The first 100 days of the Trump administration will be full of many challenges and dangers. Not least of these will be the incoming attacks against immigrant communities, the trade union movement, abortion access, LGBTQ people, and the justice for Palestine and other movements for peace and self-determination.

An important plank in the defenses of Resistance 2.0 will be launching efforts to prevent the MAGA right from resurrecting McCarthyism from its grave. During his campaign, Trump vowed to “root out” the communists, Marxists, and the “radical left.” Should such a McCarthyism 2.0 be implemented, no pro-working-class and democratic movement will be spared from its ever-widening net. The GOP even labeled Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as socialists and communists.

At the beginning of December, the House voted 327–62 to pass a bill called the Crucial Communism Teaching Act, sponsored by the Republican Rep. Salazar from Florida. The bill is meant to ensure that high school students in the U.S. are taught “the dangers of communism and similar political ideologies.” The “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation” would be responsible for developing the curriculum. This group was founded by Lee Edwards, the main sponsor of Project 2025.

Such efforts must be resisted and defeated. To this end, a letter has been prepared which all are encouraged to send to their Senators and House Representatives.

McCarthyism was built on a Big Lie: that socialism is evil, undemocratic, and conspiratorial. In the U.S., it took the form that the socialists and communists — and by extension, every pro-working-class and democratic movement of which they were a part — was acting at the behest of the Soviet Union. Its victims included not only the professed communists, but unions, workers, teachers, artists, college professors, religious figures, scientists, athletes, and community activists.

In the U.S., socialists and communists have made invaluable contributions. Among its advocates were Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Langston Hughes, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Richard Wright, Woody Guthrie, Juan Chacon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansbury, Paul Robeson, and Angela Davis. Socialists and communists were leaders in the organization of the nation’s mass production industries and drafted legislation that resulted in Social Security and Unemployment Compensation.

The CPUSA itself initiated the mass movement and legal defense of the Scottsboro defendants, put on death row in Alabama in the 1930s. Their case established the precedent for requiring due process in U.S. legal proceedings, regardless of race.

There is no struggle for democracy and peace in which partisans of socialism have not left their mark — from fighting fascism in Spain and Hitler’s Germany, to combatting the war in Vietnam and South Africa’s apartheid.

So, too, with the struggle for labor and civil rights. This history, however, has been canceled and denied by the forces of money and corporate power. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn led the drive to fire tens of thousands from their jobs and deport thousands. Some went to jail for — believe it or not — “conspiring to teach” Marxism. Cohn went on to become a mentor to Donald Trump. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the ACLU, was expelled from the civil liberties organization. The great scholar W.E.B. Du Bois was handcuffed and charged with being an “agent” of a foreign power.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had this to say about the role of communists in American life:

“We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely.

In contemporary life, the English speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist, or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet, though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist.

It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.”

McCarthy and Cohn and their big business backers unleashed a mass hysteria upon the land. Lives were destroyed. Children lost their parents. Unions were weakened. Community struggles suffered.

Today, communists and socialists continue to play a big role in the trade union, democratic, peace, environment, and equality movements.

Trump and MAGA’s McCarthyism 2.0 is directed against an entire generation seeking fundamental change. It seeks to strangle contemporary struggles for better pay and working conditions, an end to racist and sexist discrimination, a clean environment, for peace, and the right to jobs, housing, healthcare, and a high quality education. If successful, its victims will be every person who fights discrimination, and every person intent on defending people’s right to earn, learn, live, and love. It will be used to further shred the social safety net, to implement harsh repression, to reverse every democratic right won through struggle over the past 160 years.

No one doubts that socialism has its share of tragedies or mistakes and even crimes. But, the parties who fought fascism and apartheid in this country and in many others, played no part in this. We don’t judge capitalism by the worst of its features — by its Hitlers, or Mussolinis, or Pinochets. Neither would it be intellectually honest to present the worst aspects of socialism’s history as if they were its essence.

Today, there is a reconsideration of the role of the left in our country. Should this new McCarthyism be implemented, it would mean once again ignoring the likes of Paul Robeson and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and removing Angela Davis from the Women’s Hall of Fame.

Anti-Communism has never been a democratic force in the life of this country. On the contrary, it has only ever been used as a tool to roll back democracy with an ever widening attack on all those who are engaged in the struggle for social progress.

We call on all democratic-minded people to contact their representatives today, and tell them to resist Trump and MAGA’s new McCarthyism! We cannot afford to have our classrooms turned into propaganda mills for the MAGA right.

Image: Joe McCarthy – Colorized by DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0) / Trump Portrait by Daniel Torok (public domain)

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