American communist. Old and new fears

On 4 July, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Donald Trump used a word that had come to seem rather old-fashioned in post-Cold War America: communism. “America will never be a communist country,” he declared, taking on the role of the nation’s protector against the new Bolsheviks. A few days later, he returned to the subject, repeating that: “Communism is a cancer, and it must be cut out quickly.” In Italy, one could not help but look back, almost with nostalgia, on the attacks by ‘Il Cav.’ when he used to shout “you are still, today as always, a bunch of poor communists”, a phrase we now find on the silicone bracelet that Gennaro Sangiuliano proudly wears on La7. Not since the days of Ronald Reagan – and his jokes about Soviet bureaucracy and the lack of freedom – had a US president brought up communism with such fervour. And he did so by using the old trick of painting anyone to the left of Barack Obama as a communist. George W. Bush, precisely to pay homage to the ‘cowboy president’, had inaugurated a memorial to the victims of communism on the anniversary of that viral speech – ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ – which seemed, indeed, to bring a chapter to a close.

After 1991, even in spy films – an excellent barometer of geopolitics – the enemies, who had previously been the ‘tovarichs’ in olive-green uniforms, became rogue terrorists or megalomaniac madmen and, of course, after 9/11, along came the Arabs, the Muslims and jihad. What is Trump trying to tell us today? That America’s enemies are communists once again? Certainly not his friend Xi Jinping, whom he so envies for the way his subjects treat him, or his friend Putin, whom he almost reveres. Perhaps America’s new enemies are the socialists of Brooklyn, who have swapped Karl Marx for Sally Rooney and the mimeograph for Instagram? And indeed, for some time now, socialism in the United States has ceased to be a dirty word reserved for those outside parliament. First there was Bernie Sanders, the veteran senator who legitimised the word beginning with ‘S’ – that is, social democracy. Then came Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the precarious Hispanic waitress-turned-MP, who built a ‘Squad’ of Islamic-progressive ‘rebels’ within the broad Democratic coalition, so much so that in 2018 the New York Times ran the headline: ‘Millennials have embraced socialism’. And finally, the much-celebrated, ever-smiling Zohran Mamdani, who is becoming something of a deity in New York, firstly following the victory of the Knicks, the city’s basketball team, and secondly after balancing the budget and freezing certain rents. Of course, this trio is merely the tip of a much larger movement, alongside many other figures on the political scene who are emerging, focused above all on combating social inequality, big tech monopolies and the rising cost of living. Mamdani sought to reassure Trump. “No, I’m not a communist,” he said a year ago, but simply a “democratic socialist inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s words on the social redistribution of wealth”. Even though Trump, in the run-up to November’s mid-term elections, is trying to demonise these pro-Palestinian – and, above all, pro-hummus – hipsters, they bear little resemblance to the old communists of fairy tales, the ones who ate children, not least because the comrades with their Strand tote bags are almost all vegetarians. Bagel & hammer. Digital nomads of the world, unite. The Mamdani are more of a threat to non-socialist Democrats, given that, for once, they stand a chance of defeating an 80-year-old Trump whose approval ratings are at an all-time low, and they fear losing centrist voters and those in the Southern states due to the Trotskyist renaissance and an anti-capitalist rebranding of the Clinton party.

But communism in America is nothing new. New York had two openly communist city councillors, both before and after the Second World War. Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented East Harlem and was a close associate of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was a member of the most important US labour organisation, unofficially affiliated with the communists. Because there have always been communists in the United States. Much like the PCI in Livorno in 1921, the Communist Party of America (CPA) was founded in 1919 in Chicago, splitting from the Socialist Party of America in the wake of the October Revolution. Instead of Bordiga and Togliatti, there were figures such as Charles Ruthenberg and John Reed – both of whom would be buried along the Kremlin walls. But whilst Ruthenberg, a former socialist agitator and pacifist during the First World War, established the CPA by drawing on the large immigrant population, the Harvard-educated journalist Reed founded his own party – the Communist Workers’ Party – to appeal to the American-born proletariat. A classic case of left-wing factionalism. The two parties were founded within ten hours of one another. But with the stock market crash of 1929 and the streets filling with desperate people, Reed’s party merged with Ruthenberg’s. In those years, the CPA, linked to Moscow, functioned primarily to organise and strengthen the unions – a concept that seemed alien in the homeland of capitalism – as well as becoming a mouthpiece for the unemployed victims of the Great Depression. The party reached its peak membership (45,000) in 1942, as the country entered the war, precisely by capitalising on the alliance with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis after years of non-interventionist propaganda. These were years when the Republicans portrayed President FDR as an ‘American Stalin’, who, through his New Deal, was creating public works projects simply to keep citizens in employment. In the years that followed, the Communist Party of America’s loyalty to Stalinism – the real thing – caused many sympathisers to turn their noses up at it, and party membership figures fell. This happened again when the crimes of the man with the moustache were made public, thanks to Khrushchev. But the party had already been decimated between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s, during the decade of the Red Scare, marked by fear of the Reds and thus by McCarthyism, with the constant expulsions or killings of Soviet spies (or alleged spies). A case in point, straight out of a secondary school history textbook, is that of the Rosenbergs, who passed secret documents to the KGB and were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The man who pushed relentlessly for the death penalty was the then very young – twenty-four-year-old – prosecutor and future mentor to Trump, who later died of AIDS, Roy Cohn. The trial of ‘the terrible communists’ brought him into the orbit of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the leading figure of that era. His unscrupulous witch-hunt saw ‘reds’ everywhere. And, bizarrely, McCarthy was aided by two fresh-faced members of Congress who, years later, would face off at the polls and on television: John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. McCarthy and Kennedy, both single and party-loving, used to go out together in Washington to drink and pick up women, organising parties in the little house in Georgetown that their father Joseph – a supporter of the senator leading the anti-Bolshevik inquisition – had bought for the future American president. With the US-USSR bipolarity, anyone who questioned the ideological and moral superiority of the West was immediately viewed as a potential enemy of the state. The purges in the entertainment world carried out by the melodramatic McCarthy – whom the writer Sam Tanenhaus described as a ‘malicious emblem of American anxiety in the early years of the Cold War’ – defined an era, more so than the communists themselves who were active in the country, receiving or collecting money (and sometimes documents) for the Kremlin. Dalton Trumbo was forced to have a friend sign the screenplay for "Roman Holiday"; Jules Dassin went into self-imposed exile in Europe; whilst Dashiell Hammett, author of "The Maltese Falcon", even served a spell in prison for refusing to name other Hollywood ‘reds’. A full-blown witch-hunt that decimated the party and frightened many of its sympathisers. One can imagine today a new ‘Maga’ witch-hunt against communists, where people check social media to see if anyone has reposted a Marxist meme, a photo of a sexy Fidel Castro (such pages really do exist) or a tweet against the trillionaire Elon Musk featuring an image of the guillotine.

Enrico Deaglio’s latest book, "Il novecento, sulle spalle dei giganti" (Gribaudo, 2026), discusses the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca, who was murdered on 5th Avenue (perhaps even by his pro-Soviet comrades who feared him). To paint a portrait of him, the journalist begins with an album familiar to all: Bob Dylan’s "The Freewheelin’", from 1963. The future Nobel laureate is standing there: a young man, in a suede jacket and jeans, on an icy street in Greenwich Village. Clinging to his arm is a girl, Suze Rotolo. The daughter of Stalinist communists ‘under surveillance as Soviet secret agents’ – and a communist herself – she would later leave Dylan for an Umbrian worker at Perugina. It was she, or so she claims, who introduced the singer-songwriter to the themes of strikes and radicalism. It brings to mind that very McCarthyist warning: ‘A communist can be anywhere; they can hide anywhere’ – even on the cover of one of the most famous albums in history. The party would go on to lose further members, first with the Sino-Soviet split – when many gravitated towards Maoist groups – then with the Vietnam War – how could one be a pacifist and support Brezhnev’s hyper-militarised state? – culminating in a veritable disaster, including for its own finances, with the collapse of the USSR in ’91. Today, the Communist Party claims to have at least 11,000 active members, a figure said to have risen since Trump’s first victory ten years ago. On its official website, the first thing you see is a banner reading ‘Stop the war in Iran’, and below that a quiz to test your knowledge of Marxist doctrine. There is also talk of the ‘MAGA ruling class versus the multiracial working class’.

Marxist ideals in America, even when they do not reach Capitol Hill, find their way into universities and culture, as always. And perhaps the most famous post-war communist is Angela Davis, now 82 years old, who – not coincidentally – is reappearing today in the windows of independent bookshops, alongside "Giovanni’s Room" and Donna Haraway, in university courses at Ivy League colleges and in the murals of Scampia alongside Pasolini. Davis, a member of the Black Panthers, recognisable by her Afro, also stood as a vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party’s ticket; she never won an election, but she did win the Lenin Peace Prize. Her philosophy, which combined Marxism, pacifism and feminism, helped shape the playbook of that contemporary American left which, enriched by wokism, is becoming mainstream (though today, raised fists have been replaced by Palestinian watermelons, civil disobedience by posts featuring quotes from Mark Fisher, communes by Hinge, and at most, the celebration of Luigi Mangione). Maurice Isserman, a 70-year-old scholar of communism in America and author of books such as "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism", says that in the last century there were people among the American communists who possessed “talent, vision and genuine idealism”, but whose tragedy lay in having relied on a model “full of flaws and historically irrelevant”, that of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet state. “In this way,” writes the professor, “they delayed for generations the opportunity for a genuine American Left to emerge”. And now, what does this new-old Left—which can call itself socialist and which is, as is traditional, branded by Trump as communist—actually want, and above all, why is it successful (in certain places, such as New York)? It is by no means a coincidence that the socialist revival we are seeing today in America follows in the footsteps of the CPA’s success in the anti-fascist struggle, as well as in organising strikes at a time when workers felt exploited. Whilst the old communists of the 1930s and 1940s feared the real fascists who were trying to gain a foothold in Congress and even in the Little Italys scattered across the US by exploiting Mussolini’s following, today’s Mamdanians – often second-generation – seem frightened by neo-fascism. Both those with Silicon Valley overtones and those of the white nationalists who marched, masked, through Washington on 4 July shouting ‘white power’. Today’s ‘red’ movement – which, however, uses the softer label of ‘socialist’ – is as much the result of fear of the new far right as it is of the effects of capitalism. Just as it was just under a century ago, it stems from working conditions on the one hand, and the rise of an ideologically opposed enemy on the other. One need only leaf through one of the bibles of the hipster-Leninists, Jacobin, to see how almost everything is based on the evils of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ and on the rich men with monocles and rockets. Whilst the crisis of 1929 led people to join the Communist Party over the following two decades, the crisis of 2008 has led people to reconsider socialism, to criticise the free market, and to demand more public healthcare, social justice, free buses and state-run supermarkets. According to a 2021 poll, 49 per cent of Americans aged between 18 and 34 viewed capitalism positively; just three years earlier, that figure was ten percentage points higher. By 2025, it had fallen by a further 7 points. And whilst Trump may capitalise on this anti-capitalist wave at his rallies by dusting off the Reagan-era playbook and playing on the "Bolshevik fear" of those who grew up watching M*A*S*H*, it will be up to the Democratic Party to decide whether or not this is the winning strategy to return to power.

Today, the Communist Party claims to have at least 11,000 active members, a figure which is said to have risen since Trump’s first victory ten years ago

Whilst the 1929 crisis had led people to join the Communist Party, the 2008 crisis provided an opportunity to reconsider socialism

According to Maurice Isserman, the tragedy of the American communists lies in having relied on a model that is ‘full of flaws and historically irrelevant’