Is communism viable in the USA?

The First Red Scare proved to be a complete refusal to communism

Question: Is communism viable in the USA?
Position‹2 of 2: No, communism is not viable in the USA
Argument1 of 2›: The First Red Scare proved to be a complete refusal to communism

After the communist takeover in Russia, Americans began to fear the spread of communism in its labor class. Communism went against the patriotism that was present during World War I.

The argument

The First Red Scare occurred in 1919-1920, following the fear of Bolshevik influence that spread after communism took over Russia. The sequence matters to the argument: an actual revolution had just succeeded in a major power, which turned what had been an abstract political doctrine into a demonstrated possibility. American anxiety was not that communism might prove persuasive in debate but that it might arrive the way it had arrived in Russia. Three conditions are identified as fuelling that anxiety. The first was the end of the war. Once the United States no longer had to concentrate its efforts on winning World War I, the attention and organisational energy that had been directed outward turned to threats at home, and many Americans were afraid that communism could spread to the United States and threaten the democratic values of the nation. The second was the mass immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the U.S., which gave the fear a visible population to attach itself to. The third was labor unrest in the late 1910s, including the Great Steel Strike of 1919, which appeared to supply evidence that organised agitation was already under way. What the argument draws from the episode is not the intensity of the feeling but what was done with it. Due to the First Red Scare, thousands of people were arrested, and hundreds of people were deported and labeled as "communists" during the scare. That is a state response rather than a mood: the country did not merely dislike the doctrine, it turned the machinery of arrest and removal against people associated with it, and did so with enough public support to sustain the effort. On this reading the episode shows that American refusal of communism runs deep enough to override ordinary reluctance about mass arrests and deportations, which is why communism is held not to be viable in the USA.

Premises

[P1]During the First Red Scare of 1919-1920, Americans broadly feared that Bolshevik-style communism would spread to the United States and undermine its democratic values. [P2] This fear translated into concrete national rejection, with thousands arrested and hundreds deported under the label of 'communists.' [C] Therefore, the First Red Scare demonstrates a deep-rooted American refusal of communism, showing it is not viable in the USA.

Counter-arguments

Irrational paranoia was not rooted in the first Red Scare that started a century ago. There was an unambiguous purpose for the government agencies which carried out the arrests: to kill the radical left in the United States.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise generalises a short, intense episode into a settled national disposition. The scare was driven by wartime mobilisation, the 1919 bombings and a wave of strikes, and it subsided within about two years; the same era returned socialist candidates to municipal office and to Congress, which a broad and deep-rooted refusal would not accommodate. [Rejecting P2] Arrests and deportations are state action, not a measure of popular belief. The raids were carried out by federal agencies pursuing the suppression of the radical left, and they drew substantial legal and public criticism at the time, including resistance within the Labor Department to many of the deportation warrants. Suppression by government establishes what officials did, not what the population held — and events of 1919–20 bear on what was possible then rather than on what is viable now.