Donald Trump, rather infamously, was mentored by the notorious Roy Cohn, once the attorney for the fascistic, anti-communist, and anti–civil libertarian Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now, as he flails from crisis to crisis, Trump is turning to Cohn’s greatest hits for relief: Red Scare McCarthyite slander. Trump is using accusations of communism to distract from all the competing scandals and failures that are closing in on his administration.

He’s had the perfect opportunity to do so with the success of Democratic Party candidates who ally with or are members of the Democratic Socialists of America: Here’s another group he can offer up for his base to hate. In addition to immigrants or Muslims, they must now worry about reds under the bed.

While one could be forgiven for wondering if the president is aware that the Cold War ended 35 years ago, this crude name-calling serves a political purpose beyond scaring the Boomer and Gen-X voters glued to Fox News. It’s about the chilling of free speech, free assembly and the right to organize. How fitting that a president whose corrupt renovations have bulldozed the White House and ruined the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool—belching algae as if disgusted with its guardians—is also taking the occasion of the 250th anniversary of this country to weaponize the politics of fear and trample the Bill of Rights.

In response to Trump’s poisonous rhetoric, centrist and liberal democrats have sprinted off to reporters—not to condemn Trump, but to decry their own party’s electoral victories by democratic socialists or candidates with socialists working in their campaigns. We’ve seen before what the cancer of anti-communism brings to the country, and we would do well to remember what happened then. If we knew our history, then we’d know that these liberals that show more energy to fight their left than fight the right are cutting their own throats.

Howard Zinn knew his history, which is perhaps why not only right-wingers but do-nothing liberals decry his work. The longtime Boston University historian and esteemed author of the classic A People’s History of the United States was 26 years old, a decorated WWII Army vet, a husband, a father, and a prominent New York City activist when McCarthyism, in the form of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, came calling. FBI agents accosted Zinn, took him in more than once for questioning, and threatened his family. They targeted him not because he was a member of the Communist Party—although they had their hysterical suspicions—but because he was a leading voice against communists’ being expelled from the powerful social movements that gripped the city.

After coming home from World War II, Zinn threw himself into an organization called the American Veterans Committee (AVC). It quickly became one of the largest multiracial organizations in the United States, with over 100,000 members at its height and more than a thousand chapters, including throughout the Jim Crow South. The Red Scare hearings were dominated by white Southern Dixiecrat politicians. To them, the AVC’s existence must have seemed like an abomination, a hotbed of something far more enraging than communism and far more of a threat to their grip on power: solidarity and “race-mixing.”

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The AVC, had it been able to endure as an open organization, could have been a critical bridge to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement of the 1950s: an infrastructure of politically driven Black and white vets throughout the South ready to lend a hand. Instead, it was destroyed by the Red Scare’s success in coercing its members to betray one another.

Under pressure from the FBI, Hollywood, and liberal anti-communists (including California AVC member Ronald Reagan), the AVC tore itself to pieces. In this maelstrom, the Cold War liberals attempted to expel anyone suspected of Communism. But Howard Zinn—a young, working-class history student and head of the Brooklyn chapter—became the leading voice against expelling members for political thought crimes. He and his compatriots took this position on political principle, but also because they knew the AVC would disintegrate if they engaged in mass expulsions.

As Zinn said at a national committee meeting of the AVC: “We will wholeheartedly endorse the expulsion of any member who discredits AVC or acts in a manner detrimental to its welfare, whether that member be a Communist, a Socialist, a Democrat or a Republican. But we deplore wholesale categorization as unscientific, irrational and unjust.”

Under Zinn’s leadership, the endangered branches fought back. They organized while wearing their war medals. (Reagan, one of their chief opponents in the AVC, never actually fought in World War II; he was grounded stateside due to “near-sightenedness.” So no medals for him.) They demanded that they not be Red Scare collateral damage.

At the end of the day, the medals didn’t protect them. The AVC National Planning Committee suspended Zinn’s chapter and the entire AVC New York Metropolitan Area Council. The liberals also eventually suspended Zinn himself for fighting the expulsions, though this didn’t become official until the following year. The results were exactly as Zinn predicted. The AVC proceeded to limp along as a rump of an organization. They were never a political force again for veterans or for civil rights.

The lessons are quite clear. Trump is not only making wildly mendacious claims about his opponents. (In typical Trump verbiage, he mocks these new left electeds as “sick people” who “don’t believe in God” and against whom he will use every mechanism at his disposal to “stop.”) Trump is attempting, successfully, to divide his opposition by building a wedge between the powerful but increasingly irrelevant centrist congressional Democrats and liberal commentariat and the upstarts who are inspiring voters and actually winning elections.

I know what Howard Zinn would say—because he said it to me: “I don’t study history just to learn about the past but to affect change in the present and future.” The lessons of the past could not be clearer: United we stand, divided we fall. If the liberal establishment does not heed the warnings of history, they will either end up siding with Trumpism or reliving the famous words of Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the communists, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t a communist.… Then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything.” The Trump agenda is to ensure there is “no one left to say anything” against his increasingly erratic and violent rule. Howard Zinn would have fought that agenda tooth and nail. In Zinn’s memory—and out of respect for history—we should do the same.