Oh, no! That C-word again!

The first time I heard the C-word, I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, with no real sense of geopolitics. “Communist” sounded like a random insult. Now, seven decades later, I’m hearing it again. In the years between my boyhood and this painful moment, I long ago concluded that anti-communism has been a far more destructive force for this nation than communism.

Now the (sadly) current president is throwing that word around, desperate to avoid a Democratic takeover of the House and possibly even the Senate. He has made it clear that he fears a third impeachment, and he will do whatever it takes to fend off a Democratic victory in November’s midterm elections. In June, four progressive candidates, including three democratic socialists, won Democratic primaries in New York and Colorado. On the eve of the Fourth of July, the (lamentably) current president stood in front of the dead presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore and gave a speech. He included a no-holds-barred denunciation of Democrats as communists, including them in the same bad-guy list as immigrants.

“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” said the husband and grandson of immigrants. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11….Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil.” He threatened to “exile” the communists. As he finally bloviated toward the end of that speech, he sounded that C-note again. “The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

Of course, decades ago, the man now issuing fake warnings about communism actually had a chance to fight communists face to face, in Vietnam. But he didn’t go. In their book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig explain how that worked:

Donald had received two educational deferments from the draft while in college but now found himself fully exposed. Again, his father’s influence kept him safe. Donald visited a podiatrist who leased office space from Fred Trump. That doctor found a problem that had not prevented Donald from playing sports but would be sufficient to shield him from the draft: bone spurs in his heels. That finding, possibly supported by a second podiatrist who also rented space from Fred Trump, provided the basis for a medical exemption from the draft.

In using the C-word, President Bone Spurs was not alone. In a keynote speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 26, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that candidates on the left of the Democratic Party “are openly running as Marxist communists for Congress.” He went on: “When Ronald Reagan was in this very building, you know, decades ago, he talked about the threat of communism. He was referencing something happening as a threat overseas. It’s now on our own shores in our own homeland.”

Before his scheduled appearance at that same right-wing gathering, the Felon-in-Chief issued a social media post, using the C-word and a D-word that he is inordinately proud of inventing. “These are not social Dumocrats, these are hard core godless Communists,” he wrote. “This is the most serious threat to our Country since its existence 250 years ago.”

In the annals of thuggish political behavior, this puts him in the same category as Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who proclaimed without proof that communists had massively infiltrated the State Department. His communist-under-every-bed behavior gave birth to the word McCarthyism. In that era, the anti-communism of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) ended up blacklisting actors, screenwriters, and others in the entertainment industry for their alleged communist leanings.

Shamefully, HUAC also made life more difficult for Jack Roosevelt Robinson, one of the greatest men of the twentieth century. In 1947, Branch Rickey the baseball executive signed Robinson to his first major-league contract, to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey instructed him not to push back against the racial taunts he was certain to endure. In 1949, Branch Rickey the Cold War anti-communist persuaded Robinson to appear before HUAC to criticize Paul Robeson, the multiply gifted singer-actor-athlete. At the 1949 Paris Peace Congress, Robeson had said that Black Americans would not fight for the United States in a war against the Soviet Union, because of the widespread discrimination they faced in this country. In his appearance before HUAC, Robinson called Robeson’s comments “silly,” but he went on to condemn systemic racism and police brutality.

If the (unfortunately) current president had any sense of history, if he were capable of reading and studying, he would have a chance to learn that anti-communist zeal has brought America a lot of grief. The two most lethal examples were the wars in Korea and Vietnam, both of them about containing the expansion of communism. The Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System lists the “total in-theater deaths” in Korea as 36,574 and in Vietnam as 58,220.

Another communism-linked bit of history was the effort by the Central Intelligence Agency and the British government to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. The Brits didn’t like the way Mosaddegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had given the Iranians a pitifully small percentage of the proceeds from their own oil. The CIA thought Mosaddegh was leading Iran in a communist direction. Together, they cleared the way for the shah of Iran, whose quarter-century of repressive rule sowed the seeds of the Iranian revolution and the 1979 birth of a troublesome theocratic state—the one President Bone Spurs bombed in 2025 and attacked this February, a war that’s still dragging on.

Now, that president wants us to believe that communism is rearing its ugly head again. His evidence is the primary election victories of some democratic socialist candidates. But the democratic socialist program is far from the Marxist communist government of China, Vietnam, and North Korea. Here’s a brief analysis of communism versus capitalism, by Corbin Trent, who has worked for two of the most progressive legislators in the Democratic Party: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York:

Maybe you’ve heard the phrase means of production and maybe you haven’t. It basically means the tools, land, factories, machines, infrastructure, and systems a society uses to make the material stuff of life. Who owns those means, who controls them, and who benefits from them is one of the oldest fights in politics.

The communists, at their extreme, think the state should own and control all of it. The capitalists, at their extreme, think it should be completely in private hands. Socialists like me think there ought to be a blend of public and private ownership, that capitalism and socialism work best when paired. The neoliberals, which is mostly what we’ve got now, think our future should be in private control but paid for by the people, maybe with a guardrail or two set up between the people and the private sector’s insatiable desire for profit.

Professor Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College, who offers a daily historian’s view of current events, had this to say about the people our (regrettably) current president says he fears:

Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.

In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.

For an early example of what socialism could look like soon after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the (regrettably) current president could actually open the made-in-China Bible that he sells and read Acts 4:32-35:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

For a more modern version, President Bone Spurs should examine what life is like in Scandinavia. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are capitalist countries that have a far more comprehensive social safety net than the United States: universal healthcare and tuition-free higher education. Yes, the citizens pay higher taxes, but they seem to be willing to pay those taxes, in exchange for the benefits those taxes buy. The (alas) current president has said he’d like to have more immigrants from (white) countries like Norway and fewer from “shithole” countries. But Norwegians are not exactly rushing to leave their social safety net and show up here in large numbers. And who can blame them? The World Happiness Report lists Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland among the ten happiest countries. The United States is number 23.

Now the C-word has become a pivotal part of Republican messaging for this year’s midterm elections. To counter that cynical strategy, the rest of us need to study and remember the bloody history of misguided anti-communism. Then we should vote against a party that is so shamelessly using that word, with the goal of staying in power and avoiding accountability.