The Very Real Fear of Communism in Today's America

Saturday evening, I went to a bar in downtown Sarasota. As soon as I sat down, the guy sitting next to me saw my Kamala hat. He immediately launched into a diatribe: 

"She's a COMMUNIST! She HATES OUR COUNTRY!!  *YOU* must HATE our country!!!"

I just smiled and nodded, saying "Oh, really?!" and looking plaintively at the bartender, who looked on somewhat alarmed.

The guy finished his spiel, got up, and walked out. The bartender (who was new) came over and said "I'm sorry!" I said, "Thank you, but it's not your fault. I guess it's my fault for wearing this hat in public."

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But Kamala Harris is not a communist.

A communist believes that the state (or the people) should own the means of production. Communist countries typically nationalize businesses and limit the ability of individuals or groups to engage in private activities or to choose their own ways of life.

As part of the typically-forcible take-over of countries by communist groups, often involving coups by segments of the military, individuals are often driven from their homes, exiled, imprisoned, or killed, all in the name of a vision of collective cooperation for the greater good. (Of course, not all authoritarian governments are communist, but that's another matter.)

Americans have been afraid of socialism (and its cousin, communism) since at least the 1840s, when a series of labor strikes and armed rebellions wracked the countries of Europe, fueled by both the remants of feudalism and the excesses of capitalism. Fears of these movements--as well as the action of labor movements across the country--caused the U.S. to severely limit immigration and, eventually, to regulate industries and build a social safety net (including Social Security and Medicaid). 

But fears of communism have continued, spiked by fears of the Soviet Union, mainland China, and, more recently, Norh Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela. American children are taught to fear (and to hate) communism as a direct challenge to our commitment to "free enterprise."

During the 1940s and 1950s, fear of communism (as part of the so-called "Red Scare") led some Americans to call for public investigations of communist party activity, including public pledges of fealty to the United States. The excesses of these anti-communist activities caused many Americans to call for the public shaming of the most vocal anti-communists, of whom the most famous was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. (See https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/mccarthy-hearings/have-you-no-sense-of-decency.htm.)

More recently, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," not only because of its communist ideology, but because of its attempts to spread this ideology around the world. Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, has signed legislation specifically mandating K-12 curriculums describing "the evils of communism" and preparing "students to withstand indoctrination on Communism at colleges and universities." These actions can be seen as tactics in an ongoing culture war in which the "good guys" (American supporters of "free enterprise") must vanquish the enemies of America (the communists).

The fear of communism among Americans has waxed and waned over the past 185 years. But it never subsides for long. Communism continually re-emerges as a boogeyman, especially useful to politicians on the right who seek to scare Americans away from more liberal or left-leaning candidates. 

But it's actually extremely rare in the United States to have politicians run for higher office who proclaim allegiance to communism as an ideology. Even Bernie Sanders--one of the most liberal U.S. Senators of all times--specifically disavows communism, saying that any transfer of wealth or power from the rich to the poor should proceed by "political revolution," not violent overthrow. 

But because Sanders advocates for "Medicare for All," which amounts to a nationalized health-care system, and because he has said that important sectors of the US economy (like energy) should be creating profits "for the people," and because in his younger days he had praise for the communist governments of Cuba and Nicaragua, it is fairly easy to suggest that Sanders is secretly a communist. (https://www.hoover.org/research/how-socialist-bernie-sanders)

To those who oppose the presidential bid of Kamala Harris, it is similarly easy to conflate her liberal views with communism.  Like Sanders, Harris has also expressed support for Medicare for All. But Kamala is not nearly as liberal as Sanders. She has not praised communist countries and has never called for the nationalization of other industries besides health care. 

But never mind these subtle differences. In today's America, "communist" has become short-hand for "liberal." The claim that Kamala is a communist isn't intended as a factual or historical statement. It's pure rhetoric, designed to inflame partisanship in a certain type of American.

Because the fear of communism has been an undercurrent of anti-liberalism in the US for generations, the word itself is inflammatory: used specifically because it is a trigger for many. The soil among some is quite fertile: plant the seed, and it will grow, resulting (they hope) in anger directed at Democrats or so-called RINOs that motivates people to support self-styled anti-communists: not rationally, but reflexively, like the angry man at the bar who has been programmed to believe that anyone who supports a more liberal person for higher office is, ergo, a communist.

On Expertise vs. Ignorance in American Culture: A "Shift-y Example

A long-ago schoolmate of mine posted this recently on Facebook:

"The Sahara going green is a 'weather shift' but not 'climate change'? Lol. Trust the media, they're on your side. Lol."

My guess is that this was prompted by a recent article on this topic that was picked up by CNN (and other media outlets). https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/weather/sahara-desert-green-climate/index.html

My schoolmate's Facebook post seemed designed to appeal to a certain "skeptical" type of Facebooker who likes to denigrate the media because, well, "the media" is a good whipping boy, especially the so-called "mainstream media" which is a favorite whipping boy of people with certain political leanings. 

I'm sure the post was also designed to goad people like me, who tend to trust mainstream media and to distrust some more right-leaning media outlets. In this goal, the post succeeded: I was goaded. 

So I wrote a long comment, which I've decided to share. It's been slightly edited. 

There's this thing--maybe you've heard of it--called expertise. One of the things experts do is differentiate among different types of events. This may seem to be about obfuscation--and it's one of the reasons that respect for experts has declined in our anti-intellectual culture--but differentiation between similar (but not exactly the same) concepts allows for more granular and sophisticated descriptions of facts, which results in more understanding of complexity. Understanding complexity is what science and philosophy are all about.

I'm no expert on meteorology, but because I understand the complexity of complexity (!), I tend to believe that if experts in meteorology (or geophysics) use different words or phrases to describe (even slightly) different things, maybe there's some complexity there. And if I don't understand the complexity, I don't automatically assume that the scientists are trying to stake out a political claim. (They *might* be, but making that determination might require some further inquiry.)

Take your example here. Even on the face of it, "weather shift" and "climate change" seem (to me) to describe different things. Let's see what experts say about them.

A simple Google search for "weather shift vs climate change" results in a generative a.i. response that says:

"A 'weather shift' refers to a short-term change in atmospheric conditions like temperature, rain, or wind, happening over a day or few days, while 'climate change' describes a long-term alteration in average weather patterns over a significant period, typically decades or centuries, often attributed to human activities impacting the planet's temperature and weather systems; essentially, weather is the day-to-day condition, while climate is the long-term trend."

Now, as I mentioned, this is a generative a.i. response, and while it's technically correct (in terms of how these phrases are typically used [remember, generative a.i. only "knows" what others have written]), it's not directly on point with regard to the Sahara. So let's look a little further by adding "Sahara desert" to our prompt. The prompt no longer generates an a.i. response,  because the complexity of the prompt has increased. Instead, we get links to a bunch of web sites. Scanning through the first few briefly, we can choose CNN, Quora, or maybe the web site of the American Meteorological Society (because, well, they're the experts). We find at the A.M.S. site a peer-reviewed journal article called "Northward Shifts of the Sahara Desert in Response to Twenty-First-Century Climate Change."  https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-22-0169.1

Look at that! Even the *title* differentiates between a [weather] shift and climate change!!

If we were actually interested in understanding how the distinction is utilized by the meteorologists who wrote the article, we could read it to learn more. Why would we do that? Maybe because *we know that we don't know as much as they do* about this topic, and that we could learn something from their expertise. 

Or, we might immediately dismiss this--or, more likely, never even engage in this inquiry--because according to our non-expertise, "weather shift" and "climate change" are exactly the same! Therefore, these meteorologists and all the other scientists who participated in the peer review process must be full of crap! Right?

Schoolmate, I know you're not an expert on meteorology. Neither am I. But some people are. Are those experts useful to us? Do we care to learn from them, or are we somehow all-knowing about meteorology without ever taking a course in that topic?

Sneering about the distinctions that experts make is both a sign of, and a facilitator of, ignorance (i.e., "not knowing"). Ignorance is what drives our culture to denigrate expertise. Ignorance is what allows non-experts to claim (falsely) that the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gasses since the 18th century is having no effect on the Earth's climate. Ignorance is what leads humans to (sometimes) engage in self-destructive behaviors. Why would you want to encourage (or display) such ignorance?

Perhaps your reason is political?

Facebook posts about prehistoric archeology

Lately, I've heard of several people who are fascinated by some Facebook posts related to what might have happened on Earth before recorded history.

Our knowledge of prehistory is intrinsically indirect, because we don't have contemporaneous accounts. We can only *infer* what happened using a careful analysis of the (often circumstantial) evidence we do have. This kind of analysis sometimes requires deep expertise to *do* but also to understand. (For example, I recently read a discussion of the supposed lengths of the reigns of kings in Sumaria that argued that the numbers were actually intended as a lesson in quadratic equations rather than an attempt to offer a realistic chronology. I had trouble following the details.)

The stuff posted on Facebook about what "really" happened before recorded history often only mentions the "evidence" that supports a particular viewpoint. It also often ignores any scholarly analysis that might contradict the intended inference. (For example, a piece about the Easter Island statues makes it seem like it's *new* that we've learned through excavation that the "heads" actually have bodies that go many meters under the ground. It's *not* new. Plus, there are very natural explanations of how the statues were buried over time.)

An analogy I want to make is to discussions about climate change. Many scientists have concluded from the evidence (*not* actual thermometers from 1000s of years ago!) that recent warming is unprecedented in the past 100,000 years. This case is pretty solid; few reputable scientists say these data and conclusions aren't pretty reliable. (Not perfect, but very good.) And yet many climate-change skeptics argue that we don't really *know* much about temperatures on earth before about 1800.

This is very much like those Facebook posts that say we don't *know* that the Earth *wasn't* visited by gods or extraterrestrials who seeded human civilization. 

In a very limited way, the posts are right that we don't *know*. We weren't there, and neither was anyone who wrote anything down. (The cave paintings are also subject to many different interpretations.)

But direct personal experience isn't the only way to *know* anything. In trials, for example, where evidence is often circumstantial, jurors are instructed to *use their common sense* in drawing reasonable inferences.

Similarly, I think we have to use our common sense in responding to Facebook posts about prehistoric archeology. Do we have *any* actual evidence that gods or extraterrestrials have ever visited the Earth? Do we notice gods or extraterrestrials interfering in today's world? Do we wonder whether it was possible to get to the moon or build the Chunnel without divine intervention?

But wouldn't it be *totally cool* if we discovered that aliens taught early humans mathematics or philosophy or how to move enormous stones? Sure! But the possibility of something that might be *totally cool* isn't reason to think it might be true.

Occam's Razor tells us the simplest explanation for an observation is most likely to be true. What is the *simplest explanation* of those supposedly lengthy reigns of kings chronicled in ancient Sumerian tablets? Isn't it more likely that the numbers were made up as part of propaganda by people working for other rulers thousands of years later to justify their current boss's rule? Or that the tablets were intended to provide a lesson in quadratic equations in a society worried about losing that almost sacred knowledge?

You decide. ☺️