My posts on liberal sympathies for communist regimes seems to have struck a nerve. While a few still deny it or continue to offer apologies, most write to tell their own similar experiences–including some very recent. Here are some excerpts. (BTW, I never post the names of correspondents unless given permission to do so.)
I find it hard to imagine that your assertions are even controversial. Very much the same sort of thing is going on today among some liberals. Many of them have learned not to pop off too loudly in the post-9/11 world, but there’s still a not-insignificant undercurrent of opinion that says we should be struggling to understand “root causes” of radical Islam–with the clear implication being that American-style classical liberalism (as amended!), and all its evil effects on the world, are the “root causes.” There’s still a subset of liberals that’s just incapable of making sound moral judgments. (Not that there isn’t a similar subset of conservatives.)
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I’d like to add another voice of agreement with you on this one. I had similar conversations with liberals pre-1989. One I particularly remember is my high school AP comparative government teacher in the fall of 1989; he argued at length that we shouldn’t judge; that the people of not only the Soviet Union but of Eastern Europe had chosen a system of greater stability and safety than ours; and that Tiananmen Square may have been necessary from a Chinese perspective. In college in the early 90’s, I continued to hear people claim that it wasn’t communism that had failed, but Stalinism, and that Gorbachev was in the process of building the real, true, successful communism which would be better than either Stalinism or capitalism.
I would add, though, that I don’t think this phenomenon is confined to liberals. I’ve heard pro-business conservatives argue that the reformed Chinese communist party, Pinochet, Suharto, and Lee Kwan Hew’s governments were leading their countries to bright futures and were better than democracy would be for them.
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. . . . I think many liberals saw socialism in theory as a noble ideal. (This view ranged from seeing it as a purely theoretical ideal that couldn’t work in practice to something that might work in part (a la early labor England or Sweden) to something that might be made to work in the right circumstances.) From this perspective, the Soviet Union betrayed the ideal into something really evil under Stalin, got less bad under Kruschev, but still had not affirmative contribution to make to the noble ideal. By contrast, China and Cuba, despite flaws, still seemed to have a chance of developing (at least some of) the noble ideal aspects of socialism.
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I was very much struck, when reading Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold by his “proposal”, put I think into Henry Kissinger’s mouth, that as the USA is a good place to be rich and the USSR was a good place to be poor, we ought to exchange our poor for their rich. This is meant to be farce, of course. I do think, however, that as with Swift’s Modest Suggestion, Heller thought his satire started with universally accepted truths. I think that the statement, if you are poor, you’re better off in the USSR would have been accepted by many ’70s and ’80s liberals.
………………………………I just graduated from a rather liberal law school (I know that doesn’t narrow it down a lot) in 2002. I was sitting in a class wholly unrelated to contemporary politics (it was actually about medieval Icelandic sagas) when I hear a classmate say “Communism was a good idea. It just wasn’t put into practice right.” I paraphrase the wording, but not the meaning. I think it’s hearing stuff like that from otherwise well-meaning liberals today – the girl was about 22 at the time – that makes your posts about liberals defending the USSR so believable to me.
Yes, we all know that conservatives and libertarians can sometimes say objectionable things too, with which not all conservatives or libertarians agree. But (a) they should be and often are criticized for it (sometimes by other conservatives or libertarians), and (b) I am speaking about a pretty widespread phenomenon, not an isolated remark by a crazy person–though I took pains to attribute it only to some liberals.
Because the political principle “from each according to his abilities to each according to his need” appeals to many modern liberals–which accounts for many of their policy preferences–it is natural they would sympathize with a a regime that, in their mind at least, is founded on a more radical implementation of this principle, though they may regret what they think are the “unintended consequences” of these regimes, or they may conclude that it is impractical to take the principle that far–which is why they are themselves liberals and not communists.
This is no different than, because many libertarians are attracted to the “nonaggression principle” that more than a few libertarians are individualist anarchists–a phenomenon that no knowledgeable libertarian would deny whether or not he or she was himself or herself an anarchist–though, of course, anyone claiming that all libertarians were anarchists would obviously be mistaken.
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