When I look back to the height of the Cold War, I can't help but think that the national fear of the idea of communism was pretty irrational and kind of ridiculous. Of course, I wasn't around during that time, so I'm considering that there might be something I'm missing here. Now, I obviously see the fear resulting from events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and threat of nuclear war as justifiable concern, but the actions of the Red Enemy itself is not the part confusing me. What I would like to know is, was our fear of communism as a whole, not just the Soviet Union, rational? Throughout the Cold War, it was often said that Communists want to destroy our way of life, or similar things, which is part of our rationale for "Preventing the spread of Communism at all costs". We are well aware of the wide use of propaganda by both sides at the time, but is there any truth to most of the reasons we were so scared of them? Was it all just the government trying to paint a bad image of our rivals to get the public to dislike them as much as they did? I would like to understand if there was really such a danger brought upon by the entire economic and social ideology of communism that it was within reason to completely avoid anything even partially related to it.
....Depends on what you're looking at. Hollywood blacklists, McCarthyism, ect were absolutely not rational responses to communism. Other reactions- Domino Theory, interventionism in central and south America in the 60's, 70's and 80's probably weren't either.
But at the same time the overarching narrative was that we had nukes, and they had nukes and by the 60's there was little doubt that both countries had the delivery systems necessary to blow everyone to tiny bits. One could argue that the US absolutely needed to present a unified front ideologically against communism so that they didn't see any opportunity to either justify nuclear attack, or exploit a perceived weakness.
This is kind of a sticky subject because it is both broad, and heavily opinionated. Think you could pick a time period and a region? Because the cold war was, in a sense, basically a third world war. Actions and reactions and propaganda warfare played out on a stage which involved most of the world. Most of Africa was immune to this, but the Middle East, south east Asia, east Asia, Europe, and the Americans were all at the forefront of this if you back up far enough.