To a modern person the absolute panic of the Red Scare hysteria seems a little overwrought. This is brilliantly displayed in the Coen brothers’ film Hail Caesar. One of the main plot points surrounds the kidnapping of George Clooney’s lantern-jawed leading man, Baird Whitlock, by a secret communist enclave working in Hollywood. The commies in this film are a bunch of intellectual screenwriters, outraged at the lack of money and respect that they get churning out hits for the big studios. As people at that time feared, they engage in all manner of subversion, espionage, and sabotage to carry out a kidnapping scheme. Once they have All-American Whitlock in their clutches, they ply him with cucumber sandwiches and Marxian theory. He is so convinced by their rhetoric that he joins their group on the spot – becoming a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
This is a hilarious joke because the Coens give us this secret group of communists, there’s even an actor who looks like Leon Trotsky, behaving precisely as people of the time were terrified was actually happening, and it is just absurd. This is what people were afraid of? Fear of these things is why congressional committees dragged actual Hollywood screenwriters to DC hearings to ask them if they “are now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.” Seeing it played out on screen makes the communist threat of that time seem positively ridiculous.
But as Ellen Schrecker describes, there was a method to this madness. The red scare was a brilliant power play. One of the most important aspects of the McCarthy anticommunist period was it gave the powerful the ability to present themselves as victims. Schrecker writes that portraying certain out-groups as particularly barbaric and dangerous gives dominant groups a way to affirm their own sense of superiority while also making it psychologically possible to demonize, dehumanize their opponents, or even deprive them of basic human rights. Israel is using the same strategy today. Israeli propaganda focuses obsessively on the October 7th attack, acting as though the genocidal counterattack that claimed uncounted innocent lives and reduced Gaza to rubble never happened. It is by playing the victim that the stronger party, Israel, attempts to win the sympathy of the American public. It is an old propaganda technique that still works.
The communist threat was a perfect opportunity to put this strategy to work. The key to the whole operation was associating the red menace with the American labor movement. Pumping up the significance of any communist presence in the ranks of American labor gave conservatives and the rich an opportunity to hide their longstanding hostility to unions and the New Deal behind a veneer of patriotic, anticommunist fervor. Beating up on commies made it possible to beat up on unions without criticism.
The McCarthy period was a wet dream come true for American business. It managed the neat trick of turning dissent into disloyalty, transforming any critic of the economic system into a possible traitor. All criticism of the economic status quo was equated to subversion. It suddenly became unpatriotic, verging on traitorous, to complain about the existing class power structure. As Schrecker writes, McCarthyism “hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture.” Alex Carey agrees, noting that this preoccupation with communism set about a 20-year paralysis of imaginative or liberal political thought, silencing the most courageous politicians and driving Democrats to the most craven demonstrations of hostility to the left. Personally, I think that paralysis lasted a lot longer than just 20 years.
Even today this reflexive hostility lives on in our political scene. Conservatives have been trained, brainwashed you might say, to automatically reject anything that smacks of “socialism.” Universal healthcare, free college, subsidized food programs are all attacked as somehow endangering what it means to be American. But what are anticommunists really attacking? They are simply responding to indoctrination imposed by corporate propaganda. Anything designed to help the masses is treated with suspicion or outright hostility. Anything that helps business is obviously win-win for everybody. This is the message that Fox News still hammers home every night. And so patriotic Americans actively fight against programs that would help them. Trying to give universal healthcare to a hardcore Republican is like trying to free an angry wolverine from a steel trap. Even as you try to help them, they will snarl and sneer and fervently believe that you are trying to hurt them. That is the power of a century of anticommunist propaganda in action.
This is part 3 in my propaganda series, here is a link to PART ONE and PART TWO.
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