Andrew Cuomo needed Republican votes to beat Zohran Mamdani. A super PAC (political action committee) backing him, funded partly by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, found the fastest way to get them. In late October, Defend NYC spent a quarter million dollars texting New York voters a quote from Donald Trump; this race was Cuomo or “communism coming to NYC.” Mamdani has never called himself a communist. Asked directly on “Meet the Press,” he said he isn’t one. The label went out anyway, because the label isn’t meant to be accurate. It’s meant to work.

The tactic has a name, red-baiting, and it predates Mamdani, McCarthy, and most of American history since. Political scientists describe it as tagging an opponent as communist or socialist to discredit them, whether or not the term applies, a strategy traced back to the 1800s, when landowners first got nervous about organised labour. Its best-known American chapter is Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s hearings, built on what one journalism professor later described to students as near-hysterical fear of “reds under the bed,” most of which turned out to be nothing. Historian Clay Risen spent a book on that period and told a reporter this year that the current version follows the same script.

Sociology has a name for the machinery, too. Stanley Cohen’s 1972 study of British youth culture coined the term “moral panic,” describing a recognisable cycle: a threat gets identified, media coverage exaggerates it, the public reacts with outrage, authorities respond, and the target hardens into what Cohen called a folk devil, a social type held up as a warning of what not to be. His collaborator Stuart Hall extended the idea to argue such panics can function as elite interests dressed up as spontaneous public concern, orchestrated from above rather than arising from below. Red-baiting fits the pattern almost exactly: identify a folk devil, in this case the socialist candidate, amplify the danger past any relationship to what the candidate actually proposes, and let public concern do the rest of the campaign’s work.

Communism and democratic socialism are not the same thing, and the gap between them matters more than it gets credit for. Even a CNN breakdown that conservative outlets themselves passed around drew the line clearly: Marxist communism means a stateless, classless, moneyless economy with no private ownership of production, a system nobody currently runs, China and Russia included. Mamdani campaigned on universal healthcare, public housing, city-run grocery stores, and rent intervention. That’s closer to Denmark than to anything out of Soviet planning. Calling it communism isn’t a loose shorthand. It’s a swap, made on purpose, because the real platform is harder to attack than the word is.

The White House hasn’t shown much interest in keeping the terms separate. Spokeswoman Olivia Wales said in a statement that Democrats’ turn toward “socialism and communism” threatens the country outright, using both words as if they meant the same thing, and accusing the party of wanting to abolish prisons, private property, and police. Some DSA members really have said things like that. Most voters hear “socialism” and “communism” folded together and never learn there was a difference to blur.

None of this means the accusation comes from nowhere. Footage from an antisemitism watchdog group caught DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) figures talking openly about tearing down the Democratic Party rather than reforming it. A clip attributed to one DSA leader has him saying the organisation’s actual goal is communism, not democratic socialism, and Republican researchers have used this heavily. Red-baiting has lasted this long partly because it isn’t a pure invention. There’s enough real material in the DSA’s own public statements to give the label something to stick to, even when it’s being stretched well past what most members actually believe or campaign on.

Antonio Gramsci offers a way to read that durability. The Italian Marxist argued that ruling classes hold power less through force than through what he called hegemony: getting their worldview accepted as simple common sense, so thoroughly absorbed through schools, media, and everyday culture that people stop noticing it’s a worldview at all.  according to one summary of his theory. Under that lens, decades of “socialism equals danger” messaging isn’t just a campaign tactic recurring by coincidence. It’s hegemony doing routine maintenance, closing off a set of economic alternatives before voters get far enough in the details to judge them on their merits. Whether that’s a cynical read of the last few months or an accurate one probably depends on which side of the quarter-million-dollar text blast you were standing on.

Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole