Nick Clegg, a "communist". Vince Cable, a "socialist". This is the euphonious sound of the Tory right on the warpath – and with every marble intact. Dismiss such invective as mere boilerplate if you will, but the increasing tendency to reach for the S word as a polemical armament against the most humble proposals for reform from pro-business centrists has a lineage, which it would be a mistake to miss.

Recall that, for Tea Party supporters, the Obama presidency represents a socialist capture of the White House. This has some specific aspects that are not necessarily duplicated across the Atlantic; above all, that the charge is suffused with racial affect. For example, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo said in 2010 that "people who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House … we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote". With the reference to literacy tests, Tancredo touched on one of the measures used in the Jim-Crow south to deny African Americans suffrage.

Perhaps the most interesting othering of Barack Obama came from the conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza who argued, in respect of the allegations of Obama's socialism, that there may be some merit to them, but that matters were in fact much worse. "Barack Obama is the most anti-business president in a generation, perhaps in American history," he averred. Interrogating Obama's motives, he asked: "What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?" The answer was "something else": an anticolonial mentality hostile not merely to business, but to the entire edifice of "western civilisation".

But such anti-socialism cannot be reduced to what Tim Wise calls "the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have". Even in the US, there is much more to it than that. First of all, the ideological pedigree of a great deal of the Tea Party, as with much of the Tory right, is authentically Hayekian. Hayek, who upbraided the "socialists of all parties", would have understood the expansive definition of socialism deployed here. The strong assumption of market efficiency, coupled with the view that free markets are a corollary of political liberty, means that any abridgment of one must lead to infringements on the other: this is "socialism". Second, while the property-based concerns of the Tea Party are exaggerated, certain of Obama's pre-election promises – such as Obamacare – were potentially a nuisance to some sectors of business, and thus in a very limited sense a curtailment of property rights.

This kind of anti-socialist Poujadism is linked to other sources of reaction in the US – the history of anticommunist purges, the southern defence of white supremacy, and so on. In the UK, anti-socialism has a more recent pedigree, referring back to a hegemonic project known as "Thatcherism". It was the aim of the Thatcherites to simultaneously destroy the bases for socialist militancy in local councils, trade unions and a section of the Labour party, and shift the popular common sense in such a way as to render socialism unintelligible as a rational, relevant answer to the problems of British society. To the extent that they succeeded, and compelled Labour to adapt to their agenda, they displaced not only "socialism" but also a chain of associated concepts such as "class" from the mainstream. Without a real referent in a major social force, the redundancy of "socialist" as an epithet was obvious. Even the blessed Tony Blair, who could sell war in Iraq with a straight face, stopped calling himself a Christian socialist rather quickly.

It is generally in circumstances where socialism has such a precarious existence that the S word has been available for disinterment. Thus, it was after the collapse of the eastern bloc that the Tory right felt fully confident in castigating the expanding European Union as a socialist rampart menacing Britain – the "EUSSR". But this rhetoric never convinced anyone but the faithful. The UK simply doesn't have the same traditions of popular anti-socialism as the US does. It is one thing for the Tories to blame the Socialist Workers' party for the failure of their workfare policy; it is quite another for conservatives to use anti-socialist eristic against allies, and people who are in most respects soul brothers of Ken Clarke.

Finally, they do so at a time when there may be some actual socialists emerging for them to contend with – the new European left represented by the Occupy movements, strikes, and the surge of Syriza and the Left Front. How to deal with real socialists if you've wasted your time red-baiting Nick Clegg and Vince Cable? Take it from an actual red – they wouldn't know class struggle from shoeshine.

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