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.
I saw one estimate that at the 1964 GOP convention, maybe 10 percent of the delegates for Goldwater were associated with the John Birch Society. It’s been a component of the Republican coalition for quite a while. It’s just a question of whether it’s a recessive gene or dominant gene.
The way that it’s become a dominant gene, I think, is connected to the generalized conspiracism that has become the predominant rhetorical strategy of the Republican Party today in a way that it really hasn’t been before.
Thor Benson
The level of conspiracism during Trump 2.0 has definitely gotten out of control. Prominent conservative influencers and even members of Congress were talking about how the birthright citizenship decision was going to lead to the end of civilization, for example.
Seth Cotlar
You’re touching on something that is connected to the conspiratorial thinking, which is the apocalypticism of it.
“This one ruling by a court, or the passage of this one bill — all of American civilization and the future of American freedom hinges on it!” As you might remember about Reagan and Medicare, he said we would spend our old age telling our children about what it was like to be free if it passed.
It’s this idea that every single new program or policy implemented by the Democrats, any form of liberalism, is basically just a slippery slope to full on Stalinist gulags. That’s very much a Bircher strategy, where you just collapse all of the complexity around policymaking and the role of the state and make it look like a civilization-destroying force.
They’ve been saying that civilization is on the verge of being destroyed by liberalism since the 1950s. Somehow no one inside the organization ever stops and thinks, “Gosh, it’s been 70 years and civilization hasn’t ended yet. I wonder if we’re wrong.” That thought process never occurs — it’s memory-holed much like apocalyptic religious cults do.
Thor Benson
Is there an explanation as to why this kind of thinking becomes more prominent during certain periods over the last 60 or 70 years? Does it coincide with times when Republicans start to feel desperate? It certainly seems like the party isn’t in a good place right now.
Seth Cotlar
