Oh, if you think "commie", "pinko", or "red" was not a dead-serious, job- or even life-threatening accusation in the past, you should read up on Red Scare, Holl

Oh, if you think "commie", "pinko", or "red" was not a dead-serious, job- or even life-threatening accusation in the past, you should read up on Red Scare, Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthyism. The question of why insult X versus insult Y survives and thrives in this day is certainly interesting. I think it's a combination of many factors - The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if I don't like him very much. Ergo, if we were fighting Nazis together, by definition the Commies are not as bad. Considering the huge amount of media produced in all the time since the end of the war, in which the enemy is the safely defeated Nazis rather than still-potential-adversary Pinkos, it's probably safe to say that Nazi's are worse than Commies in absolute terms as far as the collective subconscious is concerned. - Nazis are generally seen as wishing to exterminate, subjugate or banish all people outside their narrowly accepted criteria. Commies maybe exterminate their own people for their own internal reasons, but don't really threaten our existence nearly as much - for a long time, it's "live and let live" more or less. Ergo, I am more scared of Nazis than Commies (though don't underestimate the fear of nuclear annihilation the seventies and eighties kids grew up in). - A lot of the fear of Commies was driven by disagreements over economic models, and fear of wealth loss by the "capitalist" class, obviously. That isn't really something very threatening to the average person, not on the instinctive level of "Nazis want to kill me because I exist". Those who lived through the red revolution and escaped it to the USA would have a much more visceral reaction to communism, but they would be a vanishing minority in the general population, I imagine. - Finally, Nazism/Fascism is in the conversation these days because it's really a thing, unlike communism. There aren't many people stridently fighting and believing in communist ideals, but there indeed are people who hold pretty clearly and openly fascist beliefs. So, when you see someone called fascist, it's not necessarily an insult but a statement of fact. Edit: I'm not defending Stalin or USSR, like I said in the parent comment, both leaders are indescribably horrible humans, in case that needs to be said.