In Donald Trump’s America, according to the President, “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” Presidents once commemorated the nation’s birthday with paeans to civic unity. George Washington beseeched Americans to “love… one another”. At the 1976 bicentennial, Gerald Ford was acclaimed as “Mr. Unity”.

Times change. This weekend, Trump used the nation’s 250th birthday and Mount Rushmore as campaign props. Languishing at 37% approval, he has decided that his only way of avoiding midterm disaster is to turn Democrats into “the greatest threat to our country since its founding”.

You only get one semiquincentennial, and Trump made it memorable. His Mount Rushmore speech was a masterpiece in zombie McCarthyism, hitting the Democrats where it hurts — right in the DSA. He also mapped the political terrain of the midterms, blaming Democrats — or, as he now calls them, “The Communist Party” — for championing “illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work”.

Trump comes honestly to his McCarthyism. The mid-century “Red Scare” earned its moniker from its leader, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. In league with his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, McCarthy bludgeoned opponents with the political weapon of “communism”. McCarthy drank himself to an early death by 1957, but his lieutenant Cohn lived long enough to teach a young Donald Trump a central credo: “Attack, counterattack and never apologize.”

Over the course of the 20th century, Stalin, Mao and their henchmen killed tens of millions of people in gulags, famines, and purges. Opposing actual Bolsheviks and Maoists was therefore sensible. But communism is now an entirely fringe ideology, and Trump’s modern McCarthyism cynically appeals to Americans’ political prejudices.

We Americans fancy ourselves as non-ideological. But the Fourth of July is a celebration of our deep anti-statist individualism, founded upon classical liberal ideals that consider collectivism an affront to human dignity. This sentiment resonates most strongly with older Republican voters, of whom only 2% express positive views of “socialism”. Dismissing Democrats as un-American is an old GOP canard, and “communist” is merely an updated version of the 1884 “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” smear. Trump has a deft feel for his base, and knows that using “communism” as a club to pound Democrats like a baby seal can juice turnout.

As usual, the President is on to something. The problem for Democrats is the Democratic Socialists of America who won primaries in New York and Colorado over the last fortnight. While they aren’t communists, DSAers are radicals. It was the group’s founder, Michael Harrington, who inspired Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty through his 1962 book, The Other America. Bayard Rustin, who helped to establish the DSA, was Martin Luther King’s chief organizer. Animated by the working class, their socialism pushed fundamental reform while still hewing to mainstream norms.

Today’s DSA, by contrast, is a product of the Brahmin Left. It is a post-materialist “socialist” movement. Sure, it nods at “Medicare-for-All” or “collectivizing major industries”. But America is a thoroughly bourgeois society. Half the nation is middle-class, while another third belong to the upper-middle class. The truly disadvantaged don’t vote. Just above them is the working class, who voted for Trump in 2024. Check the map: Democratic Socialists win affluent districts. These voters don’t want the means of production. The DSA’s real aims are boutique social issues dear to their fringe supporters.

Unfortunately, the Brahmin Left’s social issues — open borders, defunding the police, gender ideology and neo-racialism — are wildly unpopular. Trump is right: “Communism is a loser.” But until Democrats either shed their socialists or make the creed mainstream, his zombie McCarthyism will retain its potency.

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Jeff Bloodworth is a writer and professor of American political history at Gannon University

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