No, you are being naive. There was no realistic communist threat to the lives of average Americans. The communist threat was largely towards the people actually living in the communist countries. There was no communist military threat to America. Communism mostly fell all on its own, crumbling under its own weight - it couldn’t even maintain itself without imports from “capitalist” countries. The idea of a communist threat to America was largely propaganda by the military-industrial-complex - a blatant exaggeration of the threat of what ultimately is a marginal group relative to our own society.
Average Americans were fine to go on living their middle class lives without any meaningful encounter with communism. It was their own government that realistically presented more of a threat to them than the foreign communist governments. This is just like the current terrorism and islamofascism issue - it simply does not present a threat to the daily lives of most Americans. We will most likely never come into contact with an islamic terrorist or be personally affected by one. The same was more or less true of the communists during the cold war. Anything much beyond this is alarmist.
I’m sorry, but this is just conspiracy theory nonsense. American culture has not been infiltrated by communism. The fact of the matter is that communism failed. It is not everywhere around us. You’re also stretching the word “left” to mean “communism”. Yes, our popular culture is “left” in a sense. This by no means translates to outright communism. “Ooooo hollywood are a bunch of commies!” What a joke. This isn’t even true about our politicians. Are they authoritarian bastards? YES! But communists? Hardly. The American political class has chosen middle-of-the-road corporatist socialism. Our democrats are quasi-corporatist and our republicans are quasi-socialist. The combined trend of the status quo is as such a fusionism - center-statism.