Conservatives have been screaming about socialists scheming to destroy everything Real Americans hold dear for as long as anyone alive can remember. Going back more than a hundred years to the first Red Scare in 1919, when the government rounded up thousands of socialists, anarchists and communists during the Palmer raids, there have been periodic paroxysms of outrage aimed at this perennial boogeyman.
In the 1920s and 30s, it was evoked to oppose the labor movement and the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt as he tried to bring the country back from the Great Depression. After World War II, anti-Communism became the official foreign policy of both parties and the Republicans began to use it as a cudgel to beat the Democratic Party politically. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, the GOP focused as much on "the enemy within" as America's cold war adversaries. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee "investigated" anyone who had once been associated with the American Communist Party, gradually expanding their probe into anyone they suspected of being insufficiently patriotic or whose political influence they believed was harmful to American culture. Then along came Joseph McCarthy, who waved around supposed lists of names of Soviet spies or "fellow travelers" he said had infiltrated the U.S. government and military. This went on for years and years, ruining the lives of untold numbers of people.
