Yeah, I see it as a great foreclosure on the imagination and on the horizon of possibility. Once you look for it in liberalism, you’ll start noticing it everywhere.

I live in a country where it’s common for very progressive progressives and radicals to lament that the masses are extremely politically apathetic. Like, the polar opposite of the French who start flipping cars and starting fires in the street because parliament is trying to reduce pensions kinda thing.

I don’t disagree with that take that people are apathetic but I think there’s something deeper going on than just some widespread individualistic moral failing. I think that liberalism has been very effective here in creating a cultural belief that it’s impossible to make things better and that there’s no point fighting for things.

There’s a reason why people identify so strongly with that Churchill quote “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” and it’s because they genuinely believe that liberalism is shit but it’s the best that things are gonna get. It’s like some sort of mass Stockholm syndrome or a political learned helplessness experiment inflicted on the masses.

You encounter it when organising. People are deeply pessimistic and genuinely hopeless, if you dig under the surface a little bit. Contemporary liberalism requires the erosion of hope so that masses remain passive and they don’t organise and fight, so they don’t vote en masse outside of the two party system, so they don’t start a revolution etc.

If you want to go deep on this there’s a weird sort of dualism in liberals because this hopelessness makes people react by resorting to investing hope in the status quo as a secondary response. This is why people put so much hope in electing Harris but they try to convince people that a third party vote is a waste:

“We all have to band together and vote for Kamala to stop things from getting worse!!”

“Cool but what if we all band together and vote for the PSL or the green party and make things better?”

“Um, no. That will never work.”

I’m sorry, what??

I think that’s why the DNC were so desperate to clip Bernie’s wings (outside of the economic reasons to do so); he represented a massive political threat to the DNC because a movement that has mass support where people start making demands means that they can no longer force their agenda on the compliant masses who believe that the only thing they can do is accept the hidden bipartisan consensus on government policy.

In order to radicalise, I think people in the west generally have to go through a process of losing hope, even that secondary response to hopelessness by investing hope in the status quo, so when they get spat out of liberalism they mostly end up bereft of hope entirely. I’d say for most people that’s necessary to negate the indoctrination from liberal hegemony. The problem is when people fail to genuinely create hope for the struggle and for a better world. It’s not all anarchists who have this sort of lack of hope, this “don’t seize power because you’ll only make things worse if you try” kinda attitude because it’s pretty endemic in lots of the left more broadly; there are leftcoms and doomer tendencies like with Mark Fisher or Chris Hedges and the people who buy into the anti-USSR paradigm and so on.

You can ask this type of person what all the failures and inadequacies of something like the Soviet Union were and if you genuinely listen they’ll have a laundry list of complaints, which is fine - that’s their prerogative. But when you ask them what movement they do find inspiring, which one was better than the USSR they tend to come up with nothing or they’ll give you a half-hearted answer like “Burkina Faso led by Thomas Sankara I guess” and if you get them to talk about why they find Burkina Faso’s revolution inspiring they tend to give very shallow answers or they’ll regress into talking about what could have been. I think this is representative of a deep kind of hopelessness that is really commonplace.

I’m gonna do some detestable armchair psychologist cultural critic routine here (like I haven’t already been doing that lol), so excuse me while I get self-indulgent, but I genuinely think for a lot of people that psychological trauma of losing all hope in politics when they radicalise goes unresolved and so when they are confronted with the invitation to engage in political optimism, they tend react very negatively and viscerally to it because they aren’t ready to hope again as the experience of suffering disappointment and losing all hope has been too much for them to deal with and they haven’t really completed the cycle of grief that they needed to go through, so it draws out all sorts of hostility and rejection and apathy. I’m not saying that everyone in the radical left must get hyped for the Soviet Union or otherwise they are psychologically broken but to see very brokenhearted people whose politics lacks any genuine hope, I think there’s a psychological response going on beneath the surface that drives this.

So I think that other responses in this thread are right about liberal anti-communist indoctrination but in my opinion there’s also deeper psychological reasons for why people adopt this indoctrination and really cling to it, otherwise it would be a simple process of providing counterfactuals that debunk this indoctrination and people would change their minds almost instantly because their position was purely based on false information. But I think we are all aware that it’s a much more involved process than simply correcting some falsehoods and this is because there’s psychological factors that motivate this belief at play, which is what I’ve been outlining here.