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(Wald, 1994; Hartz, 1991 [1955]). “Under such circumstances,” wrote Louis Hartz of America’s
initial red scare in the early 1920s, “it was just as easy to remove the Bolsheviks from the human
race as it was to remove their economic organization from the realm of productive mechanisms”
(Hartz, 1991 [1955], 302). Europeans, by contrast, always demonstrated more ambivalence
about the Soviet threat despite their being considerably more vulnerable to it. Since communism
was explicitly atheistic and opposed to capitalism, Americans were quick to regard it as not
simply a physical threat to their well-being, which it was, but also as the antithesis of their core
values and therefore the very embodiment of evil. This was the ideological well from which the
early Cold Warriors drew to build and sell a containment theory of unprecedented scope and
ambition; whether policymakers believed their own strongest claims or not, existential anti-
communism’s mythical resonance made it a necessary backdrop for their policies.
Yet, even within the “Cold War consensus,” ideological and cultural divisions within
American society found reflection in foreign policy opinions. Wald notes, for instance, that
religious traditionalists, who tend to define themselves as politically conservative, “generally
supported a strongly nationalist line which portrayed communism as a moral enemy to be
resisted wherever it appeared. This perspective stressed active opposition, endorsed military
action taken in the cause of anticommunism, and expressed skepticism about the prospects of
negotiation with communist states” (Wald, 1994, 489). In the post-Cold War world, religious
traditionalists remain active in many causes, including support for Israel, whose anticipated
success in rebuilding the second Temple they see as crucial to the unfolding of dispensational
history; hostility to the United Nations; protecting religious freedom, especially the religious
freedom of Christians in places such as the Sudan and atheistic / communist China; and
opposition to any international or transnational organization that supports abortion rights
Convention