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Notes -
I want to say that I appreciate you laying this all out. There’s certainly some continuity to be found, and you’ve done a better job elaborating on it than most people who make the attempt.
With that said…doesn’t this argument work a little too well?
The Reds made a near-perfect bogeyman. As a result, the American immune response had an obvious rallying point. Compare our wartime propaganda against the Germans or Japanese. After all, they really could have been infiltrating or at least sympathizing.
Rallying the home team against outsiders is tribal psychology 101. That rather takes away from its predictive value. Were our wartime ancestors right to be suspicious? Were the wartime Soviets? How about today’s anticommunists, looking for the ghosts of our old enemies? And what about the progressives?
The shoe fits. It fits enough different movements that you’d need to narrow it down.
I guess I look forward to part 4.
As an aside, when I checked on the Julianne Hough thing, it appears she was immediately attacked and released an apology. While the pushback looks tame by 2020s standards, it’s not exactly ignoring the event, is it? Leaves me a little skeptical of your other links.
ah, darn. I did not see any stories about that prior to 2021 but couldn't find the date of the actual apology. I will have to replace that with another example when I have time. In the meantime, I just deleted the paragraph. Thanks for the catch.
I don't think so. Every tribe, indeed every person, does that a little, and a few fundamentalist members of every tribe do it a lot -- but some tribes do it more often, with more severity than others. When the frequency and severity are categorically greater in one case than another, it makes for a categorical distinction. There was a real surge of this in the McCarthy era, which can be compared qualitatively to what Marxists themselves do -- but you would have to multiply the intensity of McCarthyism at least 10, and maybe 100, get something comparable with the Soviet version. Note, for example, that Lenin actually said to look for the action of the class enemy in "every event no matter how small". It's hard to imagine Reagan, or any other American president, saying any such thing.
At the fringe, there exist people who see the communist menace everywhere (as Bob Dylan wrote, red stripes on the American flag!), but I don't think there are enough of them to put that tribe in the same category with Soviet communism or wokeness in that regard. Dylan's satire is humorous precisely because real (right wing) Americans have never been that silly in any significant numbers; but it's hard these days to write satire that is crazier than SJW's actually are (or the Bolsheviks actually were). Hence, The Bee or Not the Bee.
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