The Roosevelt Administration included quite a few communists at very high levels, up to and including Vice President. Much of our history has been colored by the efforts to excuse communist behavior. Even the characterization of the Nazis as “right wingers” comes from this effort. The Nazis, of course, were radical socalists and were in fierce competition with the communists for political power. When we decided to fight the Nazis, we could hardly call them left wingers when we had decided to ally ourselves with the Soviets.
The Cold War caused the communists to go to ground, change their name, and cry foul over the exposure of those in their ranks by McCarthy and others. With the Cold War over, they have reemerged. Now, these communists call themselves Progressives and they once again occupy important positions in the White House. This time around, they’ve even managed to get one of their ranks into the Oval Office.
Seventy years ago, as the first Red Army units rolled into Poland while expelling the Nazis, the rest of the world learned that the Soviets had no intentions of honoring the promises that they made to the Poles. That was never their intention, as the Katyn burials prove, but our government helped keep the lie alive.
Evil never sleeps.
This distinction, not unreasonably, fell out of fashion for approximately 65 years. At that time, when assorted forms of formalised socialism had been unleashed on the world, the "pure" or "purer" socialists in assorted nations, seeking a distinction between themselves and other "corrupt" socialists, resurrected it.
By the 20th century, this left-right nonsense had devolved into the harder-core socialists, Bolsheviki and their ilk, styling their socialist opponents as "rightists" and "right-wing" and (I love this) "forces of reaction", i.e. reactionaries. In reality, the only practical differences between Bolshevism and Italian/German state socialism were that the latter two "philosophies" also contained a strong component of nationalism AND that the latter two had relatively little interest in outright ownership of the means of production. Hitler's speech to the Nazi conclave at Nuremberg on 1 May 1927 contains several (and one VERY specific) reference to this latter point, ownership of means of production, to wit: "Our socialism goes much, much deeper."
There is an account from 1936 or so, titled "The Vampire Economy" written by an on-the-ground industrialist in Germany. It's heavy reading -- the author was distinctly not a writer -- but worth the effort, speaking historically. The similarity described within between Nazi bureaucrats and modern-day Eurocrats and American bureaucrats is, frankly, stunning.
Socialism can never and will never tolerate any ideological competition. It is NO accident that, after assuming power, Hitler first of all purged the Communist faction in Germany.
Yours for accurate history, and FReegards, m'friend.