, is fretting about the imminence of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Who looks at Zohran Mamdani and sees a commissar? Are you fucking serious?

Maybe Chait thinks since it worked before it’s gotta work again. Maybe he thinks this will help make him the 21st Century’s Norman Podhoretz. Well, Podhoretz was an asshole and if that’s his aspiration, God go with him. The rest of us have a world to win.