I always say, and I’m fairly confident it’s true, they’re more pro-autocracy than they are pro-leftist. They will defend a dictator when they harm people before they back the people being harmed. That’s not leftist. Leftism is on the side of the people being oppressed. They absolutely do more harm than good by making people think being left they have to agree with that group, but they’re a very loud minority.
While I don’t disagree that MLs online cause harm, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the root of the issue is decades of intergenerational indoctrination during the cold war that anything democratically socialist was directly equivalent to autocratic communism. There is a deep, cultural cognitive dissonance that occurs in the US about things like socialised medicine and welfare that I just don’t think tankies online influence as much as you think they do.
I always say, and I’m fairly confident it’s true, they’re more pro-autocracy than they are pro-leftist. They will defend a dictator when they harm people before they back the people being harmed. That’s not leftist. Leftism is on the side of the people being oppressed. They absolutely do more harm than good by making people think being left they have to agree with that group, but they’re a very loud minority.
While I don’t disagree that MLs online cause harm, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the root of the issue is decades of intergenerational indoctrination during the cold war that anything democratically socialist was directly equivalent to autocratic communism. There is a deep, cultural cognitive dissonance that occurs in the US about things like socialised medicine and welfare that I just don’t think tankies online influence as much as you think they do.