Zombie Reagonomics Coupled With A New Red Scare? It Looks Like That’s the Size Of It

The Trump regime is weaponizing the accusation of “anti-Semitism” to silence critics and smear anyone who might question the morality or utility of what the U.S. and Israel have done over the past eighteen months in Gaza.  These aggressive attacks on our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, as well as academic freedom, hold distinct echoes to some of the most shameful moments in American political history.  There was a “Red Scare” in the 1920s, where the government ended up deporting hundreds of thousands of people based on their political views; and another one in the 1950s that destroyed the lives and livelihoods of countless innocent Americans.

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            Like today, in the early-1950s, the Republican Party leadership, fell dutifully in line behind a boisterous demagogue: the junior senator from Wisconsin, “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy.  But McCarthy (who bequeathed to us “McCarthyism”) was far from the only loudmouthed commie-hater in the government at the time.  Republican party leaders and rank-in-file politicians piled on to humiliate publicly anyone who thought the New Deal was a good idea as being “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” or “pinks” (or “commies” or “pinkos”).

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            By hurling false or greatly exaggerated accusations at the Democrats for their alleged “communism” the Republicans stumbled upon political gold.  Since they had nothing to run on other than dismantling popular New Deal programs they resorted to character assassination, baseless allegations, and demagoguery to win elections.  And it worked.

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            In 1950, Richard Nixon won his California seat in the U.S. Senate by labeling his opponent, Helen Gahagen Douglas, who was a protégé of Eleanor Roosevelt, the “pink lady.”  During the campaign Nixon also used anti-Semitic surrogates to slander Douglas because her husband Melvyn was Jewish.  Following the elections of 1952, the Republicans held the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the Presidency (with bigger majorities than the party enjoys today in 2025).  It was the first time the Grand Old Party ran the whole federal government since 1930.  Joe McCarthy called the previous era of FDR and Truman: “twenty years of treason!”

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            The accusation of being a “communist” didn’t have to have anything remotely to do with the nation’s “security” (or even “reality”) to have real world consequences for thousands of innocent people.  The Republican-led scare of the 1950s ruined the careers of government officials, civil servants, teachers, professors, labor leaders, Hollywood screenwriters, film directors, producers, actors, and many other people in multiple fields.

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            Anything was fair game.  For example, McCarthy, aided by his hatchet-man staffer on the Government Operations Committee (and future Trump lawyer), Roy Cohn, outed many closeted gay men who served in the government labeling them “security risks” because their sexual orientation opened them up to blackmail.  Cohn knew many of these men in Washington personally because he too was a closeted gay man.

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            This “Red Scare” outlasted “McCarthyism” by decades.  Long after McCarthy flamed out during his 1954 “Army-McCarthy Hearings” (and later drank himself to death by 1957), the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) continued its work, traveling all over the country holding sensational hearings, issuing subpoenas like so much confetti, and hauling innocent people before it to testify.  Grandstanding Republicans (and some Democrats trying to burnish their anti-communist bona fides) blistered “witnesses” in televised hearings to score political points.

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            F.B.I. Director, J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the bureau from 1924 to his death in 1972, used his unique powers in Washington to hunt-out “communists” and harass the leaders of every leftist social movement of the 1950s and 1960s, including most famously Martin Luther King, Jr. (who as far as the racist Hoover was concerned King was the biggest threat to the country).  One can only imagine what the juvenile, hyper-partisan, pathological liar, Kash Patel, will do with Hoover’s former plaything.

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            Even during the years between “Red Scares,” the far-Right and the corporate oligarchy it serves have never ceased attacking anyone in politics they deem “too progressive”; this is why the word “socialism” in American political discourse holds such negative connotations.  For example, there’s no mandate to demolish the federal agencies that keep our food and water and medicine and transportation systems safe, or our national parks open, or our schools and colleges up to date, or our veterans taken care of; the citizenry is not demanding $800 billion in cuts to the only program that helps low-income families have access to minimal medical care.  This “anti-government” nihilism has been a long time coming.

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            Since 1981, the country has been following the cold prescriptions of zombie “Reaganomics” — tax cuts for the rich and corporations, deregulation, savage cutbacks to social programs, bloated military budgets — and if our current tilt toward fascism tells us anything, it’s that these policies have failed the country miserably.

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            The 1990s led to more zombie Reaganomics with the “Washington Consensus”; the leaders of both major parties decided “big government” had to go and must not hinder the perfect workings of neo-liberal market capitalism.  This ideology never goes away because it serves perfectly the interests of the most powerful corporate and ruling-class elements in our society.  Ideas that serve power are always widely ventilated — ideas that don’t, not so much.  Yet today we see a doubling (and tripling) down of these failed economic policies simply because they serve the billionaire class and the corporate oligarchy.

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            Universities, because they’re historically bastions of truth-seeking and freedom of thought, have always been the bullseye on the Republican Right’s target.  In McCarthy’s day, there were long lists of banned books and rabid attacks on leftwing students and professors.  In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Lynn Cheney (spouse of Dick Cheney) as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, tried to force historians to adhere to a set of U.S. history “standards” concocted by her friends at right-wing Washington think tanks, who were neither historians nor education experts.

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            Throughout the 1990s, politicians criticized academia for becoming too “multicultural” or “Afro-centric.”  Right-wing talk radio and high-ranking Republicans, including Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who has a Ph.D. in history) denounced “multiculturalism,” as well as African-American and Women’s Studies as “divisive” and “anti-American.”

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            The right-wing education establishment, settled comfortably inside billionaire-financed think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, stole from a liberal charity a nice sounding title, “No Child Left Behind,” for what in reality was a wholesale attempt to privatize public education and to control curriculum conservative didn’t like.  The complaints were similar to what we hear today about “critical race theory” and “DEI.”  For decades “deconstructing” the Department of Education has been the Holy Grail for teacher-bashing ideologues and ruling elites who want a passive and compliant public.

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            What’s the aim of Trump’s recent letter to sixty colleges and universities that they’re going to be “investigated” for “anti-Semitism” if it is not to put a chill down the spines of administrators, silence free speech and crush dissent on campus?  Being categorized in this way by Donald Trump or Marco Rubio or Mike Johnson can be absurd yet politically operational — just ask Mahmoud Khalil.

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