Trump Should Avoid a Second Red Scare

When we adopt illiberal methods to combat ideologies with which we disagree, we risk abandoning the very core of what it means to be American

A new political movement was seeping through American politics. This movement was fundamentally opposed to founding American principles like equality of opportunity and freedom of the press. It traded in common-enemy identity politics and preached the overthrow of philosophical liberalism.

In response to this new movement, the ruling powers cracked down hard.

The enemy back then, in the 1940s and 1950s, was communism; and the backlash was fierce. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, Jacon Mchamgama writes that "The Alien Registration Act of 1940 (known as the Smith Act), which on paper prohibited the advocacy of the violent overthrow of the US government, sent more than two hundred people to prison merely for being members of the Socialist and Communist political parties." Substantial majorities of Americans favored banning communists from any number of areas of civic life, including: teaching at universities, working in the local community, and even speaking publicly. Communist actors and writers were blacklisted from Hollywood.

And, of course, the definition of 'communist' kept expanding to mean anyone who fell out of favor with the ruling powers. The chair of a Washington State investigative committee argued that, "If someone insists that there is discrimination against negros in this country or that there is inequality of wealth, there is every reason to believe that this person is a Communist."

Ultimately, even defending your rights as an American was seen as suspect. New Jersey mayor Frank Hague spoke for many when he claimed that, "We hear about constitutional rights, free speech, and the free press. Every time I hear these words, I say to myself, ‘That man is a Red. That man is a Communist.’ You never hear a real American talk like that.'"

In their zeal to root out communism, the United States threw the baby out with the bathwater. The censorious atmosphere created by the Red Scare took years—perhaps decades—to fully undo.

Then as now, a new political movement is infiltrating American politics. This movement—what Tim Urban calls Social Justice Fundamentalism (SJF), but more commonly called wokeism—is illiberal, reactionary, and trades in common-enemy identity politics. And it is deeply concerning that, then as now, the administration is fighting this ideology using illiberal tactics of their own.

In its justifiable eagerness to fight back against SJF, the Trump administration is overreaching…by a lot. President Trump is suing CBS News for editing a "60 Minutes" interview with then-vice-president Harris in a way that made her answers look better. In a recent speech, Vice President Vance responded to the leftist bent of many AI programs by saying that the administration "will ensure the AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias." In a recent executive order designed to root Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology out of the federal government, Trump called for agencies to assess the number of "DEI hires" by the former administration.

Each of these represents a substantial move towards illiberalism. Trump's attack on CBS is groundless; the First Amendment protects the right of newsrooms to edit interviews in any way that they see fit. The intention of the suit seems to be to scare CBS—and by extension other media outlets—into thinking twice before they cover Trump's opponents in flattering ways.

Vance's comments on AI are equally concerning. Like the politicians in the 1940s who opposed communism, Vance is responding to a real problem. AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini have often displayed a clear left-wing ideological bias in ways that irritate users and attempt to tip the scales of our national conversation. But in attempting to fix the problem, Vance goes too far the opposite direction. What happens if a company produces an AI chatbot that offers answers that Vance and Trump won't like? Will it face the threat of regulatory disapproval? His comments seem to suggest that the answer may be 'yes'. The cure to the ideological bias of Silicon Valley cannot be censorship or retaliatory regulatory hurdles.

And then there's Trump's DEI executive order. I'm no fan of DEI, and a lot of the order struck me as excellent. But focusing on "DEI hires" is concerning. As the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism warned, "We urge caution in using this term as it may invite speculation, without a firm basis or evidence, regarding an employee’s skills, abilities, or merit and instead make assumptions based on their perceived identity." Or to put it another way: women and racial minorities might come under increased scrutiny in the new administration, just because they're the kinds of people who would have received preference under the old DEI regime. Putting government workers under heightened scrutiny based on their race and gender is as un-American as ideas come.

Why is this overreach such a problem? For one thing, it energizes Social Justice Fundamentalists. In What's Our Problem, Tim Urban claims that SJF ideology represents what he calls a "golem." A golem is a political super-organism characterized by "strict conformity" within and "total ruthlessness" in its dealings with the political outgroup. A golem is an army; and like any army, people join it because they feel that they are under threat. Fear is a golem's fuel source. As Urban writes, "Golems rely on a common enemy for unity and for might. The stronger and more dangerous the rival Them seems, the stronger and more united the Us group will typically be."

By adopting sweeping and illiberal policies designed to excise SJF root and branch, the Trump administration might accidentally be empowering the ideology. By trampling free speech rights and threatening news organizations he thinks oppose him, Trump may be driving moderates right into the arms of his fiercest ideological opponents.

The second danger is even larger. When we adopt illiberal methods to combat ideologies with which we disagree, we risk abandoning the very core of what it means to be American. Here's how George Kennan, no friend of communism, put it in 1951:

"The subjective emotional stresses and temptations to which we are exposed in our attempts to deal with this domestic problem … represent a danger within ourselves—a danger that something may occur in our own minds and souls which will make us no longer like the persons by whose efforts this republic was founded and held together, but rather like the representatives of that very power we are trying to combat: intolerant, secretive, suspicious, cruel, and terrified of internal dissention because we have lost our own belief in ourselves and in the power of our ideals. The worst thing that our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them."

Like communism, SJF is opposed to liberalism as a matter of principle. One of the intellectual support structures of SJF is Critical Race Theory. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic put it in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, "critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law." The entire premise of SJF is that philosophical liberalism has failed and ought to be replaced.

With that in mind, we should heed Kennan's warning. Perhaps the worst thing that SJFs could do to those of us who oppose them is to make us as illiberal as they are.

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