by kleinbl00

Looking back in history, you can see why. In the 20th century before the First World War, when inequality and capitalist dysfunction was at levels comparable to today, American socialism spread by leaps and bounds — at one point even signing up a fifth of the population of Oklahoma. That brief flowering was destroyed by schisms over war jingoism and by President Wilson, whose Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer seized on anti-Bolshevik paranoia to repress the socialist left by force. The federal government could again attempt such tactics, but today there is no Soviet Russia and no world Communist movement to fuel popular anti-Red paranoia, and no prospect of a broadly popular war that would divide the left.