They Need a “Communist”

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Excellent essay by Stephen Schmidt

Red Scare, Red Herring

This is nothing new.

The political reporters who describe the divisions inside the Democratic Party as unprecedented are overwhelmingly ignorant about the party they cover. The tension has always been there: between reform and revolution, liberalism and socialism, the institutional party and the insurgent left.

The right depends upon that tension. Its most potent fuel is the threat of the revolutionary left.

That threat is not imaginary. Wherever the revolutionary left achieved absolute power, death, mayhem and suffering followed. From the Jacobin Terror through Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge, movements promising emancipation constructed prisons, abolished liberty, and murdered human beings in service of an imagined future.

The American Revolution did not succumb to the Jacobins in our midst. The constitutional system — tragically compromised by slavery — was constructed upon a harder view of human nature. It did not entrust unlimited power to a supposedly virtuous class. It divided power because no person, faction or party could be trusted with all of it.

The danger begins when a legitimate fear of revolutionary tyranny is transformed into permission for counterrevolutionary tyranny.

California in 1934 revealed the modern machinery.

Upton Sinclair was not falsely accused of being a socialist. He was a socialist. He had belonged to the Socialist Party for decades and proposed a genuinely radical program called EPIC: End Poverty in California. The state would put unemployed people to work in idle factories and on idle farmland, creating a cooperative economy based upon “production for use” instead of production for profit.

Sinclair entered the Democratic Party, won its nomination for governor and frightened the California establishment. Newspapers, corporations, banks, real estate interests and Hollywood studios combined to stop him. MGM produced staged propaganda films disguised as election newsreels. Respectable citizens supported Republican Frank Merriam. Sinclair’s supposed supporters appeared foreign, menacing and disreputable.

The campaign required a certain alchemy. It began with something true: Sinclair was a socialist. The truth was then melted down and recast. Socialist became communist. Communist became Soviet agent. Economic reform became confiscation. Assistance to the unemployed became an invitation for an invading army of vagrants. Sinclair became an existential threat to California.

Every distinction disappeared.

Sinclair frightened Franklin Roosevelt too.

EPIC was not simply another component of the New Deal. It was an implicit indictment of its caution. Roosevelt was attempting to regulate capitalism, relieve suffering and restart production. Sinclair proposed constructing a cooperative economy that might eventually supplant capitalism. If FDR embraced him, Republicans could attach EPIC’s most radical provisions to the entire Democratic Party. Banking reform, public employment, labor rights and Social Security could all be represented as preliminary steps toward communism.

Sinclair met with Roosevelt after winning the primary, and attempted to present a modified EPIC as compatible with the New Deal. Roosevelt withheld his endorsement. He understood that Sinclair could become the face Republicans placed upon every New Deal reform. Protecting the national coalition mattered more than rescuing California’s Democratic nominee. Once FDR stood back, establishment Democrats were free to abandon Sinclair, and many did. The University of Washington’s EPIC history documents Roosevelt’s refusal, and the pressure EPIC placed upon the New Deal⁠.

Roosevelt’s fear was rational. He understood the alchemy. Sinclair really was more radical than the New Deal. But the right would not preserve that distinction. It would transform Sinclair into Roosevelt, Roosevelt into Sinclair, reform into revolution and the Democratic Party into an instrument of communist conquest.

FDR chose distance. Yet Sinclair’s movement still helped push the New Deal leftward. Roosevelt would not embrace EPIC, but he could not ignore the desperation that had made it possible. The second New Deal produced the Works Progress Administration, Social Security, and a more aggressive federal response to economic insecurity.

There, in 1934, was the permanent Democratic tension. The radical left pushed against the limits of reform. The institutional party feared being defined by its radical flank. The right needed that flank as fuel.

Nothing is new.

Franz von Papen is the most vivid example of where the alchemy can lead.

Papen was not an innocent bystander. He was a former German chancellor, aristocrat and political intriguer who helped persuade President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. Papen and the German conservative elite feared communism, social revolution, and the destruction of the order that had given them power.

They reduced Germany’s future to a fraudulent choice: Hitler or Bolshevism.

Once that binary was accepted, constitutional government disappeared as an alternative. Parliamentary compromise disappeared. Democratic conservatism disappeared. Social democracy disappeared. Hitler became necessary because everything else had been erased.

Papen believed Hitler could be surrounded, controlled and used. Instead, Hitler seized the state, abolished liberty and destroyed the men who imagined they were manipulating him. Members of Papen’s own circle were murdered during the 1934 purge. Papen survived and continued serving Hitler as a diplomat.

Germany was destroyed. Europe was reduced to ruins. The Holocaust was perpetrated. The war killed roughly 70 to 85 million people.

Yet Papen returned to the communist danger at Nuremberg and in his 1952 memoirs. Seven years after the catastrophe, the essence of his defense remained: if not Hitler, then the communists.

The hypothetical catastrophe became the excuse for the actual one.

Papen asked history to compare Hitler with an imagined communist Germany instead of the constitutional order he had helped destroy. Communism justified bringing Hitler to power. After Hitler had brought death and ruin to the world, communism became the alibi.

Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes are contemporary symptoms of the same American rot. They are products of a broken generation of man-children whom a sick culture has indulged, flattered and made famous.

They are not ideologically equivalent. Piker comes from the socialist left. Fuentes is an antisemitic white nationalist who wants to push the American right toward authoritarianism. But both flourish inside the same diseased attention economy, where provocation creates engagement, engagement creates celebrity, and celebrity is confused with wisdom.

Neither man is important because his ideas are original. They are important because each supplies the enemy his opposite requires.

Piker gives MAGA the revolutionary leftist it needs. His rhetoric can be extracted and made to represent the entire Democratic Party. Piker becomes the left. The left becomes every Democrat. Every Democrat becomes a communist. Communism becomes the destruction of America. The alchemy is complete.

Fuentes offers a corresponding indictment of the right. He converts racism, antisemitism, misogyny and authoritarianism into entertainment for alienated young men. Each extreme becomes proof of the other’s darkest story. Each declares normal politics exhausted. Each converts resentment into identity, and gives frustrated young men the narcotic of belonging without the burden of responsibility.

They require one another.

The international reversal is even more grotesque. The Soviet Union was communist. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not. It is an authoritarian, oligarchic, militarist and revanchist state built upon nationalism, political repression, imperial grievance, leader worship and state-aligned religion. It resembles the fascist tradition far more closely than the Marxist one.

Yet MAGA screams “communist” at American liberals, while accommodating the narratives and interests of the Russian dictatorship.

Trump, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff do not have to be Russian agents to be useful to Russia. A useful idiot does not require instructions. Vanity, credulity, ideological affinity and the delusion that every conflict can be solved through personal negotiation may accomplish more than conscious recruitment.

The same is true of Piker’s usefulness to MAGA. Intention is irrelevant. Political effect is enough.

Then came Dallas.

At the Republican midterm convention, Donald Trump repeatedly described Democrats as communists. He declared that they had gone “long beyond socialists.” He warned that a Democratic House would be controlled by a “communist caucus.” He presented himself and his movement as the final defense against forces preparing to destroy American civilization.

Then the self-appointed defender of capitalism promised a $5,000 government payment to every American adult if Republicans retained Congress.

The proposal would cost approximately $1.2 trillion before additional interest expenses. It had no enacted funding mechanism, and would require congressional approval. Trump explicitly conditioned it upon the electoral survival of his party. Reuters reported the estimated cost and Republican skepticism⁠.

Call it a dividend, a rebate or a benefit. The mechanism remains the same: the federal government collecting revenue, and redistributing an immense sum directly to individuals. Trump denounced redistribution as communism, while proposing a colossal redistribution bearing his own name.

This is evidence of the farce.

The MAGA campaign presents an absurdist rendition of the oldest right-wing tropes. The familiar malice remains, but it is delivered with farcical incompetence. The enemy is communist. The leader alone can save the country. The election is an existential emergency. The press is fake. Political opponents are lunatics. Civilization is under siege. Salvation arrives through a $5,000 government check called the Trump ‘dividend.’

This is not limited-government conservatism. It is big-government national conservatism: a politics comfortable with concentrated state power when that power enforces its preferred conception of the nation. It rejects redistribution in the name of universal social welfare while embracing tariffs, industrial direction, favored constituencies, cultural enforcement and direct payments when they strengthen the leader and his national project.

It is not historically precise to call national conservatism National Socialism. That term belongs to Nazism, a specific totalitarian, racist and antisemitic ideology. But national conservatism has abandoned the central restraint of traditional American conservatism: suspicion of concentrated government power. Its objection is no longer consistently to the size of the state. Its objection is to who controls the state and for whose benefit it acts.

Trump and MAGA are imploding. As the collapse accelerates, the cries of “communist” will become louder, more frantic and more absurd. The rhetoric is not evidence of confidence. It is the vocabulary of a movement unable to defend its record and therefore compelled to inflate its opposition into an existential threat.

That does not make the revolutionary left harmless. It makes Piker indispensable to the MAGA performance. The lie requires a fragment of truth. It requires a radical who can be made to represent everyone.

Sinclair was that fragment in 1934. He really was a socialist. The lie was that Sinclair made Roosevelt a communist, and the New Deal a revolutionary conspiracy.

Papen confronted a real communist movement. The lie was that Hitler was the only alternative.

Piker is genuinely radical. The lie is that he speaks for the Democratic Party, or the millions of Americans who oppose Donald Trump.

Russia was once communist. The delusion is that Putin’s Russia therefore cannot be fascistic, imperial, and strategically aligned with an American movement that denounces communism while imitating authoritarian power.

Dallas brought it all together: the ancient accusation, the invented emergency, the indispensable leader, the erasure of every distinction, and the promise of government largesse made in the name of defeating socialism.

Nothing is new.

Not the extremist who supplies the provocation. Not the propagandist who makes that extremist the face of an entire coalition. Not the conservative who decides constitutional limits are inadequate. Not the demagogue who claims freedom can survive only through greater personal power. Not the collaborator who later insists that the imaginary alternative would have been worse.

Only the technology is new. Only the velocity is new. Only the reach is new.

The lie is ancient.

steveschmidt.substack.com - Red scare red herring

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