To listen to some of today’s conservatives, the sky is forever about to fall.

to the ash heap of history, it is routinely invoked here in an accusatory way: Democrats are communists, or communist sympathizers, or influenced by communism, or at the very least socialists, their plans the spearpoint of a collectivist takeover in America.

That refrain, of course, has ricocheted through American politics for the last 90 years.

It was said of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and Social Security, now a crucial retirement cornerstone for millions of Americans. Lyndon B. Johnson faced that bombast about Medicare, which now provides quality health care for millions of older Americans. It was said or insinuated about Barack Obama and, perhaps most risibly, about the Affordable Care Act, which eschewed a single-payer health care system for one based on private insurance plans.

Sadly, though actual communism has faded in the world, those accusations have not. While president, Donald Trump actually called the aspiring Democratic presidential candidates a “group of socialists or communists,” said the Democratic agenda was “probably communism,” and predicted that Americans “wouldn’t be able to survive” if Joe Biden won.

It should be no surprise, then, that stopping months ago.

“It’s a communist regime. It’s been a communist takeover of our country,” US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, opined about six months into the Biden administration.

But she’s a conspiratorialist wackadoodle, one may say. True, but she’s also a rising House power under Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Meanwhile, consider conservative commentator Mark Levin, who is what passes as a deep thinker in today’s American conservatism. It’s a regular theme of his that Biden and the Democrats have unleashed the forces of Marxism in America.

It’s reminiscent of the days when John Birch Society founder Robert Welch — a former candidate for lieutenant governor here in Massachusetts — accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist.

We hear the same kind of nonsense when it comes to global warming. Conservative climate deniers routinely cast efforts to curb climate change as far-left schemes to assume control over the everyday lives of average Americans.

Meanwhile, almost any firearms-related attempt to reduce gun violence is immediately portrayed as the first step by “gun grabbers” determined to seize all the firearms