Allen West’s Communist Conspiracy Implicates Woodrow Wilson

Noted Communist Woodrow Wilson.Wikimedia

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Rep. Allen West has been on a tear recently trying to defend his assertion that liberal Democrats are actually communists. West’s argument focuses not on Democrats’ commitment to the dictatorship of the proletariat or the elimination of private enterprise, but the fact that Democrats generally support public assistance and regulation of private industry. 

All of this is ridiculous, but perhaps my favorite West assertion of late is the idea that President Woodrow Wilson was a communist. Here is Mr. West’s reasoning, as relayed by TPM’s Eric Kleefield:

I think that if you would take the time to study the political spectrum of ideologies, you’d understand that at the turn of the [20th] century, American Communists renamed themselves as progressives. If you study the Woodrow Wilson administration, people referred to the Woodrow Wilson administration as a progressive administration.

So Wilson described himself as progressive, and progressive just means communist, so Wilson was a communist. This is fifth-grade logic.

Tim Weiner’s excellent history of the FBI goes into great detail about Wilson’s record on communism, but here are a few examples of how President Wilson, in real life, dealt with self-identified communists and socialists:

  • Wilson imprisoned and deported communists, socialists, and leftists for just generally holding views he found subversive.
  • Wilson threw American Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who had garnered nearly a million votes running against Wilson in 1912, in prison for speaking out against the imprisonment of anti-war leftists.
  • Wilson sent American soldiers to support Czarist forces against Bolshevik revolutionaries during the Russian civil war in 1918.
  • Wilson appointed A. Mitchell Palmer as his Attorney General. The iconic 1920 Palmer Raids resulted in mass arrests and deportations of suspected leftists of all stripes.

How many communists do you have to kill and/or throw in prison to not be considered a communist? It’s not like Wilson lacks for actual flaws either, given that he was a huge racist and Confederate sympathizer, among other things.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that Wilson, the self-identified progressive, might be better described as an anti-communist than a communist. But that’s because you’re not looking at the big picture. Wilson’s assault on civil liberties eventually resulted in the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union, which—I’m about to blow your mind—was obviously the plan all along.

Partisan derangement is usually directed at a president currently in office; West is gifted in the sense that he’s able to maintain a right-wing fever swamp perspective on a president elected a hundred years ago. But if a guy who locks up communists for protesting wars can’t catch a break because he supports a federal income tax, the House Progressive Caucus probably doesn’t have much of a chance either.  

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate