Republicans Resurrect The Red Menace

Republicans have decided not to craft an official party platform at their convention this week, so in lieu of a detailed agenda for the country, its top minds delivered a simple message on Monday night: The GOP is for Donald Trump, and Democrats are for socialism. Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle repeatedly decried the “socialists” running the Democratic Party, along with the “socialist Biden-Harris agenda,” which apparently would include shipping American jobs to China, welcoming sex traffickers across the Mexican border, the “policies that destroyed places like Cuba and Venezuela,” and, for good measure, “closed schools.” “Their vision for America is socialism,” declared former Trump United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, adding that socialism is an experiment that “has failed everywhere.” “They will turn our country into a socialist utopia,” Sen. Tim Scott warned. Conservatives seeking to beat back the civil rights movement would rail that Marxists had infiltrated the NAACP, or attack Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a devotee of “socialism and sex perversion.” The attempts to link socialism with efforts to dismantle American racial hierarchy go back much further than the Cold War, however. When white mobs besieged Black neighborhoods in several American cities in the summer of 1919, The New York Times and other news outlets portrayed the violence as a response to “widespread propaganda” from labor unions to convert Black families to socialism. And while Martin Luther King wasn’t trying to convert the country to queerness, in 1952 he wrote to his future wife Coretta Scott that he was “more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” Was the right’s objection to King really about the prospect of nationalized industry bringing an era of weak economic growth?