The Sixth Red Scare, Not the Second
At some point, a pathology appears often enough that we must see it as a feature, not a bug, of American politics.
Red scares are manufactured moral panics that serve three purposes:
Justify military buildups
Repress political enemies
Weaken organized labor
Red Scares 1.0-5.0
The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 sparked fears of communism among American capitalists,1 who, from the start of US involvement in World War One through about 1921, deliberately stoked a moral panic about communism to engage in authoritarian practices. In the name of combating “communism,” the US state proceeded to suppress free speech, repress organized labor, deport migrants at scale, and even militarily invade Russia in 1918 (as part of a multilateral imperialist coalition).
This period of Orwellian unfreedom, which usually gets condensed into the Palmer Raids from November 1919 to January 1920, is known as the first “Red Scare.”2
The Second Red Scare spanned roughly 1947 to 1954—an anti-communist moral panic that broke the New Deal coalition. Although often referred to as “McCarthyism,” which you’ve surely heard of, it mostly took place in the years just prior to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s show trials and guilt-by-association, life ruining accusations against socialists, progressives, feminists, gays, and Jews. Thousands of technocrats implementing Roosevelt’s New Deal were purged from public life. Hollywood blacklisted screenwriters, actors, producers, and directors with ties to the Communist Party of the USA, which a decade earlier had been one of the leading organizations in American life advocating for civil rights, gender equality, labor unions.
This Second Red Scare also broke and reconfigured organized labor. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, one of the key legislative tools of the Second Red Scare, required union leaders to forswear communist ties of any kind. Consequently, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the “CIO” part of AFL-CIO) had to purge 11 major unions for supposed communist ties. Even bracketing off the democratic disenfranchisement of weakening labor in this way, the move also co-opted US organized labor into the national security state’s global war against labor unions. Anti-communism was the mask of an imperial domination that, by design, came at workers’ expense.
The Third Red Scare was a historical blip in 1976, more manufactured even than the prior two. Because organized labor was a shell of its former self by this time, there was little need to use another moral panic to discipline workers into passive subjects of exploitation; that job was mostly complete. Instead, the point of this Third Red Scare, which found expression as the re-establishment of the Committee on the Present Danger, was explicitly about justifying large military buildups on the basis of delusional assessments of Soviet power.
And this Third Red Scare wasn’t just comprised of obscure conspiracy theorists with money. It was led by familiar historical (albeit right-wing) names—Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, William Van Cleave, and even George H.W. Bush as CIA Director. By scaring their way into more money for the Pentagon, they were doing their part to promote the perils of military Keynesianism while also actively lobbying against US-Soviet arms control efforts—specifically SALT II.
The Fourth Red Scare came in 2004, when the Committee on the Present Danger was again dug up to prosecute the Global War on Terror. This red scare is rarely recognized as such because it was a fight against both the Islamic world and the idea of terrorism (a tactic)—not communism. But the founders of the new Committee self-consciously identified the War on Terror as sharing DNA with the anti-communist campaign of the Cold War. They thought the War on Terror was a problem that must be fought unrestrained, at the expense of citizens’ rights, and that also meant a large military buildup that would come at the expense of using government resources for the general welfare of the people.
The Fifth Red Scare came in 2019, when reactionary conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney and Steve Bannon formally reconstituted the Committee on the Present Danger to counter the supposed existential threat of China. As part of this elite fever dream, the Congress created the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition. The FBI launched the racist “China Initiative.” The State Department formally established “China House”—an office intended not just to coordinate China policy but to ensure it imposed a zero-sum lens on all action and analysis. And on and on.
You might have scarcely heard of Bannon’s red-scare Committee being reformed, and you almost certainly never heard the media talking about a red scare in America between 2019 and 2024. That’s because mainstream liberals and Democratic Party leadership were some of the leading agents of making this red scare a reality.
I don’t need to re-litigate the damage of this Fifth Red Scare here because 1) we’re still living in it, and 2) I wrote an entire book about it with Mike Brenes called The Rivalry Peril—the only book I know of that documents and critiques US China policy in terms of the red-scare politics it unleashed.
Red Scare 6.0 Is Here
But since Charlie Kirk’s shooting last year, we’ve been in a slow-building Sixth Red Scare that Project 2025 foreshadowed, as did Trump’s presidential campaign if you were able to parse signal from noise.
I have to admit I’m surprised at how this is coming together. I knew—and bet—that the anti-China red scare would be the load-bearing pillar of Trump 2.0’s moral panic on behalf of oligarchy and the military-industrial complex. That’s in evidence with the trillion-dollar war machine—which justifies its resourcing on the basis of imagined wars with China. With hyper-scale investments in AI and critical minerals-extraction regimes (which soak up too much capital and move too fast to regulate it because the US must “beat” China, whatever that means). And with Trump’s grand accusation last week that China stole the election from him for “Beijing Biden” in 2020.
What I did not expect was that this anti-China stream of moral panic would converge with a moral panic about literal (and effectively non-existent) communism and “far-left terrorism”—true fever dream shit.
Marco Rubio is enlisting the national security state in a project of counter-revolution, which I’ve been warning about since 2024. They’re issuing subpoenas and investigating nonprofits that range from Black Lives Matter to peace in Gaza and everything in between. They’re sentencing non-violent ICE protestors with terrorism charges. They’re harassing union leaders (the DOJ just launched a grand jury investigation into UAW president Shawn Fain on the basis of nothing). They’re announcing that leftists who are not US citizens will be denied visa travel abroad, and even US citizens can expect harassment and targeted surveillance.
Most telling of all, they’re using government statements and documents to make accusations of subversion and treason without evidence. Rubio’s State Department issued the dumbest and least credible report in the history of the US government about Cuba as the “Capital of 21st Century Communism.”
In that report, they blame Cuba for leading a global effort to subvert and overthrow the US government. They attribute every positive progressive movement in US history the past 40 years to Cuban “foreign influence.” And they attempt to link—again, without evidence, only accusation and rhetorical manipulation—revolutionary Cuba to a who’s who of MAGA’s political enemies.
The list includes Congresswoman Maxine Waters, two liberal (not communist) mayors of Los Angeles, Zohran Mamdani, Amy Goodman who hosts Democracy Now!, Hasan Piker, the Amazon Labor Union, and a bevy of peace organizations. There’s not a single communist on the list, and they can’t seem to distinguish liberals from progressives from socialists—it makes you think that maybe they don’t care.
All red scares are dumb.
All red scares are violently anti-democratic.
All red scares benefit demagogic right-wing politicians.
All red scares benefit moneyed interests.
All red scares weaken organized labor.
We are in a new red scare.
At some point, a pathology appears often enough that we must see it as a feature, not a bug, of American politics. If you’re reading this, you or people in your life are who will decide what happens next. Elites and people of means have an outsized role to play in either inflaming or smothering red-scare politics. Previous red scares only came to an end because people, sooner or later, refused them.
So we must all refuse this concocted moral panic with our minds, with our art, with our bodies, with our labor. I hope people can find the intestinal fortitude that has been in short supply in recent years. Because everything is at stake, again.
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Capitalists are owners of the means of production, not people who have money or own a home or believe in the ideology of capital-ism.
Between November 1919 and January 1920, the US Attorney General directed what came to be known as the “Palmer Raids”—more than 6,000 arrests across 36 cities, all claiming to target anarchists and communists who were also immigrants. it was a violation of civil liberties and, by some judicial interpretations, constitutional rights.