Something a colleague said recently that I'm often given cause to think about is that some liberals and centrists are unable to process a critique of the right unless it's packaged in the language of anti-communism https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1360294544277913606

This isn't just an American phenomenon either. Something that coloured years worth of onslaught against the Labour left was constant comparisons with Trump and Trumpism

This comes out in the dumbest ways sometimes, like that NYT interview with Sanders that was basically like "You have big rallies, and so does Donald Trump. Which kinda makes the two of you similar, no?"

One of the worst intellectual reflexes of the Trump era was the use of the term "populism" as broad pejorative signifier for literally anything critical of the neoliberal consensus - regardless of whether it was coming from left or right. Ergo, "Sanders = Trump"

This came out in the Center For American Progress's ludicrous partnership with the right wing AEI, which yielded a report that collapsed left and right "economic populism" into the same category https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/why-is-the-center-for-american-progress-betraying-the-left