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Liberals Are Shaming Howard Zinn’s Memory Yet Again

Zinn saw firsthand what happened when liberals did more to fight the left than the right—they sabotaged their own power.

Donald Trump, rather infamously, was mentored by the notorious Roy Cohn, once the attorney for the fascistic, anti-communist, and anti–civil libertarian Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now, as he flails from crisis to crisis, Trump is turning to Cohn’s greatest hits for relief: Red Scare McCarthyite slander. Trump is using accusations of communism to distract from all the competing scandals and failures that are closing in on his administration.

He’s had the perfect opportunity to do so with the success of Democratic Party candidates who ally with or are members of the Democratic Socialists of America: Here’s another group he can offer up for his base to hate. In addition to immigrants or Muslims, they must now worry about reds under the bed.

While one could be forgiven for wondering if the president is aware that the Cold War ended 35 years ago, this crude name-calling serves a political purpose beyond scaring the Boomer and Gen-X voters glued to Fox News. It’s about the chilling of free speech, free assembly and the right to organize. How fitting that a president whose corrupt renovations have bulldozed the White House and ruined the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool—belching algae as if disgusted with its guardians—is also taking the occasion of the 250th anniversary of this country to weaponize the politics of fear and trample the Bill of Rights.

In response to Trump’s poisonous rhetoric, centrist and liberal democrats have sprinted off to reporters—not to condemn Trump, but to decry their own party’s electoral victories by democratic socialists or candidates with socialists working in their campaigns. We’ve seen before what the cancer of anti-communism brings to the country, and we would do well to remember what happened then. If we knew our history, then we’d know that these liberals that show more energy to fight their left than fight the right are cutting their own throats.

Howard Zinn knew his history, which is perhaps why not only right-wingers but do-nothing liberals decry his work. The........

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