As long as I’ve been a historian, I’ve viewed the Red Scare as the worst episode of political repression in modern American history. No longer. What’s happening today is worse – much worse. In a hundred days, the Trump administration has done more damage to American democracy than fifteen years of McCarthyism did. Similarities exist. Trump, like McCarthy, is an aberrant character with a unique ability to manipulate the media and delve into the darker recesses of the American mind. And Trump, like McCarthy, had the ground prepared for him.

If we knew then what we know now, we might have called McCarthyism ‘Hooverism’. It was J Edgar Hoover who first drew attention to the communist threat to America and created the machinery to destroy it. McCarthy himself joined the anti-­communist crusade years after its main features had been put in place. Likewise, Trump is the beneficiary of a nearly forty-year, lavishly funded campaign – led by a network of reactionary billionaires and libertarian ideologues – to move American political culture far to the right. Unlike McCarthy and his allies, however, who only focused on an unpopular and increasingly sectarian left-wing group, Trump and his acolytes are seeking to destroy what remains of the welfare state, capture the main institutions of civil society and make money in the process.

While a much less ambitious project than Trump’s revolutionary scheme, the Red Scare offers a preview of what’s to come. Unfortunately, however, usable models of resistance from the past are rare. During the height of the Red Scare in almost every sector of American society – from the White House