There was a time during the Depression in this country when it was almost considered fashionable for people to flirt with membership in the American Communist Party. This later resulted in the blacklisting of film industry people like Dalton Trumbo, and the persecution of those and others for having -- at one time -- carried those membership cards in their pockets. This was the time of the ascendant HUAC -- the House UnAmerican Activities Committee --- which paralleled the antics of Senator Joe McCarthy.
Throughout the subsequent Cold War period, benign propaganda TV shows like "The Big Picture" made Americans vigilant and attentive to the country's challenge to a Soviet threat. Strategic Doctrine promoted by the JCS and other elements drew on a white paper written by George Kennan. To some odd degree, this focus on communism -- not unwarranted -- was as much a concern about totalitarianism that would include the Third Reich or any country with dictatorial and authoritarian leadership. And so the opposition to communism was in the minds of the public in those and subsequent days. And despite this narrative sold to the public, Kennan had stated that the problem with the Russians wasn't so much that they were communist, but that they were Russians.
Similar to the discord sown by the HUAC and McCarthy, history continued with various actors banging the drum for political reasons -- political in the sense they wanted to inspire fear and move voters to the Right, mostly. For instance, there was an Australian preacher who came to the US, appearing in rallies on TV. His name was Fred Schwarz. He had published a book entitled "You Can Trust the Communists To Be Communists", and the book-title was a slogan he echoed whenever he appeared in the media.
In the public mind's eye, Communism came to be seen as synonymous with Socialism. But there had been socialists of many flavors originating in the writings of Rousseau and others. Their attention was turned on norms of Justice and Social Responsibility as much as anything else. There was never any single ideology of Socialism. There was a single communist ideology.
Marx had written an historical study gathering evidence in the British Museum which he meant as a rebuttal of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" published in 1776. Das Kapital was published around 1850. It does not belong on a shelf of "bad books". Instead, the perspective of his prolix study led him erroneously to collaborate with Friedrich Engels toward the end of the 19th century with the publication of the Communist Manifesto, promoting the notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat". It would seem inevitable that the Manifesto would then fuel a revolution in the most backward of European countries, where the distribution of income and wealth was incredibly unequal, the Serfdom of Russian peasants had only recently been ended, and the Czarist regime had become even more corrupt.
We spent $6 Trillion on the Cold War, but the Cold War never ended. A Russian tradition of autocracy re-emerged after Yeltsin was president; all the major trouble-spots in the world since then have been former Cold War pawns or hot-spots -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the South China Sea. It is folly to think that we "won" the Cold War or that it had ended.
In the midst of all this, some Americans confuse themselves to assume that Public Goods, Collective Goods financed at public expense, or anything the Congress chooses to expend money other than National Defense are "Socialist", and they believe that any yielding ground to some domestic program with federal spending is "creeping socialism" -- that it will lead to a situation where we all answer to a Totalitarian government, and our freedoms and precious bodily fluids have been compromised.
So I'm sick and tired of hearing the old "S-ooo-o-sh-al-ist!" mantra. It's a hollow moral justification for people who simply don't want to pay taxes through a representative government for a mix of things -- some which don't benefit the complainers directly. And today, with this Scourge in the White House and his minions -- our institutions are being destroyed extra-legally. Terminating institutions is the responsibility -- the sole responsibility of Congress. The President, as chief executive, is supposed to manage those institutions on behalf of citizens who want and approve them, and in spite of people who don't want them.
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