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Seth Cotlar on historical roots of the new Red Scare
"If you look at the 1956 GOP platform, it reads like a center-left policy platform in a contemporary context."
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To hear President Trump tell it, all Democrats are evil communists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is fighting against an imaginary Marxist movement. House Speaker Mike Johnson claims America is in an existential battle against communism and that if Republicans don’t win in November, the means of production will surely be nationalized. (Never mind that Trump is literally doing that right now!)
Everywhere they look, Republicans see nothing but radical Marxist socialist communists. It’s like 1954 all over again.
This sort of rhetoric isn’t exactly new — it was popularized during previous generations by the John Birch Society. They’ve long been seen as a fringe, far-right group, but their tactics are making a comeback as Republicans flail to find a message ahead of a midterm cycle that’s shaping up to be pretty grim for them.
Seth Cotlar, a professor of history at Willamette University, studies the history of the right. We connected with him to discuss MAGA’s new Red Scare and how conspiracism has “become a dominant gene” of today’s GOP.
“For me, the problem is when it gets wedded with state power — local or state or federal power,” Cotlar told us.
“If your neighbor thinks some kooky things about communists, that probably doesn’t really have power to harm you,” he added. “It might make them kind of an intolerable jerk, but they don’t have any power to do anything. But when the FBI or the CIA or other institutions that have power think this way, then it starts to have real implications.”
“It’s what Chris Ruffo did with Critical Race Theory, right? ‘If anybody is teaching these books or using these terms, obviously that’s a sign that they are part of some Marxist, international, anti-American, anti-Christian movement. We can’t have people teaching it or assigning these books or using these terms in their classes.’ That’s a big problem.”
A transcript of Cotlar’s conversation with Public Notice contributors Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. If you’d like to read all of it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This newsletter (and my work in general) is entirely funded by readers, and paid subscribers are why we’re able to keep almost everything we publish Monday through Friday free for everyone.
Thor Benson
You’ve called out the John Birch Society rhetoric that Republicans have embraced. When did you start seeing this stuff being mainstreamed again?
Seth Cotlar
It’s always been there under the surface. The stuff about communism or socialism is such a standard piece of Republican rhetoric. But the notable thing now is the idea that somehow there’s a real, substantive communist menace secretly embedded inside the federal government, academia, and the churches.
I mean, the Birchers looked at Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 and were like, “I think he’s a commie.” Are you serious? Yeah, they were. But it’s the absurd levels of conspiratorial fantasizing that is the dividing line. Republicans calling people on the left communists or socialists is the oldest kind of rhetorical trick in the book. But it’s this kind of “well-organized, coordinated enemy within” rhetoric that stands out now.
So it’s not just that we don’t like your ideas about the regulation of businesses because we think that can get out of hand and can lead to forms of tyranny. It’s that the reason the Department of Education under Joe Biden was implementing regulations around trans students is that they are part of a global conspiracy to destroy gender and impose communism.
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