Right-wing rhetoric of late is reverberating with echoes of the First Red Scare. Former President Donald Trump recently promised a conservative Christian audience that, if elected president again, he would keep foreign "communists, Marxists, and socialists out of America" by ordering his government to deny them entry.
Honoring this early campaign promise would not require a new policy, it would just enforce an extant one. The authority to turn away leftist immigrants, as Trump noted, is already enshrined in a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which deemed members or affiliates of "the Communist or any other totalitarian party ... inadmissible."
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services policy manual traced the statute back to an immigration law passed in 1918 to address the "external threats of anarchism and communism" amid the First Red Scare. The law was a symptom of the feverish anti-communist hysteria of the time, appeased with an iron fist by the federal government in what historian Kenyon Zimmer called "an unparalleled period of political repression in the United States."
Trump's intention to dust off a fossil of that period is troublingly regressive and authoritarian. But his proposal for addressing domestic radicalism is even more so.
"My question is," Trump went on, "what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here? I think we have to pass a new law for them." The implied solution, to deport U.S. residents who espouse purportedly un-American politics, was clear. (The audience certainly caught on, supplying approving shouts of, "Get rid of them!")
Such aspirations harken back to the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, which marked the apogee of First Red Scare repression.
Spearheaded by the eponymous former U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the Palmer Raids saw the U.S. Justice Department violently round up thousands of anarchists, socialists, and communists, and expel foreign-born dissidents among them. In the end, this exercise of arbitrary administrative authority saw several hundred deported, marking a clear blot on the country's civil liberties record. A vast majority of subjects of the mass deportations were cast off merely for holding certain political ideas.
As one contemporary critic of Palmer put it, the attorney general used "exile to counteract evil-thinking." Or, to borrow terminology George Orwell would coin 30 years later, deportees were punished for the offense of thoughtcrime. While Trump may insist his plans are intended to stave off "totalitarian" incomers, his (and any) aspirations to replicate Palmer's methods ultimately bear true hallmarks of totalitarianism.
And Trump is far from the right's sole First Red Scare revivalist. Republican Senator Rick Scott recently warned that leftists "are not welcome" in Florida, reiterating a May "travel advisory" that the Sunshine State "is openly hostile toward Socialists, Communists, and those that enable them."
Such attempts to vilify radicals should disquiet even moderates on the political left, if not only on civil libertarian grounds, then because Republicans have proven time and time again that you need not be a communist to be labeled one.
In Scott's travel advisory, for instance, "socialist" denotes proponents of socialism, sure, but also those "who work in the Biden Administration" and "supporters of big government." Trump has historically adhered to a similarly loose definition of "communist," which encompasses the 2020 Democratic Party platform, Vice President Kamala Harris, private censorship by Twitter and Facebook, et cetera.
Despite sensationalist red baiting being a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, centrist Democrats too often fall in lockstep.
In February,109 House Democrats voted to pass a vapid GOP-sponsored motion condemning the "horrors of socialism." Critics at the time dismissed the resolution as a reactionary ploy—rife with junk history and selective amnesia—to falsely conflate increasingly popular democratic socialism with Stalinism. Despite these transparent ulterior motives, Democrats unquestioningly took the bait.
Considering that there appears to be no shortage of would-be A. Mitchell Palmers in our midst, endeavors to rehash First Red Scare tactics require strong, united opposition going forward.
The onus is on true anti-authoritarians to dismiss them for what they are: efforts to recycle dreck better left rotting in the dustbin of history.
Robert McCoy is a writer who studies history and politics at the University of Virginia. He can be found on Twitter @_rmccoy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
