We are stuck with this idiot due in some measure to our refusal to spike the football and do a victory dance at the end of the Cold War. There was never a reckoning for just how stupid and destructive communism was (unlike fascism). Most people still think it’s “good in theory”, and have only a vague idea that it might have been the cause of some bad stuff. “Communist” and “Socialist” are just seen as name-calling these days, devoid of any content. They should carry at least the weight that “Nazi” does. I suppose by the time the Cold War came to an end, the liberals had so taken over the media that any triumphalism would have been seen as too much of a help for Republicans. Hollywood spent its time making movies like Reds, Salvador, and others propping up the mass murderers (with exceptions like The Killing Fields).
Freepers talk about various media and institutional “takeovers” by liberals as though they were acts of God or otherwise inevitable in some way. Yet they refuse to look at how conservative historic actions or inactions resulted in this strategic defeat.
As the “party of Lincoln”, I recall damned few Republicans working for civil rights and voter registration for black citizens or equal rights for women during the 50’s and 60’s. Republicans have spearheaded zero social initiatives that have subsequently evolved into core aspects of Americans’ contemporary sense of fair play and as such have been Darwined to the margins of the cultural food chain.
Just as one might assign greater intelligence to those who accumulate wealth, you can also assign lesser intelligence to those who squander an historic advantage. The right has suffered from a near terminal case of media illiteracy and were totally outflanked and rolled up by the “drugs, sex & rock & roll counterculture”.
Why aren’t we shrieking for jail time for bankers? I see almost no reporting of articles critical of banking practices on Free Republic, no naming of names, no calling for criminal indictment, no critical discourse on the failings of “free market” or “lassaiz faire”, no call for a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.
It seems as though conservatives have simply watched as the 20st century Age of Info yanked the rug out from underneath their feet. Time to get smarter, kidz.
I personally think the reason most people do not think socialism (soft communism)is “really” bad...they do not have war or even peacetime pictures of that form of government. We have millions of pictures of Naziism on the war channel daily. During the cold war, we had many “newsmen” who travelled to the USSR and came back telling us of the wonderful things the Soviet Union was doing for “the little people”. Free education, free health care. Everyone was happy, according to the newspeople. They didn’t talk of the night calls to individual homes by the KGB. They didn’t tell us about the gulags and the treatment the prisoners were given. So there is a big disconnect between what we know of Nazi Germany and the countries of the USSR. I doubt even some of our elected youngsters have no idea of the Soviet Union’s treatment of their citizens.