The New Red Scare: New at Reason

The current debate over the alt-right has begun to display some of the same hallmarks of red scares in the past.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

These days America sometimes looks as if it were slipping into the grip of another Red Scare. Only this time the object of fear and loathing is the far-right menace, not the far-left one.

The first Red Scare happened after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The second followed WWII, and helped commence the Cold War.

Both scares involved a hysterical overreaction to a genuine threat. Totalitarian communism was antithetical to America’s most cherished values, and anti-communism was the morally correct position to take.

Some took it too far. The overreaction led to loyalty oaths and star-chamber hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee and Hollywood blacklists and a general atmosphere of what, today, we might call political correctness: an intolerance of dissenting ideas that challenged, or were insufficiently devoted to, the prevailing anti-communist orthodoxy. The more common name for the overreaction is McCarthyism.

All of this produced almost inevitable blowback, which came to be known as anti-anti-communism. Anti-anti-communists did not support communism, but they also opposed McCarthyism. To muddle the issue even further, many on the left were at least sympathetic to communism, and at least a few were objectively pro-Soviet, so it was easy to lump anti-anti-communists in with those who were pro-communist, and it could be difficult to navigate all of the finely grained distinctions.

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