Image by Kelly Sikkema.
As Donald Trump stirs up a fresh Red Scare by branding communism a “mortal threat” to the United States, corporate-backed “moderates” in the Democratic Party have launched their own moral crusade against a surging left flank. Last month, the centrist think tank Third Way pledged $15 million to flood the airwaves with anti-communist ad campaigns specifically targeting the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) through 2028. Even high-profile self-identified “democratic socialists” like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have begun punching left, writing off early post-2020 movement rhetoric as “Woke 1.0” and “crazy,” while deriding popular calls for police and prison abolition that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. In Minnesota, where last winter’s federal Operation Metro Surge disappeared thousands and left two activists dead, “progressive” Democratic candidates running in the midterms don’t have “Abolish ICE” in their platforms, turning their backs on the groundswell of grassroots organizing that mobilized more than 100,000 people for two historic general strikes in the Twin Cities. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives—an institution hovering at an abysmal 15 percent approval rating—recently passed a resolution condemning socialism “in all its forms,” backed by a chorus of Democratic votes.
For more than a century, the labels “communist” and “socialist” have functioned as weaponized slurs, no matter if the movements or individuals they described deserved them or not. These terms carry a charged emotional register rooted in deep-seated white panic and anti-immigrant sentiment. White segregationists routinely vilified the Black freedom movement by smearing civil rights leaders as either “pinko commies” or under the influence of them. A generation earlier, waves of Jewish and Eastern European immigrants were demonized by white nationalists who claimed “godless” foreign radicals were poisoning the blood of an Anglo-Christian republic. Underneath this lies the core logic of Manifest Destiny: the conviction that North America is the exclusive property of a Western civilization, requiring the violent erasure of Indigenous nations whose very existence challenges the empire’s divine right to the land. To question this civilizational project is to be branded a savage and barbarian—binding anti-communism directly to settler colonialism. This core logic rendered the United States the world’s preeminent anti-communist settler colony.
While reactionary red-baiting is typically championed by the far right, liberal anti-communism aligns with that same consensus whenever corporate interests are threatened. This cynical maneuver is not just political opportunism; it exposes a profound moral bankruptcy—the utter inability of establishment politics to produce a real alternative. When liberals join the right to vilify social liberation, they reveal that the ruling class—regardless of party—would rather side with reactionary violence than allow working people to build a world where everyone can survive.
In this moment, the frantic liberal reaction to an insurgent electoral left reveals little about any actual threat of communism and socialism and everything about the extremism of self-identified “moderates.” Take, for example, the establishment pushback against the DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” platform. Corporate pundits and party strategists routinely go viral by pillorying demands to abolish the anti-democratic Senate or dismantle mass incarceration, framing them as unhinged fringe proposals. Yet, they don’t mention the platform’s foundational demands. Calls for universal healthcare, housing rights, free public education, racial and climate justice, an anti-imperialist foreign policy, and enshrined labor rights go conspicuously unremarked upon.
The silence is deliberate. Many of these policy proposals are not only wildly popular among working-class communities, but also many are already guaranteed human rights across the globe, leaving the United States as a glaring anomaly. From the comfortable, imperial social democracies of Western Europe to the choked, sanctioned shores of Cuba, state-guaranteed healthcare and tuition-free education are treated not as radical favors, but as the mundane, non-negotiable baselines of civil life. U.S. political moderates have completely abandoned even this baseline. In nations like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, housing is enshrined directly in constitutional law as a fundamental state obligation. Where the U.S. political imagination sees unrealistic utopias, whole regions of the world have already codified these core demands into everyday governance.
The true extremism of political moderates lies in their total inability or refusal to imagine human survival outside the logic of the market. According to their extremist logic, every fundamental human need—food, medicine, learning, shelter, clean air, and water—must first pass through a corporate tollbooth. The result is an empire that consumes the planet and cannibalizes its own people, turning human suffering into super profits and speculative assets while framing standard, international social guarantees as dangerous, fringe extremism. It is the moderates—those who strive to keep the status quo of a planet on fire and consumed by war, racism, and inequality—who are the true extremists.
This first appeared on Red Scare.
