I'd call my Mom an "ordinary" liberal (though for such a dynamic, voluble, sharp witted/tongued person she is far from "ordinary"), anti-Vietnam War, called a, "n-word lover, " by our 60's Rockville, Maryland neighbors. If she tuned into the C-SPAN coverage the other day of the ANSWER rally and compared it to the speeches she and I heard at the huge MOBE in D.C. in '70, she would be disgusted and appalled. Same with my liberal Unititarian Universalist sister and her boyfriend who was in SDS.
The issue isn't Communists organizing the demo. It's tankie Stalinists. Plenty of Communists opposed the tanks in Budapest in '56, the suppression of the workers revolt in the GDR in '53, tanks in Prague in '68 and Tienanmen Square in '91. If anti-Stalinist communists organized the demos, I'd be fine w/ that.
Doug, Buckley, Nixon and Reagan marginalized the John Birch Society and others even further right like hard core racist Revilo P. Oliver from any role in the mainstream Right. In your Yale Party of the Right days would you have accepted the leadership of Birchers and racists in a rally for any issue, let alone something important to the Right like say lower taxes or fighting the, "Nanny State."?