The Elephant in the Living Room: Theodore Draper and the Historiography of American Communism

While I cannot speak for Draper, as one of those identified by revisionists as a member of the "institutional/political school of 'traditionalist' liberal anti-Communism," I can offer a summary case for him.  He has set a high level of scholarship as well as an interpretive stance which I think has stood the test of time. It is simply a matter of democracy.

Certainly Communists in the main claimed to be advancing democracy. But in the eyes of liberal anti-communists such as Draper the claim is fraudulant.  Democracy encompasses more than political democracy, though political democracy is of its essence.  A movement is not democratic if it does not accept that those who govern must be responsible to the governed through periodic elections conducted in an environment of free speech, free press, fredom of assembly along with multiple competing political parties or other political formulations.

As Draper argues, the CPUSA never accepted political democracy, but explicitly rejected it and the freedoms that came with it.  The Communist movement in the United States founded as a result of the Bolshevik was tyrannical both in theory and in practice. Draper's history in recognizing this fundamental point explains America's inhospitableness to Communism.