Back in the silly old days of the “fascism debate,” there was a common argument on the “no” side. Trumpism could not be mapped onto the fascist movements of interwar Europe, the skeptics said, because there was no mass left for it to organize against. As Daniel Bessner put it as recently as last year, there was no “powerful communist movement” threatening “entrenched capitalist interests” in the United States.

There was something to this. Fascism indeed emerged largely as a violent response and traditionalist/hierarchical alternative to socialism. It was bankrolled by capitalists, including some leading American capitalists, for that reason. My response was, and is, that in the 21st Century you don’t need an actual mass Communist movement for fascists to react against. The fantasy of one is enough. This is especially true on the American right, whose adherents have spent the last ninety years seeing Communists, as it was said, under every bed and around every corner; a tendency that, after the briefest of hiatuses, rebounded (entirely by coincidence, of course) around 2008.

Now, however, a specter has reappeared. Socialists are having the best electoral run in the U.S. since the 1920s. At least seven candidates endorsed by either their local or the national Democratic Socialists of America chapter have won their U.S. House primaries, all, I believe, in districts the Democrats are expected to win this fall. Dozens more have won statehouse, school board, mayoral, and other races in fourteen states. This, along with the ascension of New York City Mayor and DSA member Zohran Mamdani—as an actual Muslim Socialist, the embodiment of the most fevered Obama-era reactionary fears—has been enough to convince the political world that a Thing Is Happening.

Some perspective is needed here. For one thing, Democratic Socialists aren’t Communists. Communists, in fact, tend to hate Democratic Socialists (the political fringes tend to hate everyone), and the feeling is generally mutual. The median DSA member’s ideal society is way closer to 2010s Oslo than 1930s Moscow. Mao jackets or no, their hobby horses are small-r republican things like electoralism and social wealth funds, both of which send your average Leninist screaming out of the bar.

And those seven House primary victories, even if they convert into general election wins, will be a drop in a sea of 435 seats; the dozens of local races are a vanishing remainder of the hundreds of thousands of such offices nationwide. The movement’s most prominent figure (after Bernie), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is in a bitter public feud with the national DSA organization, which withdrew its endorsement of her in 2024 due to what they saw as her insufficient opposition to Israel. (It wouldn’t be socialism if allies weren’t at war with each other.) Many of those candidates, like AOC, reject much of the DSA platform. If there’s a Thing Happening among the Democrats, it’s a return to New Dealism—a thing which, to be fair, the conservatives of the day also thought was Bolshevism with a cigarette holder.

But given the age-old American conflation between Communism, Socialism, and, well, basically anything to the left of Chuck Schumer, it would be Fascist Malpractice for Trump and his enablers not to start going full McCarthy, complete with AI hammers and sickles. Consider Abdul El-Sayed, who just won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. Asked by the New York Times about socialism, he delivered a short lecture on supply and demand, argued that free entry and exit into markets is what makes capitalism work, and noted that you don’t have to be a socialist to want billionaires taxed on their wealth. “I’m [a] capitalist who just knows about capitalism,” he said. The President has, of course, called him a communist. Ted Cruz accused him of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Tommy Tuberville tweeted that he is a “TERRORIST … who will do everything he can to destroy America.”

Never mind that actual Communists in the Muslim world were fighting for secular states free from religious law, which, despite some occasional alliances, tended to make them blood enemies of the Islamist right, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. Coherence was never the point. The right has always needed and accelerated itself through Red Scares, including the grand-père of them all, the French Revolution. After all, how are you going to convince workers and farmers to pick up guns and kill and bleed themselves dry for the benefit of the rich if you can’t terrify them into thinking it’s the only way to prevent a dastardly alien class of sweet-talking interlopers (Jews) and immigrants (also often Jews, currently Muslims, Haitians, or Latinos) from somehow enslaving them?