The Cold War never ended for the American right Cliff Schecter posted the clip below last night and it’s a fine example of the conservative reflex for branding as communist everything and everybody they dislike. Three-plus decades after the end of the Cold War that they declared Saint Ronald of Reagan had won, they still can’t let it go. They’re still looking for commies in woodpiles and for Reds under their beds before they cower beneath the sheets. Upon review, I was surprised to see that Ed Kilgore wrote in response to Donald Trump branding his opponents communists that he “hadn’t heard a Republican call a Democrat a commie since the high tide of McCarthyism.” Looking at the clip Cliff posted, where’s Ed been all this time? Kilgore wrote in March 2022: It’s not just Trump throwing the term around. One of his favorite Republican acolytes, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, calls Democrats — all of them, not just some of them — communists all the time (most recently in her speech to a white-nationalist group, in which she referred to “Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America”). When Republicans lost two Senate seats and control of the upper chamber in Greene’s home state in January 2021, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem called the winning Democratic candidates communists. And another Republican member of Congress, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, betrayed a lack of understanding of communism just last month in explaining that the Russians…