The GOP's Big Red Scare Is Really Stupid
Summary
It's a strategic truism in politics that if you can't seize the political "center," where a lot of unaffiliated voters live, you try to push the opposition out of the center by labeling them as extremist. This has been a constant preoccupation of Republicans in the Trump era, thanks to the 45th and 47th president's inveterate habit of playing to his MAGA base. Hence the effort to brand Democrats - even aggressively centrist Democrats - as "the radical left" is not particularly surprising. Radical is, after all, a relative term on which people can differ, odd as it is to apply it to staid...
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The GOP’s big red scare is really stupid. Democrats aren’t communist, and the relatively small progressive surge in this year’s primaries isn’t a Bolshevik Revolution, writes Ed Kilgore. https://t.co/VAXP83UPsH
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) August 2, 2026