The great beast is the reactionary elements in this country.
-Lyndon Baines Johnson
The President and his ruling party are attempting to direct a crackdown on opposition to their program under the banner of uprooting “The Left.” The clearly stated goal is to roll back time—to eliminate the programs and policies most associated with the Civil Rights Movement and the New Deal, in addition to dismantling the regulatory structure that ensures the safety of food, air, water, or medicine and the prevention of avoidable deaths. All this would be done in the service of increasing the share of societal wealth held by a tiny elite.
The elite leaders of the MAGA movement think that the role of government is to serve capital first and foremost, leavened with a racist, patriarchical, anti-labor sensibility which, for them, represent the system’s “red lines.” The roots of these principles go back to the founding of the United States. Their direct influence waxes and wanes with the political moment, but its existence is consistent, core to the “American” way of the rich ruling the poor and downtrodden.
The attack on a whole range of progressive organizations, is not about individual groups, but the idea of “oppositional” political activity to the broader far-right, capitalist movement that polices the boundaries of acceptable reforms to the capitalist system.
This should raise hopes that this assault on speech, dissent and organization can be beaten back, because it represents one aspect of a deeper attack on racist, pro-billionaire, anti-worker policies hated by tens of millions. This huge group of people can easily become a bulwark against repression.
Deep roots
“America First” was first popularized as a slogan by the Ku Klux Klan at its zenith, and later, appropriately, picked up by the U.S. wing of the worldwide fascist movement of the 1930s before being revived by Trump in 2016. In today’s world of consultants and focus groups, if direct association with the KKK and Nazi Germany doesn’t give pause, the message being sent is unambiguous.
The American system of “property first,” is inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing and slavery. Those who wrote and supported those words in the Declaration of Independence, however, were perfectly willing to not just accept, but protect slavery and justify any crimes on “the frontier.” Affiliation with the Klan was perfectly acceptable, at the highest levels, right into the 1960s.
From the FBI to the Texas Rangers, the institutions most “heroically” associated with “law and order” were formed to buttress reactionary political agendas. “Natvism,” has come in waves, welling up every time a broad wave of immigration creates questions about whether an essentially Anglo-Saxon, protestant sense of “culture” is the fountainhead of “American-ness.”
“Hard right” capitalist politics can’t gain momentum without calling forth those who ascribe to the retrograde view that supposed innate Black inferiority, Native backwardness, and “unclean aliens,” are harbingers of crime and political radicalism. This is an ideological system tailor-made for building a viable, if minority, consensus around political repression within the populace.
The inquisition
There is a long history of rightwing forces stretching the letter of the law to protect capitalist institutions from challenge.
In the 1790s, the Adams administration and the Federalist party feared the leveling spirit of the French Revolution might sweep the new “United States.” Criticism of the president and his party were directly targeted by the “Alien and Sedition Acts.” The Senate tried to use their power to imprison the editor of a Philadelphia newspaper for organizing Irishmen and free Blacks to help the enslaved.
In the late 1870s, when mine owners feared organizing in the Pennsylvania coal fields, the state government surrendered sovereignty to them. It allowed a private detective agency, a private prosecutor and a private police force to use a state court to carry out a frame-up, a sham trial and an execution by hanging of four labor organizers.
In the wake of the First World War, with the rich and powerful fearful of revolution, over 100 leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, the most militant and committed of the labor movement, were hauled into court, charged with 10,000 violations of federal law based on the Espionage Act and every other possible law, proclamation or statute prosecutors could find. The frame-up worked, and all these courageous fighters for workers rights received hundreds of years in prison collectively, and some ended up deported.
The “Overman Committee” offered congressional sanction to the Palmer Raids. 10,000 arrests made around the country by the Justice Department, often illegally, involving hundreds of deportations and convictions. This was secured by new laws like the Espionage and Immigration Acts of 1918.
In 1938 Texas Congressman Martin Dies—who blamed the Great Depression on a “large alien population” and argued for a separate, lower, minimum wage for Black people—set-up a committee to investigate “Un-American Activities.” Under Dies, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) refused to investigate the Ku Klux Klan, which one committee member called: an “old American institution.”
Howard Smith, another segregationist Congressman, this time from Virginia, introduced and passed a bill that would become infamous: the Smith Act, in 1940. Similar to Dies, and much like Trump, Smith aimed at “extremists” on the left. Starting in 1941 with leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, the militant core of midwestern Teamsters, especially in Minneapolis where they had led a general strike seven years before. The Smith Act would become infamous in the 1940s and 50s, during the frenzy to take down those bold enough to challenge racism, advocate aggressively for workers, for peace rather than world war or cold war, and a post-war world that would also be free of colonialism.
Liberals, leftists in the crosshairs
The Trump Administration is resurrecting this trend, directly. Heritage Foundation president and ringmaster of Project 2025 Kevin Roberts stated that Joe McCarthy was “on the whole” right in what he did, “Especially in hindsight, I think he was spot on.”
Members of Congress are making long lists of organizations to proscribe. The President has repeatedly targeted the biggest donors to the Democratic Party as the center of a vast criminal conspiracy. Conservative influencers with wide reach are campaigning to “ban all muslims from Congress.” Add to that a campaign by MAGA journalists to link everyone from AOC to the U.S. Soybean Council to the Communist Party of China.
In a new executive order, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), details a wide range of undefined “indicators” that mark one for investigation by the totality of Federal law enforcement and Treasury Department. Including:
anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
An addendum explicitly states that “First Amendment-protected activity,” acts as cover for alleged criminal acts. Sources inside the Department of Homeland Security told journalists organizations are being targeted simply for having “been written about by right-wing media.”
This makes the purpose of the crackdown clear: to stifle voices speaking up for Palestine, cripple the fight against racism and bigotry, while defunding institutions offering even the most modest of opposition to the MAGA agenda. From taxes to tariffs the White House and its political allies want to prevent minority support becoming active, majority, opposition.
Stand Up, Fight Back
Inquisitions and witchhunts in U.S. history tend, at some point, to collapse under their own weight. HUAC, for one, was vanquished by the new spirit introduced by the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the collapse of segregationist orthodoxy. This, alongside Civil Rights groups who declined to isolate communists, combined to deinstitutionalize McCarthy-style red-hunting.
All those who are opposing the ultra-right Project 2025 agenda have a common basis for opposition to the closing down of political space by the Trump administration. Attacks on this or that organization are politically diverse because they are an attack on the very concept of opposition, not just its real-life manifestations.
The relative unpopularity of Trump and his policies create a broad basis for the working class to push them back. The response to the attack on civil liberties can become an offensive against the entire MAGA agenda, which only serves the ultra-rich. Continuing and expanding the fight against the deportation machine, the attacks on Black America, the gutting of the social safety net and warmongering abroad is the best defense against Trump’s wave of repression.