Christopher McKnight Nichols
Nov. 2, 2026, 4:25 a.m. ET
The Columbus Dispatch Guest Column

“A vote for me is a vote against the Communist-dominated PAC with its gigantic slush fund.”

“Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.”

Those assertions don’t come from Donald Trump, JD Vance or Vivek Ramaswamy. The first was spoken by Richard Nixon in 1946 when he ran for Congress in California. The second, in 1950, emanated from the mouth of notorious “Red” baiter Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

With the 2026 midterm elections upon us, one of the most constant refrains has been a Republican call to arms against communism, socialism and sometimes Marxism.

From the White House to the Statehouse to attack ads airing across Ohio and the nation, the “threat” of creeping socialism and communism has been bandied about with reckless abandon.

Digging up the Boogeyman

“It’s going to be a communist country if they win,” alleged Trump at the Texas Republican Convention in September.

In the address he mentioned communism or socialism over 60 times. Attacks based on assertions that people, groups, and policies are harbingers of a rising tide of socialism and communism recently have become so outlandish, so common, and so distant from any meaningful definitions, that they’ve become fodder for late night comedians.

Republicans appear to be desperate enough this election cycle that they’re trying to resuscitate the socialist-communist boogeyman as an immediate, terrifying threat, a trope that doesn’t have a lot of meaning for those who don’t remember the Cold War.

These latest efforts to conflate socialism and communism with policies advocated by Democratic Party candidates provides an opportunity to explain what the two actually mean, how they differ, and how they’ve been used over time.

The bourgeoisie and the worker bees

Let’s turn to the facts to grapple with real meanings and historical changes. First, what is socialism?

It is a political philosophy that revolves around a core attempt to restructure the economic, social, political systems of a society to serve the common economic and social good rather than private interest. Social(ist) organizational ideals are long-standing.

By the sixteenth century that had real traction, for example, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) depicted a society characterized by communal ownership of property and organized around collective good, rather than private accumulation.

Some socialist advocates push gradual reform centered on increased state-led social welfare regulations, while others maintain that a socialist society can emerge only through revolutionary rejection of capitalism.

In the American political tradition, a more maligned, misunderstood concept is Marxism.

Karl Marx argued in works including Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The Communist Manifesto (co-authored with Friedrich Engels) and Das Kapital, that historically the world has been divided between the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labor power to survive.

For Marx industrialization changed something fundamental: wealth congealed at the top, and the exploited proletariat experienced extreme alienation, with no time to explore passions and deeper dimensions of themselves. Thus, Marx’s broader goals were to move from industrialized society toward something new, with communism as the end-state, overcoming alienated labor and attaining fuller human development. Ultimately, he argued, this would generate a society under which classes, money, state governments, and even nations would have no use, and there would be complete collective ownership of all means of production.

While many would-be revolutionary leaders in the twentieth century were significantly influenced by Marxist critiques of capitalism, none fully adhered to what Marx originally envisioned.

Subversive, anti-American and dangerous

In the U.S. during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, fears of “alien” radical socialism and anarchism dominated public life alongside pushback against “Robber Barons” and massive wealth accumulation, amidst the ravages of cyclic recessions.

From the Haymarket bombing (1886) to the Pullman Strike (1894), federal, state and private forces used violence against workers who acted collectively to strike and protest.

Yet, by the turn of the twentieth century in the Progressive Era, their causes made headway; officials embraced progressive initiatives; they focused on social and economic welfare; regulated capitalism through minimum wage and maximum hour laws, better working and living conditions, collective bargaining and trust-busting legislation.

To do so officials and activists had to duck politically potent accusations of supporting “socialism,” “communism” or “anarchism.”

During World War I, the Wilson administration’s criminalization of antiwar dissent often targeted socialists like presidential candidate Eugene Debs (sent to jail for opposing the draft and war) and members of the Industrial Workers of the World.

This primed the public to view “socialists” and “socialism” more broadly as subversive, anti-American and dangerous.

But it was the Russian Revolution of 1917 that opened a Pandora’s box for weaponized, fearmongering use of anti-socialism and anti-communism in political discourse.

To many, Marx’s criticisms and visions were being implemented by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party.

Perhaps more threatening to U.S. observers than the seizure of former czarist property was Lenin’s establishment of the Comintern, which advanced the global spread of revolutionary socialism.

Who can be trusted and who can't

American anxieties over Bolshevik successes abroad only increased as new waves of labor activism and highly visible strikes emerged at home, spreading from Seattle to Boston throughout 1919.

Concerns about imported as well as domestic radicalism fused with a surging tide of nativism, white supremacy, and xenophobic reactionism to Eastern and Southern European and Asian immigration.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer exemplified these sentiments.

In arguments and policies eerily reminiscent of 2025-26, during the First Red Scare, Palmer wanted the Justice Department to prosecute and deport large numbers of “alien” “communist” radical “criminals”; he warned that “the whole purpose of communism appears to be a mass formation of the criminals of the world to overthrow the decencies of private life, to usurp property that they have not earned, to disrupt the present order of life.”

In the 1920s a new linkage emerged: criminal immigrants and others espousing socialism or communism aimed at the destruction of civilization.

This deepened immediately following the Second World War in the global context of paranoia and fear of the “Red Menace.”

The U.S. faced the Soviet Union as a rival superpower that had extended its interpretation of socialist principles and governance to hold sway across Eastern Europe. Charges of being “communist” or simply being “soft on communism” rapidly became almost omnipotent in their political power.

New era, old scare

The era of this Second Red Scare and McCarthyism are well known for baseless accusations of socialist or communist beliefs as disqualifying for people of color, gay people, activists, dissenters, immigrants and others.

Firings and blacklists proliferated. But what was unique about McCarthyite accusations was that they breached the walls of Washington.

The labels “socialist” and “communist” successfully stoked widespread doubt in the trustworthiness and loyalty of not just the State Department, but across government, and precipitated investigations into the highest levels of the military establishment, notably General George C. Marshall.

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, charges that political opponents were socialist or communist lost potency. But candidates didn’t quit using them.

During the 1992 election, President George H. W. Bush tried to brand Democratic candidate Bill Clinton as a communist sympathizer. These attacks, however, largely fell flat with voters, who elected Clinton in hopes that he would revive a sluggish economy.

In the 1990s, large-scale efforts to advance socioeconomic redistributive policies were promoted by Democrats and even some Republicans as expressions of individual rights and democratic freedoms rather than collective welfare. To do otherwise was widely regarded as a losing strategy in the triumphalist political atmosphere of the post-Cold War United States.

So where have we been in the past decade or two? These days, long removed from the Cold War, attacks involving communism and socialism have resurfaced largely in response to the growing electoral visibility of democratic socialism.

Most remarkable is Senator Bernie Sanders, whose influential 2016 presidential campaign brought those ideas greater attention and popularity. The election of Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 further highlighted the growing appeal of such policies that, while sometimes vague, aimed to disempower elites and big corporations while re-centering the voices of working people to address issues like wealth inequality, stagnating wages, health care, education and climate change.

In 2025 Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City also demonstrated an ability to attract support beyond the conventional progressive Democratic base, including among voters who previously supported Trump. The ascent of Sanders, AOC and Mamdani has added to the fearmongering against them as un-American “socialists.”

Even candidates not affiliated with democratic socialism, such as 2024 Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, have been targeted by Trump and others as “communist.”

Are Americans sufficiently freaked out?

In 2026 polls suggest voters care most about affordability, along with foreign policy and immigration. These are issues on which the president and congressional allies have received less than passing marks.

In response, Republicans have worked to shift political debate away from the economy.

GOP talking points coalesced around culture-war topics and anti-radical fears, lobbing accusations of “socialist” or “communist,” often said in the same breath.

Trump led the charge.

In commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July he assailed “communism.”

Opinion: 'No sense of decency.' Trump learned to hunt Commies from other remarkable liars

Taking a page from McCarthy’s Cold War scare tactics, Trump said, “the godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions … They don’t want good … They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion, and they won’t have it, but we will not let them win.”

History strongly suggests the continued misuse of allegations of socialism, communism and Marxism is something we can count on in American politics.

It is hard to know how far such allegations will go or how effective they will be, particularly in an era distant from fears of Soviet communist aggression.

As these terms, once used to induce panic, become more of a boogeyman, these midterms will reveal how well such fearmongering tactics will hold up against the easy-to-grasp realities of high prices and an unpopular war.