American intellectuals feared anticommunism itself more than communism in the early Cold War

Evidence

After the War, came the realignment of world powers into communist and democratic blocs. In this country the wartime solidarity with Russia was forgotten and Soviet Communism replaced German fascism as the principal villain in world affairs. American intellectuals were not as ready as the national majority to anathematize communists; the two fascist themes of prejudice and political reaction seemed worse evils to us. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 433

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: was the intellectual-left preference of fascism over communism as ‘the worse evil’ a consistent stance through the 1940s-50s, or a post-hoc rationalization?
• XREF: Connects to broader historiographic debates about Cold War liberalism and the ‘end of ideology’ — and to the author’s own ideological positioning as an insider. — connects to: Postwar American business elites feared liberalism more than Soviet communism — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1446; New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism