Communism is back, the US president argued, casting it as a resurgent menace and a mortal threat to American liberty.

He linked the fight against communism to the upcoming midterm elections in November. Trump’s Republican Party is currently on course to lose at least one, and possibly both, houses of Congress. At the same time, the president’s personal job-approval ratings continue to plummet.

The attack on communism may seem so absurd that it is easy to dismiss. It is partly a response to the success of Zohran Mamdani, who was elected last year as mayor of New York on a Democratic Socialists of America ticket.

Neither Mamdani nor any of his Democratic Socialists colleagues are remotely close to being communists. But Trump appears to have decided that the best strategy for the midterm elections is to stir up a new Red Scare, reviving a familiar political tactic that has long depended on turning a broad ideological label into a warning about disorder, disloyalty and danger.

He may well be right. Anti-communism has enormous appeal within American political culture, particularly among generations of voters who, like Trump, grew up on a diet of Cold War propaganda.

Ironically, given the connections Trump has repeatedly made between communism and immigration, anti-communism also appeals to some voters in immigrant communities. For much of the Latin American diaspora in the US, especially people from countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, anti-communism is even more politically powerful than it is in the rest of the country.

When people think about the history of anti-communism, they usually think first about McCarthyism and America’s last major Red Scare in the 1950s. But anti-communism was not limited to the US or the Cold War. It was one of the most powerful global political projects of the 20th century.

Anti-communism drove Britain and its allies to invade Russia in 1919, and it provoked a right-wing backlash against the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s. It fueled Christian politics and parties in the interwar period, particularly in the Vatican.

Anti-communism also underpinned the rise and popular appeal of fascism across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It drove Britain’s murderous fight against Malaysian independence in the 1950s, caused up to 1 million deaths in the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s, and was used to justify mass torture and disappearances during the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s.

It also shaped many features of 20th-century politics that are widely regarded as progressive. The UK’s welfare state, for example, was built to encourage working-class people to resist the siren call of communism. Social democratic parties existed to provide a reformist alternative to revolutionary parties on their left. Many trade unions in Britain and elsewhere pursued the fight against communist rivals with even greater urgency than the fight against their employers.

Anti-communism, in short, was a far more persistent and powerful force in 20th-century history than anti-fascism.

Manufacturing an ‘enemy within’

There are three reasons why anti-communism was, and remains, such a powerful project.

The first is the ease with which hatred or fear of communism can be linked to hatred or fear of other outsider groups. For Trump, the connection is between communists and illegal immigrants. For the Nazis, it was between communists and Jews. Hitler’s deranged obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism” culminated in the Holocaust.

The second reason is anti-communism’s ability to unite people across the political spectrum, from traditional conservatives to the wildest fringes of fascism.

In the Spanish Civil War, fear of communism proved a more powerful ideological glue for Franco’s supporters than fear of fascism did for the fractured Republican side. And throughout history, there have been many examples of liberals and social democrats who, when push came to shove, chose to line up with fascists when the threat of communism loomed.

The third reason is that anti-communism does not require the existence of actual communists to remain effective.

Many of those being labeled communist, like Mamdani, are no more than moderate social democrats by historical standards. Similarly, most of those killed in anti-communist massacres in Indonesia and Latin America were not card-carrying party members. And while there were certainly Jewish communists and socialists in early 20th-century Europe, the idea that all Jews were communists was nothing more than an antisemitic fever dream.

We can see all of this at work in the rise of the global far right over recent decades. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declared at his first inauguration that Brazil’s flag would never be red. Colombia’s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, denounced his reformist opponent as a “radical left Marxist”.

Even mainstream UK conservatives such as Suella Braverman are prone to sharing “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theories.

For all these reasons, it is important not to be blinded by the seeming absurdity of Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric. Anti-communism is back — indeed, it never went away.

It survived the end of the Cold War, embedded itself within some of the most extreme ideological currents of the far right, and is now reemerging as a central plank of global politics. It is powerful, persuasive and dangerous, and it should be taken seriously.

David Brydan, Senior Lecturer in the Modern History of International Relations, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.