Frank Lovejoy was a mid-level supporting movie actor whose base voice, prominent chin and dour personality should have given him more recognition, much more so than Robert Stack, who also developed a persona as a stone face and became a Hollywood fixture for twenty years. But Lovejoy did manage to act as the star of a minor movie, “I Was a Communist for the FBI”, made in 1950, close to the top of the Second Red Scare, and he portrayed a Communist undercover agent for the FBI so as to let the audience see both the workings of Communism in the American midst as well as how the hero persevered to finally reveal himself as a true patriot, something all right thinking people would endorse because all the Reds were bad and devious and violent while the FBI and civilians understood that all Reds were bad, no ambiguities allowed. As Whittiker Chambers put it, the real war was between Reds and ex-Reds. They would decide the fate of the world. Other movies such as “I Led Three Lives'' and “Dear John'', which starred Helen Hayes and the last year of the overweight Robert Walker, made the same point: monolithic heroes and monolithic villains in our midst. The point of these movies was to see the Communist side as impenetrable, beyond the ability to understand what ordinary people thought of them, and nothing redeeming about them, and so it was that there was a gnostic divided between the two that was not mediated by ideological interchange or mixed feelings, the female Communist in the movie realizing it was a lost cause as soon as she realized what the Party was doing, never wondering whether allowances might be made for its imperfections after she had joined its initial idealistic enthusiasm. Even German generals within a few years of the war were recognized as having human touches and mixed feelings and a kind of honor, but not so for Communists.
I am pointing out how different and distinctive was that set of preoccupations during the early part of the Cold War. I had to sign a loyalty oath to get my high school diploma but I dispensed from refusing to do so because my faculty advisor told me she would have had to do a lot of paperwork if I refused to sign. I didn’t want to inconvenience her and so I signed. I might have persisted if she had been more belligerent and maybe, years later, I decided I didn’t know if she had conned me into signing or simply meant what she said. I think that seeing those realities of social life made real to me demonstrated to me how complicated life was and so any antidote to ideology of whatever stripe. What remained to me about that dark period was how much of it was ideological posturing. Ethel Rosenberg went to her death full of platitudes, perhaps because that was all she had, whether or not she had herself conspired to try to sell secrets of the A-Bomb. The Communists were small in number, less powerful that the Anti-Communists thought, in that the major unions were opposed to them, but they were well organized and very fervent and clear headed about their objectives, which was to support Stalin in every way he wanted, and so, rightly, an enemy of America and its values. I joined in College the Americans for Democratic Action, the John Kenneth Galbraith organization, which on its membership card said it eschewed totalitarian parties for both the right and the left, and have been a proudly wishy washy Liberal ever since.
The Red Menace, as it was called, was purposeful and principled (which is to say, unprincipled on principle). Members were dedicated to the belief that the Communism of the Soviet Union would one way or another take over the world, and believed so because of either perusing a canon of works that elaborated its beliefs and system with considerable intellectual rigor or else because of having a certainty that the leader and the leadership were somehow inherently wise about what was tactically necessary, whatever were the apologetics offered at the moment to, let us say, justify the Stalin-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. Yet the fruits of these activities were meagre. “I Was a Communist for the FBI '' purports to do no more than create a riot in a steel mill and potentially use Communist school teachers to influence the young, this resource never exploited. A lot of organizing with not much product, and yet enough to scare people silly and for everyone to feel utter hatred at these few outsiders, their own ranks riddled with FBI informants. Why were people so scared except for having to blame someone for the fact that the world had been a mess for a generation? Nations don’t have to regress after a war. Remember that Great Britain was very progressive after the war ended and Christian Democrats came to dominate many European nations.
Compare the spectre of monolithic Communism with what has happened in these past few years with Qanon. It is farce rather than tragedy. There are no manifestos, no statement or report to explain the whys and wherefores of Joe Biden having illegally achieved his Presidency, and the Republican leadership does not bother the need to say so, Ted Cruz and Roy Blunt simply saying that other people are troubled by the election and never bothering to say what those troubles were. Hypocrites and mischief makers all. Their ideology is not a theory but the assertion that pedopholes rule Washington, as if that could be the worst thing possible in their imagination, worse, apparently, than storming the Capitol. They use numerology to explain why Trump will be restored to the White House within a few months without offering any reason to think how that will be done, just as was the case if the insurrectionists had been successful, hanged Mike Pence and kept the Congress from ratifying the Electoral College votes. What next? Had they not contemplated that there would be a counterreaction? It sounds like they weren't thinking very deeply, while Communists, as malicious as they might be, were always thinking about their practices and policies. The Communists would have had a plan. And yet the insurrectionists on January 6th had accomplished far more than anything the Communists had done, more than what even Robert E. Lee had done, never having taken over the Capitol, January 6th an event that will be in the history books. Who were these people, whose nature will be established perhaps in the trials and plea agreements that the Justice Department is now processing.
It was easy enough to understand the Communists in that they were murky as to their inner feelings while Anticommunists convinced that Reds were a Fifth Column, as was said in the Spanish Civil War, another military corps that worked without uniforms but would aid to unsettle a government. They were implacable and to be rid of influence in America. What of the insurrectionists? The way to think of them at the moment is much more problematic. One possibility is that they were stupid, ignorant and naive. Some of them have admitted as much in their self-serving pleas in early legal proceedings: they were misled by Trump and others to do what they were told to do and have recovered from their misinformation. Apparently, they did not learn from high school that the loyalty of Americans is to the Constitution rather than to the President and that, for some reason, they thought that Biden had been cheated out of Trump's election. Where did that come from? Or else that the demonstrators were just expressing their opinions, which is what Trump and some Congress people continue to say, although it works against those insurrectionists who are supposed to have been pacific that there were those who shouted about hanging Pence or finding where Nancy was.
Another possibility to explain the insurrectionists is to look politically. The insurrectionists include a number of ex and present day members of the armed forces, and so the inference is that ultra conservative views are embedded in the military and so were simply engaged in doing what they thought they thought they should do, which is for a military to intrude whenever it cares to do so, as happens in Turkey and in Latin America and even though that is despite the general ideology of high level American officers that the American military is subservient to civilian control. This is the first time that this violation of American principle ever happened. More generally, there is the perception that the insurrectionists, like other citizens, are frustrated because of declining social expectations and so are expressing their frustration, lashing out, at worse economic or social conditions, even though it is unclear that economic disadvantages are increasing for one or another strata of American society. It may well be that the United States will in a generation or two will become a minority majority population, but it is not at all clear that the projection of demography is salient even for those who have racist inclinations. They probably dislike Blacks and Hispanics for their own reasons having to do with dangerous neighborhoods rather than because of future majorities.
A third way of explaining the insurrectionists is a bit of a stretch. Everyone needs to believe in some consolidating impulse but the United States is more fragile than most states because it rests on the more sophisticated view that people are tied together by principle as established in documents such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. So threats are always available. The problem with that is that a nation based on principle has been sustained for more than two hundred years. The question is why it broke down at this particular moment, and so we can turn to Trump as the context and not just his actions on January 6th as having provoked lawlessness. There has never been a President like him.
The most important point is to step back and notice about the situation is that, whatever happened on January 6th, people are anxious to find reasons to humanize the insurrectionists, to excuse or merely explain them as merely human, which makes them very different from how the Communists were regarded seventy years ago, and I suggest that a very unhappy explanation for that arises. Sen Ron Johnson said it overtly a few months ago. He was more afraid of Antifa and Black Lives Matter than the patriots and law abiding people who had, apparently contrary to the facts, Johnson did trust. Black people are demonized today just as the Communists were. Even in “I Was a Communist for the FBI'', the movie claimed that Black activists were duped by white people rather than themselves unpardonable. Race relations have deteriorated in these times to the point that demonization comes to people of color while white insurrectionists earn the understanding of why they have engaged in doing what had been before totally unacceptable, only blacks subject to law and order. So the United States has to dig out from under its race relations as well as January 6th.