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Notes -
Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.
California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.
It all adds up.
2nd comment because I had another thought:
A lot of it probably has to do with conservatives making Marxism sound super cool and awesome for the last 3-4 decades?
Like, if Marxism actually meant, in the public imagination, 'Stalin and Mao and nothing else', it would probably still be unpopular.
But conservatives have applied the label to everything from every attempt the government makes to help people (that includes spending money) to every attempt by workers to organize or otherwise improve their bargaining power relative to bosses to basically every form of critical analysis and critical theory (post-modern neo-Marxism) to most of Hollywood and the entertainment industry to etc. etc. etc.
So, given that Marxism means all of that in the popular imagination, then yeah, of course people are going to like it, or at least not get universal support for virulently attacking it.
As far as I can tell, the process went something like 'Communist countries were legitimately awful and threatening -> Conservatives attacked American communists and Marxists in a reaction against those terrible nations and threats -> This worked so well that conservatives continued to call everything their political opponents did communist/Marxist as a generic smear for decades -> The next generation of their political opponents found that they were growing up in a world where everything they wanted to do and be was being called Marxist -> The next generation really likes Marxism'
Maybe the same thing will happen with racism if the left keeps using it as a generic smear against everything the right does, seems like that's already happening a little bit in places like this, between HBD and 'despite' and so forth. Of course, as other commenters have pointed out, the difference is that Marxism has a utopian vision it can rally all kinds of people around ,whereas racism is definitionally decisive and exclusionary, so no matter how much it is recontextualized it still has a limited audience. But time will tell.
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