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Listening to the incendiary rhetoric emanating from Trump and MAGA world, one would think the United States of today, decades after the collapse of the communist bloc, was enmeshed in an existential struggle against communism. Even before his election win in 2024, Trump claimed his opponents’ economic policies were at the extremes of leftism. Kamala Harris, he said, had gone “full communist.” With Trump setting the tone — and now ensconced in the White House — his minions have amplified that rhetoric as a way of justifying their repressive onslaught. For example, Homeland Security Director, and anti-immigrant stormtrooper, Kristi Noem told the press in July that liberals “are actually turning out to be a bunch of communists and Marxists.” In like fashion, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller — speaking in Washington’s Union Station after the military was dispatched to that city, proclaimed, “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city.” The tenor and tone of all this show no signs of abating, as the fascistic moves and raw assertion of power continues.

That the trope of anti-communism is being invoked and retains such power, is in no small measure a testament to the legacy of the anti-communist initiatives of the 20th century. This writer’s forthcoming book, Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism, takes a deeper dive into that history. Given the moment we find ourselves in, it is worth exploring some.

In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. What followed was a wave of repression in which his assassin, an erstwhile anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, was tried and executed, all within two months of the shooting. In the aftermath, New York State passed a law proscribing what it called “criminal anarchy,” making it a felony to advocate — not plan for, let alone move to carry out — revolution. The law would serve as a major weapon against organized leftists, specifically communists, who emerged in the early years of the 20th century.

Fast-forward 18 years, and an anarchist bombing at the home of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer triggered the Palmer Raids, a key chapter of what would come to be called the First Red Scare — a government roundup of thousands of anarchists and communists, hundreds of whom would be deported. Arrested in this period and prosecuted under the criminal anarchy law was the then-communist Benjamin Gitlow, convicted and imprisoned for publishing a document called The Left-Wing Manifesto. The conviction, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, was upheld. As the court wrote in its opinion, “It cannot be said that the State is........

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