The anti-communist paranoia is what also brought a lot of rights and perks to workers in the US and Europe. The ruling elite had to concede some demands to the working class to prevent the read scare from spreading. Now that threat is gone, we're seeing a claw-back (defanging unions, etc).
Not at all, the global left at the time was actually into things like racial and gender equality and so on, it was not just a paranoid delusion among elites in the USA. So called communist states actually built people's armies, actually brought people out of poverty and taught them to read and write and study, actually sent soldiers to colonies to fight the colonisers.
The anti-left propaganda obviously did not want to put these things into focus, since it had clearly inspired rather successful revolutions and reform projects in Europe and elsewhere. Instead we got these medicalised narratives where socialism or communism is presented as a viral epidemic, or leftist leaders described as profoundly evil persons bent on subjugating the world under tyranny.
The objectives and contradictions are very different now. The first 14 James Bond movies were trying to avert a madman obsessed with triggering a nuclear first strike. The next 13 were not. The cool Russians who avoided hysteria devoted a generation of resources on real bad decisions made in Afghanistan. The only constant is how you’re treated if you get in the way of profit.