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The GOP’s New Red Scare

McCarthyism, the second time as farce.

Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy during his second appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee in 1950.

Shortly after announcing the mission of turning the 2026 midterms into a “hate election,” the campaign brain trust for the Republican Party has settled on the secret-weapon epithet it plans to deploy against its Democratic congressional rivals: “Communism.”

No, really: Three and a half decades after the collapse of the Cold War, the campaign chieftains of the right are planning to revive the paranoid political stylings of Joe McCarthy. The rationale for this round of 21st-century red-baiting stems largely from the recent string of primary wins racked up by Democratic candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America; in the perfervid imaginings of the right, socialists are just genteel stalking horses for Communists, with Marxism serving as the intoxicant of choice for raving leftists of all description. So the thing to do is to call out any and all Democrats as no-good Reds, determined to undermine and overthrow true-blue American individualism and laissez-faire capitalism at every term.

This advice is distilled in a polling memo that the conservative political research firm co/efficient drafted for the House Republican Conference and circulated to GOP House members on July 20. Washington Examiner reporter Hailey Bullis obtained the document, which peddles this spittle-flecked counsel to GOP House candidates: “Call them what they are: Socialists, Marxists, Communists. Communism rings the loudest alarm with constituents (42 percent name it the most dangerous system).… Connect all three, fruit of the same poisonous tree, and let the family name carry the alarm.”

There are a few difficulties with this line of argument, to put it mildly. To begin with, of course, Communism was never anything more than a fringe-minority allegiance in American politics, even during its heyday in the “Red decade” of the 1930s. The penchant for descrying it as a lurking menace in—take your pick—American university classrooms, federal government bureaucracies, diplomatic redoubts, labor unions, and the liberal intelligentsia typically said more about the persecution complexes raging through the id of the American right than it did about the actually existing state of recruitment activities by an American Communist Party that claimed membership in the tens of thousands at its peak. That became the damning consensus view in the wake of the alcoholic and demented McCarthy’s self-implosion on the national stage three years prior to his death.

Yet the primal grievances of the American right are endlessly fungible, and can be repurposed........

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