Trump Is Building the Blue Scare

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In the hours and days after Charlie Kirk's murder, there was discussion on social media about whether this would be America's Reichstag fire.

A reference to the fire that was part of, that was a rationale for, Hitler's crackdown on political freedom in Germany.

Many of us were worried hearing that, and I think what we've seen since suggests the fears were right, but the analogy, the analogy was wrong.

We should have been looking closer to home.

This isn't a Reichstag fire.

This is more like the Red Scare.

We often think of the Red Scare in terms of McCarthyism, named for Joseph McCarthy, its most enthusiastic and effective practitioner.

But it was a lot more than that.

The Red Scare's basic structure was to define a political enemy that could not be compromised with.

The point was to use that charge.

that this enemy was everywhere, that it posed an existential threat to America, that its tentacles had to be chopped off everywhere they could be found, to go after a very wide swath of your political opponents, to do so using state power, to do so using cultural power, to do so by intimidating employers.

What we are seeing now is a blue scare.

In this, the Trump administration is not even being remotely subtle about what it intends, how wide a net they want the blue scare.

to cast.

Just listen to Vice President J.D.

Vance.

We're trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream.

A lot of people are very worried about how we got here in the first place.

And you have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and J.D.

Vance, they're going to go after constitutionally protected speech.

No, no, no, no, we're going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.

But the Red Scare took decades to build.

It had at its heart a genuine foreign adversary and real domestic espionage.

The blue scare isn't being built with the same care or attention or effort at creating political consensus.

The Trump administration, as it often does, is speedrunning the project.

It took them mere days to get to Jimmy Kimmel.

Jimmy Kimmel.

But to see where they might go, to see what they might try to do, we need to look at where America.

not all that long ago, was.

Corey Robbin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College.

He He is an expert on McCarthyism, as well as the author of the book The Reactionary Mind, which is, in my opinion, one of the most insightful books you can read on the Trumpist right and what is behind it.

As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.

Corey Robin, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Let's begin here.

What was the Red Scare?

There were actually two Red Scares in America.

The first one was in 1919, 1920, and that was an intensive government assault on a group of left-wing anarchists, socialists, many of them immigrants, radicals.

It was centered around something called the Palmer Raids, during which thousands were arrested and hundreds were deported.

The second Red Scare is what we oftentimes call McCarthyism.

That was a much longer, far more comprehensive, involving a far greater range of people and ideologies and movements, and I would argue had a much more profound and long-term effect on American political culture.

Let's talk about the first for a second, because the Palmer raids feel very relevant in this moment.

Can you talk about what they were and what triggered them?

Yeah.

It was a really intense,

but fairly brief, episode of political repression, but triggered by this

combination of ambient fear and anxiety, rooted in real things, I should say, not just hallucinatory.

There was a series of bombings that happened culminating on some fairly influential figures.

And I think, in fact, there was a bombing attempt or an actual bomb attack on Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, who was the Attorney General for the Woodrow Wilson administration.

And this was coming off of a wave of fairly intense left-wing activity.

There was a fairly robust Socialist Party.

The Bolshevik Revolution had just happened.

There were labor unions champing at the bit coming out of World War I.

So there was a whole bunch of activity.

And the government really decided to clamp down upon that and ended up rounding up people, including most famously Emma Goldman, who was deported in something called the Russian Ark.

She She was on a boat with a bunch of other radicals and just sent back to Russia where she had been born.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: And it gets at something that I have been worried about in this moment, that I see a symmetry with in this moment.

But you often have profound periods of repression, of state-sponsored violence that pick up on maybe something people had wanted to do before, but triggered by genuinely real violence, by assassination attempts, by bombing attempts.

And that's there in that moment.

There is a real act of violence and then a huge ideological project and response.

Aaron Powell, absolutely.

And in fact, I would argue that most political repression has those features that you've just said.

I think sometimes people on the left and liberals and centrists tend to treat political repression as if it's purely a, as I said, a hallucinatory response to fantasized enemies.

And that's rarely the case.

There are oftentimes real stakes.

There are, you know, there can be real acts of violence, as there were.

There can be real challenges to the ruling order and the political regime.

But you are right that the actors who want to do something about that are oftentimes waiting for what we would call a pretextual moment.

And then everything gets thrown in but the kitchen sink as they go after that.

As we get to the second red scare, I want to pick up on the way the world changes in between.

As you said, the first one is 1919, 1920.

That is before World War II, before in many ways communism goes on an international march.

I was reading Clay Risen's excellent book, Red Scare, which taught me a lot.

And one of the points he makes in that book is that we look back on the Red Scare mainly in the dimensions in which it was a wild overreaction or an act of repression.

But to understand it, you have to understand the ways in which communism was alive and growing, and there were actual fronts in America, and there was fears that, you know, there could be takeovers.

Just give me a little bit of that texture.

Yeah.

Communism really was on the forward march and particularly in the 1930s and the 1940s as the battle against fascism got going.

Communists played the forefront in that battle.

Communists came

out of 1945 with a tremendous amount of stature.

In fact, I was just reading this wonderful book by Walter Kampowski, German writer, and it's Four Days at the End of World War II, and it's based on diaries and memoirs.

The love that American soldiers had for Soviet Sovengers.

I mean, you really feel there had been a real war fought, and there was a real sense of camaraderie between them.

So communism had been building.

And then also in the United States, as opposed to 1919, where those parties were really much smaller, they were concentrated really in immigrant urban communities.

Communism had become, as it was famously said in the 30s and 40s, 20th century Americanism.

Communist Party members were part of the federal government under Roosevelt.

Cultural workers became really big parts of Hollywood and the cultural industries.

You had some in the universities, and most importantly, in the labor unions.

And most of these people, I think historians would agree, were just idealistic, progressive, coalitional actors, basically.

And they were an really, really important part of the New Deal, which is very important for us to understand for what follows.

But there were certainly very high-level members of the Communist Party who were also spying for the Soviet Union.

And so there, right there, you immediately have the problem,

which is you've got a party and a movement and a group of people that have really become integrated into, in ways that we would find very hard to imagine today, the mainstream of American life and its culture.

And yet part of that party is also allied to what immediately, you know, following 1945 is going to become the big enemy of the United States.

And that is a recipe for disaster.

So you have in this period,

not the beginnings, but the growing strength strength of a number of emancipatory movements.

You have labor unions.

You have the desegregation and civil rights movements.

You have a movement for gender equality.

You have in a much more nascent way, a movement for sexual equality, for rights for gay and lesbian men and women.

And the communists, the socialists are sort of two things at once.

There's on the one hand, just a...

group of people with a commitment to more left and radical politics, which are braided into these movements for obvious reasons or actual political allies.

And then it's connected, and you have these party structures, some of them explicitly communist parties, some of them fronts,

that really are trying to take orders from Moscow.

Like that's not fake.

They're trying to do what they think the party in the Soviet Union wants them to do.

And it's like in this kind of ambiguity between the two, like the ways that touching a normal political reform movement also might mean touching a movement actually allied to the Soviet Union, that you get like the raw material for what becomes a second Red Scare.

Before we get to that, which is

both more ambiguous but more explosive, what you just said, we also have the question of actual espionage and spies.

This is the other big thing.

And I do think, you know, that's really important because, of course, you know, in many ways, that's the crown jewel of the right-wing's attack.

And it's the crown jewel because it's real.

It's not fake.

It's, you know, there were people who were, you know, very closely tied with the Communist Party and the Communist Party who were doing actual spying and espionage at very high levels.

I mean, there are nuclear secrets smuggled out of the United States that accelerate the Soviet Union's development of an atomic weapon, which is considered a huge loss in the Cold War.

Absolutely.

And also, you know, diplomacy at Yalta.

You know, there's people who are fairly high up in the Roosevelt administration who know about what's going on there, who are also linked with the party and passing secrets.

So it's real stuff.

And I think we do a disservice to try to pretend like that wasn't the case because that was part of the tragedy of the whole moment.

But then you have what you were just talking about, which is.

To what extent is the Communist Party really sort of taking orders from the Soviet Union about its political line?

And I think their historians are much more uncertain about how to do that.

And I think we have to be really, really careful because there are a lot of times when

the Communist Party is pursuing not just good emancipatory things, but as we would say, like, you know, really good coalitional politics, really building bridges between different groups.

And sometimes the Soviet Union was in favor of that, sometimes it wasn't.

But so there it gets much trickier.

And I think the really important thing about this is less for the red scare and more more just because of the internal division it creates on the left and the internal suspicion and the internal sense of betrayal that you get.

Some people feeling when they feel like, wait a minute, when you're speaking to me, are you speaking to me as a good left-winger or are you taking dictation from somebody else?

And I think that's where this atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination really becomes very difficult and has some lessons, I think, for us today, not in terms of people taking dictation from a foreign power, but that atmosphere of mutual distrust among people who are allies is poison and it becomes a real problem and makes you very vulnerable.

Tell me a little bit about Alger Hiss.

Alger Hiss was a kind of waspy, blue-blooded government official.

He'd gone to Harvard Law School.

I think he had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice.

And he became a fairly high figure in the agriculture department and was in many ways a representative figure of of what we're talking about in DC.

It was a very left-wing city.

It had a very left-wing culture.

And the Communist Party was a big part of that.

And he was part of that milieu and got involved in what became exposed as a spy ring involving a man named Whitaker Chambers, a kind of only in America type of figure, very troubled,

very

interesting, very mournful figure, who was the opposite in a way of Hiss.

I mean, just as a character study, he was, you know, Hiss was very good looking.

He was very suave.

He was very tall.

He was very slender.

Chambers just was a mess and he looked like a mess.

Chambers was a spy and Alger Hiss passed him a series of papers, you know, for his handlers to take back to the Soviet Union.

And

I think the significance is less the specifics of what was going on than that this just became,

I don't know how you would even describe it today.

Everything from Charlie Kirk to O.J.

Simpson to, it was just a cultural event.

Who's the liar might well be the title of the drama, which unfolds before a packed caucus room where the House Un-American Affairs Committee members swear in Alger Hiss, former State Department executive.

Mr.

Hiss is accused of being a former communist and before news cameras faces his accuser.

Well, so there's the House Un-American Activities Committee, which starts up before McCarthy becomes a significant significant figure.

And, I mean, I believe the first televised congressional hearings are this Chambers Hiss showdown.

I first knew him as Crosley.

What his name is today, I am not prepared to testify to, or what other names he may have had.

You know, when you read back into this, it's so hard to put yourself in the mindset of what it all is.

The Agriculture Department is a much bigger deal in that period of American life than it is today.

Not that it's a small thing today, but we have way more farmers, right?

And Hiss goes on to be a top aide to like Dean Acheson, you know, is like top, you know, the absolute elite of the elite foreign policy side of things.

It's not quite like if Jake Sullivan or on the right, maybe Stephen Miller turned out to be a spy for the Chinese Communist Party.

It's maybe just like one step below that, but it is one step below that.

He was a scion of the American establishment.

He really was a figure.

And I'm glad you brought up the agriculture department because Henry Wallace, who ends up being FDR's vice president, comes out of the agriculture department.

And so there's a real sense that he is, you know, from the establishment, but he's part of the American grain.

And this does a lot of things, I think, but one of the things is it really creates a sense.

Well, if it could have been him, then you can't discount it being anybody.

What are the tools that are being used in this period of the Red Scare?

So let's just start with that.

And this is really a larger lesson about political repression in America, both what's different and what's similar.

You know, McCarthyism, that Red Scare, was just not particularly a violent affair.

There were not really that many people, comparatively speaking, who went to jail.

There were not that many people who were deported if you compare it to the first Red Scare.

But what you did have is roughly 20 to 40 percent of the American workforce subject to surveillance and investigations and firings for their beliefs and activities.

And I just want to say something because I think when people, and I'm glad we're using the language of the Red Scare as opposed to McCarthyism, because when we say McCarthyism, people really think about Joe McCarthy.

He comes on the scene.

Nobody's ever even heard of him really until 1950.

The Red Scare happens much earlier.

It really starts in 1946 and it is comprehensive.

There are, first and foremost, I think at the level of the government, you have to look at the FBI.

As it turns out, the FBI was majorly gathering surveillance and information and then passing it up the food chain.

And so it then goes to higher levels of the executive branch.

And that leads to the second dimension of the Red Scare, which is the purge of the civil service.

It begins in around 1947.

And, you know, we're not talking about figures like Hiss.

We're really talking about people who work in, you know, in Washington, in the post office, and in a whole range of, you know, the government's gotten big and are members of the Communist Party, Carl Bernstein's father, the great journalist, his parents were communists.

And the government starts getting rid of them as a security threat.

And there's hearings and there's a bureaucracy.

It's not just random and arbitrary terror, which is an important thing to, and it's a very bureaucratic procedural mechanism.

But it really doesn't just get rid of around, I think, 10,000 members of the civil service, but also really creates an atmosphere.

Just, you know, think of what happened recently with Doge,

not nearly as

scattershot, but it has a chilling effect.

So that's the second part.

Then you have congressional hearings, which we've just already alluded to, but there's HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee.

There's McCarthy's Committee and several other committees in the Senate.

These are very high-profile media publicity events where they're getting Fed information from the FBI, often confidential information, where you can't confront your accuser because it's not a court of law, but it is a court of public opinion.

And that then, and this gets us now to another level of McCarthyism, how you perform what you do before these hearings, if you're testifying, goes then to your employer.

And this becomes very famous in Hollywood by people who are either willing to testify, are not willing to testify, are willing to testify about themselves, are not willing to name names about other people.

There's a whole thing there.

And employers start firing people who are suspect.

I've just talked about maybe one tenth of what the Red Scare was, but it's it's important.

But let me hold on the tenth for a minute because there's something about the Hollywood dimension of it that I think is important and is important for thinking about now.

The question before this committee and the scope of its present inquiry will be to determine the extent of communist infiltration in the Hollywood motion picture industry.

So you have this group of screenwriters.

that is called up and screenwriters in Hollywood at this time are probably the the most left-wing of the Hollywood machine.

Contempt citations and ejection from the hearings came in rapid succession.

Very apparent.

It's very apparent that you're following the same line of these other witnesses.

I am following your line.

Which is definitely the commonest line.

I am using my own head, which I shall be.

You're excused.

And if you want to make a speech, go out here here under one of the big trees and bang down or.

And some of them, you know, were involved in communist or communist fund organizations.

Some of them are kind of just more left-wing.

But they're a big cause celeb, and Hollywood rallies around them.

And it's pretty amazing in retrospect how quickly Hollywood, with all of its cultural power, falls.

Yeah.

They have these hearings.

They're kind of a fiasco.

And the Motion Picture Association of America, or possibly it's, you know, whatever it's called then,

basically agrees to

a kind of soft blacklist, to codes of what sort of movies can get released.

Ayn Rand writes a guide to what should be in movies.

You shouldn't be, you know, valorizing the working man.

It reshapes the content of movies.

I think this is like one of the very scary parts.

They don't pass a law telling Hollywood what to do.

They go after a couple of screenwriters and then hollywood collapses and the thing about that self-censorship is over time as anybody who's ever been in an institution knows you do things initially under kind of this threat of coercion and then over time you start inhabiting the role in hollywood i think you just see a version of this very much writ large.

There was

a very high-profile set of hearings.

And just to put some meat on those bones about how Hollywood rallies on behalf of these many communist screenwriters, they form something called the Committee on the First Amendment, and they go to DC.

And it's people like Gene Kelly, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart.

And there's a beautiful picture of them marching on the Capitol.

You know, we stand for American values.

We're the true patriots.

We believe in the First Amendment.

And then, as you say, very quickly, Hollywood crumbles.

The mobilization just fails.

And

the people with economic power in Hollywood just start getting very, very nervous.

There are these kind of freelance forces out there.

There's a famous grocer, the grocer from Syracuse who won't put products on his shelves if he finds out that the networks or other, you know, kind of cultural things are putting advertisements for those products.

There's a kind of reverberation that just starts extending out there where people feel like there's going to be some real economic bottom line consequences if we pursue this route.

The heartbreaking sort of icing on the top of that cake is Humphrey Bogart, who rallied to defend the First Amendment, you know, who we all know because of Casablanca, you know, right?

The great hero of independent, you know, I'm the,

nobody, not the Nazis, are going to push me around.

And he's told by Ed Sullivan, who's a really good friend of his, you know, what you did there in D.C., it's not going over well.

You're losing your audience share, whatever the metrics are.

And he gives an interview, a very famous interview.

I think it was with Look magazine.

And he says, I don't know what I was doing.

You know, I'm a dope.

You know, let the big shots handle that.

I'm just a, you know, I'm just an ordinary schmo kind of a thing.

It's just the exact opposite.

And, you know, ends his career with that hanging over him.

And as you said, this is all very fast, but there are a lot of little steps, as we've seen in the last couple of days, you know, that can happen within 24 hours.

I mean, back then it was probably, you know, a couple of months, but very fast turnaround.

Can you give me some examples of how that changed Hollywood?

What are the kinds of movies it made before that it didn't make after or the kinds of themes it got dropped?

Like, how did that actually change the culture people consumed?

You have some more overtly political films in the early 1940s, Grapes of Wrath.

I'm right here to tell you, mister, there ain't nobody gonna push me off my land.

My grandpa took up this land 70 years ago.

My paw was born here.

We was all born on it.

And some of us was killed on it.

I'll be everywhere.

Wherever you can look.

Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.

Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy,

I'll be there.

You know, sort of social justice-y films.

Gentlemen's agreement about anti-Semitism.

You still can't believe that anybody would give up the glory of being a Christian for even eight weeks, can you?

That's what's eating you, isn't it?

Now, if I tell you that that's anti-Semitism, your feeling that being Christian is better than being Jewish, you're going to tell me that I'm heckling you again, or that I'm twisting your words around, or that it's just facing facts, as someone else said to me yesterday.

Even, you know, Screwball Comedy, you know, which was a lot of it was done by people like Ring Lardner, who were, you know, communists, had a kind of strong social content, and a lot of that kind of disappears.

And then you get How to Marry a Millionaire, which is a wonderful movie, but, you know, kind of very different.

If you had your choice with everybody in the world, which would you rather marry?

A rich guy or a poor one?

I think I'd rather marry a rich one.

You still have some wonderful films but i do think that there's an inward turn you know this kind of more psychological interiority at the exclusion of the social and then you also have just the kind of the the embrace of sort of fluff we've sort of kept joseph mccarthy lurking on the the edge of this conversation tell me about him He was a senator from Wisconsin, a Republican senator.

He had been, I think, a bit of a, I wouldn't say a war hero, but he had fought in the Second World War.

And he is elected in the wake of the Second World War.

This is kind of a return moment for the Republican Party.

They had been really kept out of Congress from 1932 to 1946.

They take back the House and he gets elected to the Senate.

And he, in 1950, makes this famous speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, where he says that he has in his hand

a list of, and I think the first number, and the numbers keep changing, but it was 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party and the State Department.

Can I note one thing that I had not understood?

And again, I'm taking this from Clay Risen's book, but that in 1948, Truman unexpectedly beats Thomas Dewey and wins re-election.

Truman had been quite unpopular.

He was a bad underdog going into that election.

And the Republican Party's lesson from that is Dewey did not use anti-communism as an issue.

And that the sort of power structure of the Republican Party prior to McCarthy sort of emerging in this way

has taken the lesson that we are not going to make that mistake again.

We are going to beat the hell out of the Democrats on communism.

And so the Republican Party was ready for McCarthyism.

Yeah.

Just a slight footnote to that, which is that in 1946, when the Republicans did take back the House, they're doing trial runs.

That's when Richard Nixon is elected elected famously on a red-baiting campaign.

So there are parts of the Republican Party that are trying it out.

But you're absolutely right.

1948, Thomas Dewey represented a kind of

internationalist

wing of Mitt Romney.

Yeah.

Well, to feel Republicanism.

You know, I would say even more, far more liberal than Mitt Romney, actually.

I just mean in the sense that one of the lessons they take from him is that we tried playing it nicely.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so someone like McCarthy in 1950 is a very successful practitioner of putting the Democrats on their heels.

And the important thing to remember about McCarthy

is that the Republican Party needed him, they wanted him, and they used him.

There were some Republicans who stood up to him,

Margaret Chase Smith most famously.

but he was very, very useful to the party.

They, you know, he immediately got out on the stump during the 1950 midterm elections.

And there was a big faction of the Republican Party, including the minority leader.

We're not talking about a kind of radical right-wing faction, but the center of the party that really depended upon him for electoral purposes and just

for framing the attack, for putting the Democrats on their back feet.

But the important thing I just wanted to stress was that between that 1946 and 1950, like the Democrats, I mean, communism, anti-communism was a democratic issue.

So there are a lot of institutions that are aligned with the Democratic Party that have been engaged with this.

And then suddenly McCarthy emerges and finds a way of turning what they had been doing into their vulnerability.

I think this is so important.

And I think it's a really hard thing to throw your mind back into because the parties aren't polarized and ideologically distinct in the way they are today.

And so even McCarthy, Joseph Kennedy Jr.

is a major McCarthy supporter.

McCarthy spends many, many weekends at the Kennedy compound.

Robert F.

Kennedy is on McCarthy's staff.

You know, the House Committee on Un-American Activities is at times led by a Democratic chairman.

And so you have both.

You have like liberal Republicans who actually do challenge McCarthy.

and end up in, you know, backwaters or in trouble for it.

You do have liberal Democrats who often lose in challenging McCarthy.

They lose primaries.

They lose elections.

But it's not highly structured as a Republican-Democratic issue in the way things typically are now.

Absolutely.

I mean, you alluded to this, but of course, Southern Democrats were a big part of the Red Scare.

And if I could just bring in an additional element of that, you ask, why were they?

Why were they so anti-communists?

Well, of course, the Communist Party and left-wing unions have really made it a project starting in the 1930s.

And in in fact, FDR supports this.

He in 1938 goes to the South because they believe that until we organize the South with labor unions and the right to vote for African Americans, we can't complete the New Deal.

It's just going to be stillborn.

This is a very high-level project and you need organizers to do this.

And there are these organizers who go in.

And Southern Democrats do not like this.

And so this isn't just, you know, as we're saying, it's not just a partisan kind of a thing.

It really goes to the heart of a social cleavage in a big part of the country.

And there are real stakes for both sides in winning that battle.

This seems also to get at a reason that's become so uniting on the right.

And I mean here the ideological right, not just Republican Party, that there is an effort to paint every social movement they don't like.

And this goes back to this ambiguity, as a communist plot to take over America, racial integration, communist plot to take over America, labor unions and the sort of elevation of the working man, a communist plot, you know, gender equality, sexual equality, a communist plot.

And so you have a lot of purges

of people who their real sin is working on behalf of these issues that today we look back on as obvious, you know, just the emancipatory path of American politics, the arc bending towards justice.

But people lose their jobs.

People are investigated, you know, based on the effort to paint all of these as communist plots.

There was a woman named Dorothy Bailey who was a government worker, I think in the post office, a black woman.

And she has to go through an investigation.

She's named as a communist.

And she's asked a bunch of questions.

One of the questions she is asked is, is, do you believe in desegregating the blood supply of the Red Cross?

And I remember when I was in my first year of graduate school or second year of graduate school reading this, you know, just very naive and thinking, what in the world are they talking about?

It's 1950, 1951.

The battle over desegregation is on and about to get much, much bigger.

And you have something called the one drop rule in this country that says you're black if you have one drop of blood.

The last thing you want to do if you believe in all of those things is to have blood from a black person going into the bloodstream of a white person.

And the Communist Party, as part of its organizing, very wisely, you know, picked this as a battle because it's so outrageous.

And so

the irony that's very hard, it's still for me to get my head wrapped around is that then becomes a question that you're asked by a government or an employee, a private inquisitor.

And you say, why are they asked that question?

Well, because many people will deny that they're part of the Communist Party,

or they'll say they're no longer part of the Communist Party.

And then the question is, well, how do you determine, are they really a communist or not?

And it's, you know, what they call this, the duck test.

If it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

It just begins to get at, I think, not just the moral dimension of all of this, but just really the cultural politics.

I mean, just you can think of a range of issues now that we just completely take for granted that were part of this left-wing front of like moral common sense.

Like, this is what good people believe in.

And it was very present in Hollywood.

It was very present in parts of the academy.

It was very present in parts of the media.

And it goes back to that point you made at the very beginning: which is

this wasn't a hallucination on their part.

Like there were communists, they were involved in these ideas, there were liberals allied with them.

The ground between them was kind of murky.

And you had conservative Democrats and Republicans who, for both material and ideological reasons and electoral reasons, hated it.

It was really a kind of a civil war.

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Tell me about the lavender scare.

So in the 1930s with the New Deal, you had the arrival in DC.

DC had always been a kind of gay city.

It was a place where gays and lesbians could kind of exist.

But particularly with the New Deal, you have people coming from all across the country.

And many of them joined the administration.

And also you have, and this is a really important part of this, a lot of women coming to D.C.

and starting to get positions of power in the government, most famously Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor.

But there were many, many people.

you know, beneath her.

And Eleanor Roosevelt is kind of a, you know, a fixture in this this community.

And so they create a culture that is associated with the New Deal of increasing gender equality or at least increasing representation of women in public spaces and political spaces, and also increasing this sort of increasing gay kind of a subculture that was a part of it.

There's one other backstory here, which is in espionage circles or in counter-espionage circles, always finding out if somebody was gay was a really good weapon to know because you could use it as blackmail.

Um,

and the security apparatus, long before McCarthy and all those guys, wants to make sure that they know people's sexual orientation because, you know, if they're gay, they're vulnerable to spying for the Soviet Union.

But then, as we get closer to McCarthy,

you see hints of this in Alger Hiss.

There is this notion that

these guys who are commies and liberals and pinkos,

they're queer.

Dean Atchison with his fancy pants and his mustache, he's a little bit too concerned about how he looks and his clothes, and it has tremendously devastating consequences.

He said the State Department is now staffed with good, loyal,

clean living Americans.

I don't quite know what his conception of clean living Americans happens to be, but

since he made that statement,

54 individuals

who were

had this unusual State Department affliction,

homosexuals,

were allowed to resign.

What had been a kind of limited security espionage thing becomes a real purge of government.

And it really gets going after 1950.

So at that point, the statistic is that every day a communist is being arrested or kicked out of government, but also a gay person is being kicked out of government.

This is what blew me away.

McCarthy's fan mail,

25% of it was about security threats.

75% of it, which is a big part, was about what they called sexual depravity.

And I think one of the things I'm trying to draw out in all of this is that you end up with this

amorphous omnithreat.

Communism is its heart,

but maybe it's gay people in government and the sort of sexual and gender revolution that that is speaking about or signaling.

Maybe it's racial integration, labor unions.

Maybe it's the New Deal itself, but the turning of it all into a plot, a threat, a kind of insidious force that can be used to corrupt any other part of it.

I think is very core to the politics of that.

And also, as best I can tell, very core to how it maintains momentum, because it's hard to find all these communists.

There actually aren't that many of them.

So McCarthy begins to go after gay people, right?

Like you can kind of keep changing the subject and things are linked to each other,

even if they're not actually the same or those links aren't even important.

Yeah.

What was going on there in the sort of Red Scare imagination, let's say, is the conversion of politics into plot, conspiratorial plot.

And I think it's really important to put both of those pieces together the way you just did, because

I think oftentimes when we look back on this, it's easy to say, well, I'm not a conspiracy thinker.

I'm against conspiracies.

I don't think like that and so on and so forth.

But what makes conspiracies powerful, particularly in a moment like that, is it's not making shit up.

Yes, it's cartoonish and yes, it's simplifying, but it's not,

it has real raw material to work with.

And of course, for the people who are battling that red scare and pursuing it, it also gives them a sense that like, if we could get to the heart of that plot, we can stop all this.

It's like Archimedes' lever, you know, you can really give me a lever and I'll move the world, you know, and we just have to find that.

You know, you see that in everybody from J.

Edgar Hoover, he makes a very famous statement about how during the Bolshevik Revolution, you know, people say, oh, the Communist Party, there's only X number.

And he said, well, look at the numbers during the Belshevik Revolution.

It wasn't, you know, that different.

And there's just a real sense of.

Not wrong, actually.

Yeah.

But like, it's not a plot.

Yes.

That's not true.

That's not the way it worked.

Would that, I see for many leftists, would that it were so easy?

Yeah.

But it's not completely wrong either.

I think that's a good place to move closer to the present.

So

let's start before Charlie Kirk is assassinated.

Trump wins his second term.

He takes office.

What

that you had been watching seeing

in the ideological structure of Trumpism or the methods that Trumpism was applying to unfriendly institutions and movements echoed this.

How were you telling that story to yourself as somebody so steeped in the Red Scare?

You know, let me first start by saying that during the first Trump term, I was part of a fairly small group of people on the left who were very skeptical of a lot of the warnings about authoritarianism, fascism, autocracy, strongman politics.

And

I think I had a lot of evidence on my side.

I wasn't just being ornery.

You know, there was many, many ways in which I thought compared to, say, George W.

Bush, if we're thinking about political repression, if we're thinking about transforming institutions, that Trump was actually a piddling kind of actor.

You know, I know the Second Red Scare.

I know the labor wars in this country.

I know about the battle over abolition.

It seemed like Trump was small potatoes.

Not just because of the ways he was constrained.

It also seemed like, well, what was the revolution that it was sort of counteracting?

I mean, you had nothing like the New Deal.

You had nothing like what we've just been describing.

So I was skeptical.

And what shook me out of this was the assault on government workers and the firings.

That was the first thing.

For me, like that's always the canary in the coal mine is employment sanctions.

There's a long history of it.

It's really the way a lot of American political repression has happened.

W.E.B.

Du Bois and Black Reconstruction, you know, this very violent moment against black people says it's employment sanctions that really is the driving engine.

So, anybody with that kind of antenna, you didn't see that really in the first term.

In fact, it was quite the opposite.

You know, civil society rallied against Trump, resisted in all these ways.

And then all of a sudden, you see these mass firings happening.

And,

you know, there's all kinds of reasons to worry about that if you care about climate change.

And, you know, a lot of people were talking about all those things, but I was thinking about it instantaneously as McCarthyism.

The other thing then was, of course, the capitulation of law firms and universities.

And the record of elites and institutions, unfortunately, is not so great.

And so seeing those institutions start capitulating and often capitulating to financial threats, economic threats.

You know, not we're going to put you in jail, but, you know, we're going to take away your funding.

We're going to do this.

And you do that.

And I think, you know, Americans have a weird attitude towards money.

You know, on the one hand, it's the most important thing in America.

And on the other hand, we have this very moralistic idea, well, it's just money.

Stand up to the, you know, the bastards.

And it's like, you know, could we put the, could we put these two worlds together?

You know, the economy is a medium of political coercion in this country.

It always has been.

Trump didn't invent that.

I want to pick up on something you said because it.

It speaks to your book, The Reactionary Mind, which I love, have read twice.

I think it describes second-term Trump much better than first-term Trump.

One of your big points in the reactionary mind is that there's a, we often think of conservatism as conserving, but it's also a movement that reacts to threats to power and to the social order.

And you said something there that one reason you took first-term Trump less seriously as a threat was that there wasn't a revolutionary emancipatory movement that was really in reaction against,

or at least as you saw it.

I would say between 2016 and 2024,

that, at least at a cultural level, changes.

You have sort of a racial reckoning, not only, but particularly after George Floyd's murder.

You have the Me Too movement.

You have a big move on gender expression and gender rights around trans issues in particular.

I actually think COVID and the professional classes are somehow very relevant here.

The sense that cultural power is being exerted there.

So that's actually a lot of something to react against.

And Trump comes back to office with a very different coalition, a coalition that now includes Elon Musk, includes much of Silicon Valley and the tech platforms, the people in charge of them, that includes a very big gender backlash behind it, that includes the comedians like Joe Rogan and

The Auvon and the sort of centers of power that they're cultural, that are atmospheric, that actually have a lot of money, that have control of attention, includes RFK Jr.

and his coalition, which is not insignificant, right?

I mean, Trump's 2024 election, he has a much higher share of the black vote and particularly black men than he did in 2016.

He does very well among Hispanic voters.

And the social order becomes very liquid

in this moment.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's interesting because I think we spent a lot of time in the first Trump administration, or I certainly did, you know, and I would say to people, well, what is, you know, what is it?

And people talk about demographic change and so on.

But I kept saying, you know,

one of the big things was racial equality.

That's what I thought it was.

Yeah.

Demographic change.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, it's not that that doesn't.

create some anxiety.

Of course it does.

But again, historically speaking, those weren't the kind.

It wasn't just demographic change.

You needed something more than that.

And also, I was thinking on racial equality, you know, the metrics were actually going the other way.

So it was like the right had won that battle.

Neighborhoods were more deep.

Although they didn't feel that way around Obama.

It's true that they didn't feel that way, but I don't think that matters as much because I think the reality was they might not have felt that way, but they weren't able to do much with the feeling that they had.

They needed some raw material to work with.

And I think you've just begun to lay out some of the raw material that they began to get between 2016 and 2024.

The thing that really concretized this for me that kind of brought it all together, there was an interview.

God, I always forget his name.

He's from Silicon Valley, Andreessen.

Mark Andreessen.

Yeah.

In the New York Times.

It was really.

My colleague Ross Staut.

Yeah, it was an excellent interview.

Mark Andreessen, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Ross.

It's great to be here.

And he talks about what it was like to have his employees start coming back to work after the initial shutdown.

So COVID was a giant radicalizing moment.

And then by that point, we had lived through eight years of what was sort of increasingly clearly a social revolution, like very clearly like companies basically being hijacked to be engines of social change, social revolution, you know, the employee bases going feral.

You know, there were cases in the, you know, it's in the, in the Trump era, there were companies, multiple companies I know that felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.

He was like a father whose teenage kids were rebelling against him.

You know, they're speaking up.

They're demanding different.

Yeah, I should have brought this into that initial list because I think the feeling among many of these people that you're having uh all of a sudden the employees had all the power right they were getting people fired they were demanding the the workplaces made political statements

like who was really in charge here who was in charge any union organizer will always tell you the fundamental battle in any union drive is not about the profit you know bottom line it's who's in charge of the workplace and i think what's important about all this is that it brings all these cultural issues because a lot of these younger employees were talking about trans rights they were talking about Me Too.

They were talking about Black Lives Matter.

So those aren't just floaters out there in the culture.

They're embodied in workers who are fighting with you about the direction of the workplace.

And for any employer, when that starts happening,

your mind starts racing very, very fast.

And again, this is kind of similar to the anti-communism thing that we were just talking about, because it's not just fantasy on the part of an employer that we could be losing control.

They sometimes are losing control.

And, you know, that has implications for all sorts of things.

You've all think that conservatism correctly understands the reality of political loss

and stature loss, that conservatives are often right that they are losing things.

Yeah.

And I think this is something the left and liberals and centrists, everybody has a very hard time coming to terms with this.

We'd like to think that these people are just crazy, that they're just making stuff up, that they're liars, liars, that they're all these things.

But the truth of the matter is, you know, it's kind of hard to create a politically repressive social movement out of nothing.

And there were some real,

I wouldn't say they were as fundamental as some of the stuff we saw in the 1930s or the 40s or in the 60s and 70s, but, you know, there were

tremors, let's say.

Another thing that Paul Krugman just wrote about recently is in terms of gender equality, it's not so much that women entering the workforce.

That's been going on.

I mean, first of all, black women, you know, and women of color have been in the workforce forever.

But in the 40s, you do see increasing numbers of women coming into the workforce.

But starting in the 80s and 90s, you see younger women increasingly looking for careers.

It's the kinds of jobs that they're looking for.

They're looking for jobs that white men have traditionally had.

CEOs, professors, filmmakers, editors of the New York Times, the whole nine yards.

And it gets very zero-sum, very fast.

And so, yeah, I do think conservatives understand this.

And people on the left either don't understand it or try to pretend it away.

And

you're sort of entering into a war, kind of disarming yourself.

You just don't quite understand what they're doing.

Yeah, you're denying the

other side's subjective reality out of which they will power their politics.

Look, I have the experience I think that many people on the left do, where I hear some of these complaints and I think they're ridiculous.

But the level of radicalization around feeling that Twitter was not giving your work enough promotion, that you weren't allowed to spread what suddenly seemed to many experts to be vaccine misinformation, right?

There was actually much more.

This sort of

raw material of

the movies are all diverse now.

We're going to make Thor in Marvel Comics into a woman.

We're going to make Captain America into a black man.

Like, who cares?

It's a comic book.

People care.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying that it is wrong to do that.

I want to be very clear, but it is motivating to do that.

You have a line in the reactionary mind where you say, quote, conservatives often are the left's best students.

Tell me about that.

I started teaching about conservatism in, I don't know, the first or second Bush administration.

Just started reading these texts.

And one of the things that shocked me, and I started with Edmund Burke, you know, the father of the whole thing, was all the times in which he, you know, he hates the Jacobins, he hates the French Revolution, he hates all of it.

But he says over and over and over again, in their commitment, in their fidelity, in their vision, in their execution, there are superiors.

And there is a real kind of grudging respect for what this rabble has been able to accomplish.

And over the years, you see this recur throughout the history, you see increasingly elaborate attempts to learn from the left.

Now, sometimes this is very strategic and instrumental.

You know, let's, oh God, he just recently died, David Horowitz,

who had been on the left and then moved to the right.

And he was a big activist against universities.

And he said, you know, let's just use all the language the left on the campus is using and just turn it against them.

Say, you're the ones engaging in hate speech.

You're doing this.

You're doing that.

So, and he was very cynical and open about it.

I mean, you read Christopher Ruffo, and he's very explicit about being a student of what he believes the left does.

Stephen Miller, in a different way, the same thing.

There's been this move in the past couple of months to say, Aren't you all the big proponents of free speech?

Didn't you just run as opponents of cancel culture and say that you would defend our rights to say anything?

And there's been this effort to tag the right with hypocrisy, which to be fair, it's very hypocritical.

That's a fair play.

But I think it actually misses in a way what's going on.

Like I think they consciously understand themselves.

as having learned from what they think the left did when they feel the left had control of cultural institutions, you know, canceling people for things they said, sending like online mobs against them, shadow banning them, moderating them, using money through Title IX and other things to push universities ideologically.

And now they are supercharging it.

And I want to be clear that I am not absolving them of their responsibility for this or saying this is the left's fault, but I do think there is something here

in,

I really believe that what they understand themselves as doing is a kind of hypercharged turnabout.

And

that in some ways we're in a weaker position because if we can charge them with hypocrisy, they can charge us with hypocrisy.

Yeah.

I would like to move it out of the moral register because I think you're making a really important point that everybody needs to understand, but that sometimes the language of hypocrisy kind of...

Yeah, I agree with you.

But let's just start with a point that I think a lot of the best historians of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare make, which was that a certain part of the apparatus that had developed and was used against the Communist Party was developed by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s.

I mean, J.

Edgar Hoover was beloved by the Roosevelt administration, who used him to go after its partisan enemies, but also whatever threat there was perceived to be of Nazi saboteurs and allies with the Nazis and so forth.

And it's not a question of turnabout as fair play.

It's just governments, I mean, you know this, you're a student of the administrative state.

Like you build these bureaucracies, they don't just go away,

and bureaucrats are trained.

And so that's the first thing: that a bureaucracy has been built over the years, in part by the Democratic Party, by liberal groups and so forth in universities, that it was just a matter of time that would be turned against them.

And I think there were some people on the left who were warning about this from the beginning, and they were not listened to.

I mean, the most dramatic turnaround from everything, and I feel it very much at the level of rhetoric, and I've seen this on campuses, I've seen this among students, is the use of if you are a critic of Israel, if you are opposed to the state of Israel, if you're an anti-Zionist, you're engaging in a form of hate speech.

And I've had conversations with students who will say quite sincerely, and many of them had been and probably still are, kind of progressive, Obama, you know, Kamala Harris types, but very committed to the state of Israel.

And that weaponized language of victim identity, hate speech, which

was very popular, potent, and powerful on the left, that speech is a form of harm, which in certain instances it can be.

I want to be clear on that.

But just the assumption that people say things that make me uncomfortable, that I find offensive, and so on and so forth.

That was, I think, probably in the last two years was, if you want to look at, you know, just politically potent explosive moments where you're seeing the writing on the wall.

That to me was it because

university administrators were caught kind of with their pants down.

Like they, they didn't know how to react to this because they were so steeped in that language themselves.

They had no way.

Then suddenly you have kids who are expelled, students who are expelled, faculty who are investigated.

And the truth of the matter is calling for the destruction, just calling for it, saying, I believe in this, is not a violation of the, you know, it's protected speech.

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So some of the things that you were just talking about them doing, the universities, they justified their crackdown in terms of anti-Semitism.

Always a very strange rationale for what they were doing.

But Trump comes back to office with this new coalition.

And it doesn't have what we were talking about a minute ago, which was an omni-threat.

Doge was justified as efficiency, right?

As if it were the reincarnation of reinventing government from the Bill Clinton administration.

You know, you can go watch panels of people on the right saying, no, no, we have to be honest.

This is about ideology.

We're trying to take back the administrative state, but it was justified in terms of efficiency and saving money.

You have the attack on the law firms, which isn't really justified by any big argument at all.

They just do it.

Attack on media outlets is more justified by a sense of bias and attacks on Donald Trump.

There isn't a thing uniting it.

And it wasn't exactly that it was slowing down, but I would say a month ago, two months ago, my sense of it was that as bad as it was, it wasn't quite holding together.

And then Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Yeah.

And I guess, well, let me ask you this.

How have you seen them change what they are saying, what they are doing in the aftermath of that?

Yeah.

So I think at the level of words, which I'm usually a little skeptical of, but I think in this instance matter,

you see the emergence of vengeance.

as a language.

And vengeance is an old language.

It goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Bible.

And it's a very dangerous language.

And there's a reason why the Greeks were terrified of it.

Because, put it this way, it has a licensing structure that is extraordinarily permissive on the one hand.

But on the other hand, and this is almost a paradox, it has a very stern injunction, a moral injunction at the heart of it.

You have to take revenge for this loss.

And if you don't,

It's as if you're committing a second murder yourself.

You're not honoring this person.

And this is a really terrifying language.

It's not one that's monopolized by the right.

There was a wonderful historian, Arno Mehr, who wrote a wonderful book about the French and the Russian Revolution, where he talks about, it's called the Furies, actually, after the ancient Greek gods, about the role of vengeance on the left.

It is absolutely terrifying, this sort of holy violence that it seems to authorize, where people are morally empowered to do horrible things

that they wouldn't ordinarily feel themselves authorized to do.

So just before I came over here, I looked, the Chronicle of Higher Education is just keeping track of how many people have been fired, faculty and jobs, since the Charlie Kirk murder.

That's just one week.

And those are not.

And just one industry.

And one industry.

And voluntary.

These are decisions of employers that are just doing this.

In an industry, by the way, where you have the most protection of any work, more protection than you have, Ezra Klein, you know, with tenure and often, you know, union rights and so forth.

It's

Hannah Arendt wrote a letter to her mentor, Carl Jaspers, in the middle of the McCarthy era.

And she said, everything melts like butter under the sun.

And what she meant was the collapse of the institutions and the collapse, the leaders of the institutions of people who, as you were saying about Hollywood, just the day before, sounded a little bit more robust.

And

this murder has

galvanized the right

for reasons that, like the second Red Scare, are both strategic and sincere, and you can see it.

And

it feels like they're just getting started.

I want to play you a clip of Stephen Miller, whose deputy chief of staff was close to Charlie Kirk,

and seems as much as anybody to be sort of structuring the response here.

With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.

It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

These networks is the term I want to zoom in on there.

In that same episode, Vance talks about the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Nation magazine.

Charlotte Kirk was murdered by, as best we know, a single gunman making a very, very, very terrible decision.

But what I see happening

is an effort to blow this up into a kind of omni-threat.

There is this thing called the radical left.

It's not just this crazy guy in Utah.

It's all the NGOs that support liberal or left-wing causes.

It's anybody who, through the Soros Foundation, has supported liberal judges.

And I guess the argument is they created a climate in which this guy got radicalized.

But the effort to expand this,

to create your threat that links it all together,

and then crack down on that threat, that feels to me like where we're entering.

into a like i've been thinking about it as a blue scare right that that feels to me like the the symmetry here the size of the enemy, which I think is something they sort of thought before.

Yeah.

Right.

They didn't just learn about, yeah, I think bringing in the Ford Foundation is ridiculous, but they've been talking about the NGO network for a long time, right?

But now they have

their reason to go after it.

I want to read to you the language of the Smith Act, which was...

kind of the major legislative tool that was used against the left during the McCarthy era.

This was the way you could bring people up on criminal charges.

What was criminal was conspiring with someone else to organize a party or a group, conspiring with someone to organize a party or a group to advocate, teach, or encourage the desirability of the overthrow of the government by force or violence.

What do you notice there?

You notice the number of nouns and verbs you have to get to before you get to violence.

And I think it's very relevant to what you just said.

It is the identification of a network that can be tied in any way, shape, or form

to acts of violence.

The flip side of this, which the journalist Ken Klipperstein just posted about, they've come up with a new formula for the lone gunman type, which is nihilistic violent extremists.

Nihilistic is an interesting word choice because it's kind of like anything and and everything.

So on the one hand, they're identifying this network to go after a whole apparatus that they both believe, and some of them opportunistically believe, but then also this very free-floating signifier of the kinds of individuals who might engage in violent extremism.

Yeah.

And so the idea is there is no such thing as the individual,

that the individual is the product

of a climate.

Everybody's a vector.

Everybody's a vector.

And so, you know, if you're an organization whose ambient works at it or, you know,

who

maybe now said anything that is disrespectful to Charlie Kirk or talked about things that you think are the kind of thing that the shooter could have believed, they become fair game.

Absolutely.

And again, the thing that the president and I would look to is it'll oftentimes start with the employer investigating their own personnel.

And those investigations then become a kind of raw database for the authorities.

But you can see how in an environment like this,

that archive becomes fair game for the Trump administration to demand handing it over, sharing it with other actors.

To me, it's the elaborate infrastructure, the meeting of rhetoric and institutions and law and the state.

That, to me, is what we're seeing.

I think that's right.

And then I think what we're seeing is connecting that to state power

in a way the left, I think whatever the right thinks of it, really did not and did not do in this way.

I mean, you just saw it with the Jimmy Kimmel thing,

which feels very red scare to me.

Yeah.

And comes from the head of the FCC

functionally threatening to use the FCC's power to block a merger.

The federal government has a lot of discretionary power reaching all across the economy.

It funds universities, it approves or disapproves of mergers, it regulates different players, it has all kinds of authorities to ask for information.

If it begins to unleash itself

from procedural neutrality,

there's very little it can't touch.

And so what they seem to me to be doing is they've been building for some time, really since coming into their second term.

They came in and said, the cultural institutions, the various institutions of society were turned against us.

I mean, this is what Project 2025 is largely about.

We are going to use the state to bring them to heal.

We're going to break them.

And

they were doing that to greater and lesser degrees of effectiveness, but they didn't really have a story.

And what they have now

is a story mixed with like the genuine

energy of vengeance, right?

They are, they did know him.

They are really furious.

I mean, Trump almost was killed by a different assassin's bullet.

And so I think the mixture of genuine sincerity, fury, and a pre-existing ideological project that they had been very, very, very systematically figuring out what leverage the federal government has and how they could use it, often in very novel ways, that's coming together now into something new.

And I think is bringing us into a new era.

Pam Bondi saying, she had to walk this back a little bit, but Pam Bondi saying, the Attorney General, hate speech isn't protected by the Constitution.

We're in something

new here, like a very fractured mirror of the previous era, but now deployed by a state trying to crush the network that it understands to be its political enemy.

Yeah.

Nancy Mace.

The congresswoman from South Carolina, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, said,

we don't fund hate.

We fire it.

We fire hate.

And you talk about a narrative.

You couldn't come up with a more pithy narrative.

I mean, they're not just going to fire people over this, although they are going to do that.

But, you know, they want to crush the institutions that they claim, you know, as you say, fostered.

this environment.

They have a martyr.

They have a cause celeb.

I mean, it's interesting you brought up Trump about his almost being assassinated because it almost seems like he was more moved by what happened to Charlie Kirk than what happened to him.

But it's become emblematic.

You know, he's a figure.

And you see this throughout the history of both right and left-wing movements.

They have their martyrs.

I think Trump felt less vulnerable in a strange way.

Yeah.

After the near assassination of him, I think it scared him.

I think it shook him.

Yeah.

But I also think he came out with this, I am chosen by God.

I am touched.

I am marked.

Yeah.

And Kirk's killing made them all feel vulnerable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know,

vulnerability is a very scary idea.

Yeah, Justice Jackson, great Justice Robert Jackson, who's a New Deal Supreme Court appointee, and he was also the prosecutor at Nuremberg.

He said,

security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.

But then let me flip this because I do think there's a lot of discontinuity here, too.

One discontinuity is

leftism, liberalism, whatever, however you want to define the thing they're actually now going after.

It's not communism.

It's not on a global march unexpectedly taking over countries.

It's not committing espionage to the high levels of American government because it's also not an alien force trying to alter the country from within, at least not in the eyes of much of the country.

I think that they are very rapidly overreaching.

It doesn't make what's about to happen not dangerous.

It doesn't mean people are not going to see their lives destroyed or worse.

But the Kimmel thing was a signal to me, Kimmel's suspension.

Once you've defined it as Jimmy Kimmel,

you've, I think, gotten pretty lost in what you're going to be able to defend.

Because to most people, Jimmy Kimmel does not represent a form of left-wing radicalism.

He is milquetoast network comedy.

And then you begin to create a nobody is safe dynamic, which is what they want to create, but it's also not a great politics.

I mean, I've been thinking about this from your line where you say conservatives are often the left's best students.

The form of the left they are studying, in this case, that Ruffo and Miller and others are studying, it was in some ways quite effective for a minute, but it's politically disastrous.

It overreached almost immediately.

It became a thing that Democrats had to run from.

And I wonder if that's a difference between this era and that one, that they're on very different, they have a lot of power, but they have not built the politics

that can support this.

I mean, you brought up the fact that there's no tie today between the domestic quote-unquote threat and a foreign threat.

And that's, of course, true.

But the flip side of that was that the Soviet Union and having to

conduct the second Red Scare in light of the Soviet Union and the kind of ideological challenge it posed throughout the globe forced the right to be careful about how it engaged in its project.

They're very, very careful to say, we are defending, as Arthur Schlesner, you know, the vital center against the extremes of both.

And you had right-wing organizations on the Attorney General's list.

J.

Edgar Hoover's FBI, despite what the movies tell us, it did help break up the Klan in the 1960s.

It had to.

It had to.

It was just part of this global contestation, particularly in Africa and Asia.

And it was discipline.

That's not there anymore.

Henry Farrell, the political scientist at Hopkins, has a great post that came out in the last couple of months about the thing that regimes really need to make very clear is like, we're going to reward you if you're with us, and we're going to punish Viers if you're against us.

And you have to be really, really consistent about that.

Like there's almost a proto-rule of law element in that reality.

And when regimes don't do that, which, you know, I think is part of the problem that we're seeing is that,

what does it take to kind of get them off your back?

It's not really clear.

And what's it going to take to not have people harass you and do all these things?

It's not really clear.

That's not always a great position for an authoritarian, proto-authoritarian regime to be in, because it means your coalition partners are going to become as uncertain as your enemies are.

And so on the one hand, it does mean that the rights narrative of a kind of foreign domestic threat is a little bit murkier,

but it also means it's a little bit unconstrained by that international.

I mean, obviously there are still international challenges to the United States, but they're not the same ideological challenges.

If anything, the United States seems to follow the model of other authoritarian regimes throughout the globe.

So that's where I'm just uncertain.

I mean, I think we're in the most politically dangerous period of my lifetime.

That's how, at least I am experiencing it.

But can I add one thing to that?

Because

I think the mistake I made made during the first term and up until the second term, just being steeped in history sometimes can be not such a great thing.

You're always looking for parallels.

You're looking for discontinuities and all the rest of it.

But the thing is, when you actually go back to Weimar Germany, you go back, you know, the thing that you see most clearly among everybody is this is all new.

This is, we have no idea where this is going.

And the historical imagination, I think today, I've been trying to disentangle myself a little bit from that and say, you know, Trump is a, he's his own kind of an actor.

I've become very careful about which historians or historically steeped commentators I have on, not because they're wrong, but people get very trapped in their dominant metaphor.

If what you know is Russia, this becomes Russia.

If what you know is Weimar Germany, it becomes Germany.

If what you know is fascism, it becomes fascism.

And those are all, they all have light to shed, and they can all create a

sense of a story that we already know how it turns out.

Yeah.

And we don't.

And I do think your point about the disciplining force of the Soviet Union is real too.

I mean, who ends McCarthyism?

It's Eisenhower.

And why does the Republican Party nominate Eisenhower rather than Taft?

I mean, in significant part, it's that what is holding it together is the fight against communism.

And Eisenhower is less of an isolationist and a much more credible figure on that.

To me, though, there's also a lesson in that, which is,

I mean, a lot of people challenged McCarthy and lost, you know, liberal Democrats, liberal Republicans.

What was dangerous for McCarthy was when he really abandoned the center, was going after the army and other things where people just didn't buy it anymore.

And then, you know, he could be sort of pushed to the margin.

And I think this is tricky.

I think I'm watching people have very different reactions about politically how to respond right now.

And I don't think any of us know.

I think anybody who says they know is lying.

But it's one of my instincts that

their abandonment of free speech, their abandonment of due process, their going after people like Kimmel.

You know, I think everybody thinks it was bad for Democrats that they lost the comedians.

Well, are the comedians so happy about what they see happening right now?

The one place where I think people need to think very carefully about their response and what they want to do is what kind of coalition can you build against this?

Because all of a sudden, to go to something that you were saying earlier, people get very nervous.

There's a lot of political power and people feeling unsettled about where they're going to stand in society and what damage can be done unto them.

And all of a sudden, the Trump administration is coming for a very wide swath of everyone.

What we were talking about, the Red Scare, it took a long time to build that.

They're speedrunning this very fast.

Right.

This is the sort of the scary part of the story.

The second Red Scare succeeded.

Part of what deprived McCarthy of oxygen was not just that he went after the military, but that at the level of what their ambitions were, they had really succeeded in stopping the New Deal from where it was heading.

And

his electoral returns were just, you know, it was diminishing to some degree.

What would you say the damages of the Red Scare after it had ended did to the left, did to the country, did to its government, its institutions?

And what do you think that tells us about what four years of the Trumpist assault on our government institutions now could do?

I think the first and most important thing was that there was a nascent budding movement that was bringing together labor rights and civil rights, race and class, the relationship between African Americans and capitalism, that the Communist Party and left-wing front groups and just kind of left liberals were pursuing.

And the Second Red Scare just shut that down.

And so I would say to this day, we've never really recovered from that.

And we've seen that when we have these arguments that we have about race versus class.

This was something that people at the forefront of those movements were thinking hard about.

Why did it shut that down?

I've never, I don't quite understand it.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So there was a movement in the 1940s.

Well, it started in the 1930s, but in the 1940s in particular, to go into the South and start organizing the South, which was really where the, at that time still, was the bulk of the African-American labor force.

And there was a very clear understanding that if we were going to get things like national health care, which was on the agenda for the Democratic Party, even Harry Truman, and other, you know, kind of more expansions, you know, include African Americans in the Social Security Act.

All those things

that you needed to break the Solid South.

You needed to, you know, emancipate and enfranchise black Americans.

But to do that required a lot of sacrifice on the part of labor unions, on the part of white workers, on the part of white liberals and so forth.

And

in order to engage in that sacrifice, you had to start making an argument about why standing up for African Americans wasn't just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do.

And once the second Red Scare was able to break what was called Operation Dixie, in a way, it kind of left black Americans really on their own.

Interestingly enough, actually, in the 60s, there were some people like Bayard Rustin who were always trying to repair that alliance, but it was really broken after that.

So I'd say in the field, that was probably the biggest loss.

I think a second one was about foreign policy.

There were a group of people in the State Department who were experts on East Asia, security experts who were, you know, on the left, were all purged.

There have been a lot of historians who've made the argument that this sets the stage for the disastrous consequences with the Vietnam War, that you just, you know, lose a whole body of institutional knowledge that has devastating consequences for the people of Vietnam and for the United States as well.

The lessons, I think, for today are, you know, as we're seeing with the purge of the government, you know, there's a whole body of knowledge that seems to be gleefully being tossed aside when it comes to climate, when it comes to vaccines, a whole array of things.

We do not know what the consequences are.

Then also final question.

What are three books you recommend to the audience?

There is a translation of a Jewish Hebrew Israeli poet, Chaim Bialik, who died many years, you know, in the last century.

He was considered the great Jewish national national poet.

And he wrote this poem after the Kishnev pogrom in 1903 called

On the Slaughter.

And Netanyahu invoked this after Gaza.

But there's a new translation by a wonderful translator named Peter Cole that's coming out with New York Review of Books.

It's called City of Slaughter that complicates that story and shows what a powerful poet who complicates any idea of vengeance in particular, vengeance.

So that's one book that that I would really recommend.

A second book is Viktor Navaski's Naming Names, which is about the McCarthy era.

And the reason I recommend it, it's about Hollywood.

It really focuses on what we were just talking about, the individual and the role of individuals and the choices they make and what the ramifications are.

And it's a wonderful read.

It came out, I think, in 1980.

And the last book is called Citizen Marx.

It's an academic book.

It's the study of Karl Marx by a young political theorist named Bruno Leopold, who's in Britain.

And it's the Marx You Never knew about.

It's the Marx as a theorist of freedom who cared about things like freedom of the press, passionately.

His first article is about freedom of the press.

And this, I think, might be of particular interest to you.

Somebody who really cared about, this was a shock to me, institutional and constitutional design.

He was obsessed with the Constitution of the Second French Republic and all the, you know, the kinds of things that all of you guys, you know, write about.

There's Marx going all in.

And it's, you know, 1850, 1851.

It's not the young Marx.

It's the mature Marx.

So.

Corey Robin, thank you very much.

Thank you.

This episode of the Astral Clown Show is produced by Jack McCordick and Annie Galvin.

Fact-checking by Kelsey Kudak, our senior audio engineers Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amon Sahuta and Isaac Jones.

Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.

The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassione, Kristen Lynn, Marina King, and Jan Koebel.

Original music by Pat McCusker.

Audience strategy by Christina Samoluski and Shannon Busta.

The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

Special thanks to Beverly Gage and Clay Risen.

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