JONAH GOLDBERG: America’s right and left need to control party radicals

Both sides have to confront those at farthest points of political spectrum

Article content It’s starting to sound like we’re in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. For those of you who forgot, the Spanish Civil War was the great prequel to the Second World War, in which the combatants were proxies for the Communists and the Fascists. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union supported the former; Adolf Hitler’s Germany aided the latter.

Recommended Videos President Donald Trump and the Republicans have decided to run against “Communism” in the coming midterms. In his Fourth of July speech, Trump referenced the Communists in our midst nearly a dozen times. “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said.

“We’re not going to let it happen.” A few days prior, the president argued that the Communist menace here at home amounts to “the biggest threat to our country, including (two world wars), Pearl Harbor and September 11th.” Before you claim the right started it, we should note that we are years (or even decades) into a long-running effort to label Republicans, conservatives and especially Trump as “fascists.”

Numerous books and countless op-eds and magazine articles have been written in support of this claim. In October 2024, then-vice-president Kamala Harris was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” Harris responded, “Yes, I do.

Yes, I do.” Of course, the right-wing habit of calling the left “Communist” and the left-wing habit of calling the right “fascist” hardly started with Trump either, so let’s restrict ourselves to the current brouhaha. Democrats and various news outlets have pushed back on Trump’s communist charge, contending that even hard-left Democrats in the news — mostly members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — are not Communists, but merely democratic socialists, of the sort popular in Europe and Nordic countries.

“Democratic socialists are willing to have themselves voted out of power,” historian Michael Kazin told ABC News following last year’s election. “They believe that once you have a democratic socialist society, people will like that society, but if they don’t want to keep it, then they can go back to a more capitalist society.” Kazin is right about the difference between social democracy and Communism.

But I don’t think that settles the argument as much as a lot of people think. The DSA website is chock-a-block with positive