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You have to hand it to the Communists. Despite the appearance of "losing" at the end of the 1980s, they thoroughly mind-fucked just about everyone except for a few cranky holdouts into thinking they were just a bunch of idealistic do-gooders who were maligned and oppressed by right-wing authoritarians like Reagan. I don't think I know more than a handful of mainstream American Democrats who have anything bad to say about Communists or Communism. That narrative simply doesn't exist. They were victims of the real bad guys. End of.
As somebody from a European country that never came under communist rule, this doesn’t seem at all accurate.
The communists lost that round of the culture war so thoroughly that literally everybody, including those few who still consider themselves socialist, will fervently, absolutely condemn everything that has to do with Soviet and Soviet collaborators in the west.
I honestly just don’t buy that it would really be any different in the US, and if your experience says otherwise then I think you might be living in a bubble.
McCarthyism did have the inadvertent effect of making US communists seem as victims, and thus as at least initially sympathetic to most of the American left. They won't defend Stalin, but they will portray pro-Stalin communists as victims of an oppressive US security apparatus. Communism did not become popular in the 1960s, but anti-anti-communism became very widespread, especially among boomers.
That's why Bond films had to be rewritten from the books to stop the Soviets being the bad guys. Making Bond someone hunting down and fighting against Soviet spies/sympathisers would make him instantly uncool.
See also the portrayal of communism in pretty much every good anti-establishment comedy of the period, e.g. Monty Python. It's not communist, but it is always anti-anti-communist:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VEy5vIWCJLQ
Eventually, boomers became the establishment. Anti-communist Democrats like Lyndon B. Johnson or Harry S. Truman became anachronisms. Worrying about communism became a way of signalling that you were a hopeless and contemptible square - a Dan Quayle type:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=83tnWFojtcY
Thankfully, there was nothing to fear from Russia, or from socialist regimes where people would have to line up for toilet paper amidst shortages.
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There might be a more thoughtful contingent of people who will argue that any Communist regime that has bad consequences was corrupted by the human weaknesses that Communism was meant to overcome (IMO, the fatal flaw of Communism), but most people don't think that deeply about it. The Communists lost the short game but won the long game, by spreading Communist ideas through academia and, downstream of that, civil rights movements, and downstream of that, entertainment and news media. That these ideas aren't directly associated with Communism any longer are part of its victory. But, for the most part, in the US at least, Communists were (ironically) "free speech" martyrs who were oppressed by the omnipresent fascism of big business and right-wing political leaders, or they were liberators of dispossessed groups in the U.S. globally, from labor to minority racial groups. It was a very smart strategy, and it divorced the incremental steps from the ultimate goal in the minds of the short-term activists.
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...Then why is Elizabeth Gurley Flynn getting a marker? Like, if what you say is true, how do you explain the event this entire thread is about?
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Post- communist / post-socialist countries are not as kind to the communists.
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Very online zoomers and gen X who know nothing, sure.. but is it the same for mainstream democrats who remember the 1980s and earlier eras ?
Communists should be seen at the same level as Nazis. Communists get tenure at major universities.
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