CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Red All Over? It’s Not So Black and White

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the month celebrating 250 years of red, white and blue, Americans were seeing plenty of red — and not just as part of commemorative trifectas or midterm forecast maps.

Red-baiters based in red states (or the financial districts of blue ones) have a wave of actual reds in power to push against.  Once, the best opposition they could hope for were such fellow travelers as Reds director Warren Beatty, who as biographer Peter Biskind notes “was no Communist but empathized with the idealism of the American left” (and whose production “reflects his ambivalence”).

In 2026 they are able to point to candidates who can win elections (if only within the bluest of blue electorates) affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America collective, which dropped a manifesto in mid-July proclaiming a need for “aggressive wealth taxes” to bring about the day when the whole sectors of “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses.”

On August 3 alone, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page offered “A Brief History of Wealth Creation” from John Steele Gordon, chiding “many on the left, unable to distinguish between wealth aggregation and wealth creation,”........

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