Dudes, You Were Wrong. Get Over It.
Kevin drum hits the nail on the head:
No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social democracy by how Western Europe has implemented it. That’s how you judge movements: by how their real-life adherents put them into practice, not by reference to a utopian vision of how they should be implemented if only we lived in the best of all possible worlds.
There’s been a lot of this kind of thing coming out of the craven brood of neoconservatives who’ve spent the last seven years systematically driving this country into the ground. They’ve been working hard to disassociate themselves from the policies that they fomented, on the grounds that the standard-bearers of their ideology just did it wrong. This is how loathsome scraps of vile like Richard Pearl and Doug Feith justify themselves these days: the war was right, and we were right. Bush just fucked it all up.
Well, this is worse than ridiculous — it’s dangerous. It’s fantasy in the face of demonstrable fact.
I have to admit to some respect for the communist movement that grew up in this country at the turn of the century, in response to the capitalist reign of terror that reduced huge swathes of the population to nothing more than subsistence rats. The communists did lots of good work back then, and persevered in the face of terrible persecution — and defeat after defeat — at the hands of their employers and their government. However — there’s just no denying that every experiment with pure communism has ended in dictatorship and misery. Which isn’t to say that there’s definitely a causal relationship between communism and despotism — just that every attempt has demonstrated one, and we can’t afford to risk trying anymore.
I’d say the same thing about the brand of scorched-earth neoconservatism that found its way to the levers of power with the ascension of the Bushies. An economy in the tank, a falling dollar, an endless war, a burgeoning surveillance society: these are the fruits of the neoconservative revolution.
So give it a rest guys. We tried it your way, and suffered for it. Time to move on.
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