[Dons politics minor hat]
That crack about liberals would have been on point if we were in Canada or Western/Central Europe considering the US political spectrum is so far to the right in comparison that the average US left-leaning liberal would be considered a conservative in those areas even with the attempted rise of Fascist xenophobic movements in Europe.
There has also been a sad history here in the US of using Communism to perpetuate political witch hunts to settle old scores(1950’s era McCarthyism) and attempt to silence political protests and movements…including the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, etc* back when they were being heavily resisted by conservative groups.
- J. Edgar Hoover's FBI strongly suspected MLK and other Civil Rights leaders of being "Communist" and kept a thick dossier on him during the '50s and '60s as a result.
And if one goes back to the early days of FDR in the '30s, some of his conservative opponents in Congress tried using the “communist label” to strongly oppose his New Deal policies…including ones we not take for granted such as Social Security or not too long after WWII, the implementation of the free/reduced price school meals program because they found the main reason for 25% of all men called up for the draft during WWII being rejected as unfit for military service was because of stunted growth and diseases arising from childhood malnutrition.
** I.e. The basis for strong conservative backlash against the Equal Rights Amendment(ERA) in the late '70s.