Red Scare Governance

Historian and theorist Charisse Burden-Stelly frames red scares as a flexible “mode of governance” which fuses both coercive “public authority” as well as “societal self-regulation” as it reaches its zenith. The United States, Burden-Stelly writes, has a history of red scare governance, from the White Terror that ended Reconstruction to the mass hanging and arrests after the Haymarket Riot, to the deportations and mass imprisonment of the First Red Scare, to the “anti-syndicalist” and “red flag” laws of the early twentieth century, to the Second Red Scare and, later, the assassinations under the FBI regime of COINTELPRO.

Red scares are not singular events, writes Burden-Stelly, but a form of counterrevolutionary governance. They are a portable set of tropes, racial scripts, constructions, and legal forms of repression that can be deployed against the Left, yet require state, business, and political consolidation to be enacted. The Second Red Scare was key in part because it fashioned a legal apparatus still with us today, as the ongoing attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil attests. And perhaps more importantly, because it was the first time a red scare of its type systematically went after not only organizations, but all of civil society.

Burden-Stelly notes the Second Red Scare was not only a destructive form of coercion; the advent of the Cold War created the civil and cultural infrastructure of modern liberalism. Civil rights liberals, the Democratic Party, and Jewish and African American organizations accepted anti-communism as the condition for reform. “Loyalty oaths” also created affective if imaginary bonds with the nation and the notion of universal citizenship. When Kamala Harris named Trump a “communist” recently, she likely did not believe that MAGA wishes to seize the means of production, but rather she sought to evoke the Cold War liberal coalition of multiethnic anti-communism as the civic religion of a New Deal state.

Yet as much as the Second Red Scare remade the left wing of the New Deal coalition from “multiethnic social democracy” to “multiethnic anti-communist liberalism,” it’s important to point out that the Communists, even the Left, were not the only — maybe not even the primary — big-picture target of anti-communism. As historian Landon Storrs makes clear, the purging of Communists and socialists from the civil service, federal government, universities, and labor unions not only limited the scope of their politics, it undid many of the more far-reaching reforms of the New Deal itself.