I recently saw a post with a meme that had two skulls, one saying ‘yes, but that wasn’t real socialism’. The implicit argument was that socialism is often used as an excuse and ends up with totalitarian regimes that kill a load of people.
One thing struck me about that: there’s no right-wing equivalent. People on the left point at Stalin and Mao and say that they were people who used left-wing ideals to build authoritarian states and ended up killing a load of people. They weren’t real communists. But, at the same time, people on the right wear ‘Hitler was right’ t-shirts. There’s no claim that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and so on were not real embodiments of their ideals.
Both extremes have given rise to dictators who have committed atrocities, but the ones on the left have been roundly disavowed by the movements that they rode to power. Falling to authoritarianism is seen as a failure by the left, but as success by the right.
So I saw this meme as a pretty strong endorsement of the left. Probably not how it was intended.
