"...a movement built on high-octane emotion and blind belief."

In City Journal, Harry Stein writes about the decade of the 1930s and its similarity to today's Left.

...While CPUSA membership likely never exceeded more than 75,000—and even for many of them, the particulars of the Communist political program surely registered as mumbo jumbo—fellow travelers numbered in the millions, and Communist-backed special causes, each near-biblical in its moral sweep, brought multitudes to the streets. Sacco and Vanzetti. The Scottsboro Boys. Republican Spain. And the pageantry and the music—Woody Guthrie ballads and labor anthems like “Which Side Are You On?” and Paul Robeson’s Godlike basso profundo on the Victrola in every left-wing home, with his heartrending dirge to the murdered union man Joe Hill. It was a movement built on high-octane emotion and blind belief.


A gifted reporter, Eugene Lyons had seen the Communist revolution firsthand in Stalin’s Soviet Union—and what he saw changed his life and perspective. (BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES)

...But in this saga of equal parts moral blindness and impenetrable self-righteousness, it is Lyons’s extended treatment of Hollywood that will likely strike contemporary readers as most familiar. For while the film community had more than its share of those steeped in Communist Party doctrine, the Party’s great achievement was in making leftism fashionable. “I saw Social Consciousness quicken and come to a boil in actors, writers and directors whose names rival Rinso and Camels as household words,” he writes of witnessing the spectacle at close hand. “The political pig-Latin of class struggle, anti-fascism, and revolutionary tactics rippled around swimming pools and across dance floors. . . . They had not the remotest idea what communism was in terms of economic structures or political superstates. For nearly all of them it was an intoxicated state of mind, a glow of inner virtue, and a sort of comradeship of super-charity.”

Adhering to the right beliefs and supporting the right causes was not just how to fit in, but how to get ahead. For those on the rise, or hoping to be, it “became the shortcut to success. At ‘cause parties’ they rubbed shoulders and bosoms with big shots they could not have met otherwise. Those who tried to detour the revolution, unless they were stars well fixed in the firmament, found themselves slipping from favor. It was at once a movement and a lobby, a religion and a racket.”

Given his intimate acquaintance with the Left, Lyons well knew what calumnies the publication of The Red Decade would bring down on his head. At the time, especially in elite circles, the charge of “red baiting” was akin to that of racism, sexism, or homophobia today; whether made in anger or with premeditated intent, it was enough to halt any challenge to the Left’s worldview. It was a weapon deployed, he wrote, by “literary critics, book reviewers and political commentators . . . a neatly contrived device for heading off free and uninhibited discussion of little things such as man-made famines, horrifying blood purges, forced labor on a gigantic scale.” In fact, in almost every meaningful arena of American life, those who “ran afoul of the revolution were made to feel the full weight of their crimes; they were ostracized socially, handicapped professionally and not infrequently stripped of their jobs as well as their reputations for ordinary decency.”

Sounds like what we are experiencing today with big tech censorship of conservatives!

Lyons’s own world of book and magazine publishing was so dominated by leftists that former adherents who turned against the Party, deemed “moral monsters and turncoats,” could be made essentially to evaporate from mainstream view. He lists no fewer than 30 writers who suffered that fate during “the intellectual red terror,” including (as if to underscore the point for contemporary readers) such now largely forgotten former luminaries as Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell. He includes himself on that list. “The part I cannot induce the uninitiated to believe is how effective the terror could be,” he writes. “When you first met a particularly far-fetched libel on your character, it merely seemed funny in its absurdity.” But continually repeated, he adds, the lies take their toll, for wherever one tried to make one’s way professionally, “there were manuscript readers, casting directors, book reviewers who—consciously or by a sort of pack instinct—took their prejudices ready-made from the Popular Front comrades.”

...today, with the Left driven by a different, if no less bizarre, notion of the ideal equitable society—one where individual merit is trumped by race, gender, and sexual orientation—CEOs of multinational firms cower, lest they be found insufficiently committed to diversity or otherwise fail to heed the harsh dictates of identity politics. Mozilla chief Brendan Eich gets fired for contributing to an anti-gay-marriage initiative; Google dispatches James Damore for a memo questioning the company’s ideological mono-culture; Papa John’s namesake founder is dumped after quoting someone else’s use of the N-word as a negative example in a public-relations session. We may not hear the word “Stalinist” much anymore, but this is stuff right out of the intellectual red terror.

...At least rhetorically, the Communists of the late 1930s were, in fact, far less hostile to the American idea than are today’s run-of-the-mill progressives. In an age where Americans were raised to revere their country’s singular history, they all but wrapped themselves in the flag. “Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism” went the party’s famous Popular Front slogan, and they did not hesitate to name their Spanish battalions for Lincoln and Washington or the Party school for Marxist instruction after Jefferson. The contrast with today’s Left, which sees American history as a cavalcade of oppression, could not be more striking. Little wonder that today’s Democrats, seeking to stay abreast of their fervent base, are as publicly invested in identity politics and collectivist economics as the denizens of any faculty lounge.

Long before, Lyons wrote in The Red Decade: “I have known men and women so frightened by the certainty of persecution from the Left, that they hid their doubts and disillusionments like criminal secrets.”

That was not his way. He knew what he’d signed up for, and never stopped taking the attacks for what they were: confirmation that he was doing something right.

Read more here.