"Useful idiots" is historically anti-communist rhetoric

Socialists would do well to leave the particular line to the right.

Two RT employees and several other journalists participated in a Russian influence operation that violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, according to an indictment by the Justice Department unsealed yesterday in New York. The indictment named two Russian nationals Elena Afanasyeva and Kostiantyn Kalashnikov in a $10m plan to covertly disseminate Kremlin messaging in the US through multiple media platforms.

The indictment also appeared to describe right-wing outlet Tenet Media as one of those platforms, potentially implicating multiple right-wing influencers like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern as participants in the project.

Foreign influence operations have long been a fraught subject on the left, which is often skeptical on free speech grounds of government attempts to censor it. There is also the problem of selectivity: the US government is clearly more worried about info ops by some countries (Russia, China) than it is about others (Israel), and shows no comparable concern whatsoever about the massive propaganda projects advanced in our country by the rich.

On the other hand, the FARA requirement Aganasyeva and Kostiantyn violated is one that the left has historically supported: a basic transparency rule demanding that foreign agents publicly register as such.

Here, however, I’d like to focus my response on one particular charge that’s emerged from this mess: the line that even if influencers like Pool, Johnson, and Southern didn’t know who they were working for, they are still guilty of being “useful idiots.” In this case this rhetoric doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense — but it does revive an old red scare era slur that socialists would do well to leave behind.

The very etymology of “useful idiots” reveals a lot about the anti-communist hysteria it was born in. As legend has it, Lenin (or Stalin) used the phrase to refer to Americans who, by championing left or liberal politics, were unwittingly aiding the Soviet agenda. Why this made them idiots from the Soviet perspective isn’t entirely clear. What is clear, in any case, is that the quote is a complete fabrication apparently coined by Illinois Congressman Ed Derwinski: neither Lenin nor Stalin ever said any such thing.

And what’s also clear is the line’s historical role: anti-communist red scaremongering. Reactionaries in the US had long suggested that anyone left-of-center was likely cooperating with the Bolsheviks, but “useful idiot” was a real innovation because it insisted that it didn’t even matter if the collaborators knew what they were doing. You could be acting out of earnest conviction and complete independence, and under the distinct impression that you were not helping the Soviets, and still be called a useful idiot. The charge allows the reactionary to attach a conspiratorial and treasonous connotation to literally anything that he can construe as advancing communist interests.

Eventually, charges of usefui idiocy became so prolific on the right that they began to lose their force; by the 80s even Ronald Reagan was being called a “useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” because of his support for an arms-control treaty with the USSR. By 1996, liberal scholars like John George and Laird Wilcox were including the quote in their book Political Extremists as a classic of misinformation, noting that

concoting quote or documents out of wholecloth has been a much-employed tactic by extremists, especially those on the right.

It was also generally understood by liberals at the end of the twentieth century that they had their own stake in resisting this rhetoric since the right would inevitably try to hang them with it.

Today, however, renewed anxieties about both socialism and the Russian Federation seem to have put the line back in circulation. But ironically, it’s the liberals who seem more prone to use it this time around — either to vilify some leftist as a hated communist, or to brand someone on the right as complicit in Vladimir Putin’s agenda.

Another great irony in this case is that by calling right-wing pundits useful idiots, liberals are unintentionally giving them a generous reading of the indictment. Consider this passage:

AFANASYEVA…privately messaged Founder-1 on Discord [and]…requested that US Company-1 blame Ukraine and the United States [for the Crocus City Hall terror attack]…Founder-1 responded that Founder-1 would ask Commentator-3, and the next day confirmed that Commentator-3 said “he’s happy to cover it.”

This does not read to my eyes like unwitting participation in the scheme; it looks a lot more like Afanasyeva is handing out assignments that stipulate specific messaging and that Commentator-3 is willfully complying. To call this useful idiocy is to downplay that deliberate participation, which the indictment goes out of its way to insist was indeed deliberate (since “the defendants, and others known and unknown, willfully and knowingly” conspired together).

To put it another way: so far, Benny Johnson’s defense has been to position himself as an unwitting victim in this scheme. Tim Pool’s line: “I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and were victims.” Both of these people are calling themselves useful idiots, and people joining them in that attack are letting them off the hook on potential charges that are far more serious.

So even if all you care about is sticking it to right-wing pundits who’ve been towing the Kremlin line on the war in Ukraine for the past two years, it just doesn’t make sense to use the ‘useful idiots” rhetoric.

As far as I can tell the only reason to use that line is if you have the same goals the McCarthyists did: to villify certain ideas as malevolent and treasonous simply because they are foreign or communist. If you care about socialism, you should probably be concerned that liberals are actively using this line to try to connect contemporary right-wing demagogues to twentieth century communists. If you care about international affairs, you should probably be worried when Netanyahu starts calling protesters for Palestine “useful idiots” for Iran.

Hell, even if all you care about is logic, “useful idiots” is just a blatant exercise in ad hominem and guilt-by-association. Americans should judge political positions based on what is true and on their values and their vision of the good. If the truth and the good happen to correspond with something America’s enemy-of-the-moment agrees with, that is no reason to abandon either. I think that a lot of Russia’s messaging on Ukraine has been downright ghoulish, but that is because I care about the truth and care about peace, not because I think Russia is somehow intrinsically wrong about everything. Let’s leave “useful idiots” back in the twentieth century with the brain-dead demagogues who came up with it.