Opinion | Trump Is Building the Blue Scare

In the hours and days after Charlie Kirk’s murder, there was discussion on social media about whether this would be America’s Reichstag fire. A reference to the fire that was part of, that was a rationale for Hitler’s crackdown on political freedom in Germany. Many of us were worried hearing that. And I think what we’ve seen since suggests the fears were right. But the analogy, the analogy was wrong. We should have been looking closer to home. This isn’t a Reichstag fire. This is more like the Red Scare. We often think of the Red Scare in terms of McCarthyism, named for Joseph McCarthy, its most enthusiastic and effective practitioner, but it was a lot more than that. “Communism: What is it?” The Red Scare’s basic structure was to define a political enemy that could not be compromised with “Who are the apostles of a system that attempts to destroy the American way of life.” The point was to use that charge, that this enemy was everywhere. “That communists had made such an attempt in Hollywood is already evident ——” “Turning law and order into revolution and into chaos.” That its tentacles had to be chopped off everywhere they could be found using state power. “The Department of Justice has prosecuted and will continue to prosecute with vigor the actions of subversive groups.” Using cultural power by intimidating employers to go after a very wide swath of your political opponents. “This frame-up attack upon the Communist Party is an attack upon the trade unions and every Democratic movement in the United States.” What we are seeing now is a Blue Scare. “The radicals on the left are the problem.” “With God as my witness, We are going to use every resource we have to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen. And we will do it in Charlie’s name.” “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” “Antifa is going to be designated a domestic terrorist organization.” “At least a dozen companies and universities to fire or suspend workers over social media posts.” “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech.” “The assault on government workers and the firings. That was the first thing for me. Like, that’s always the canary in the coal mine, is employment sanctions. There’s a long history of it. It’s really the way a lot of American political repression has happened. But I was thinking about it instantaneously as McCarthyism, because the firing. The other thing then was, of course, the capitulation of law firms and universities, and often capitulating to financial threats, economic threats, not we’re going to put you in jail, but we’re going to take away your funding, we’re going to do this and you do that. The economy is a medium of political coercion in this country. It always has been. Trump didn’t invent that.