“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
It goes back to the presentation of politics and political history as fundamentally a logic puzzle whereby you deduce the most freedom-y system in the abstract and everything descends from that. You see this all the time with the Founding Fathers where the revolution is taught as being purely about their ideals of what a just state should be and any historical context, discussions of their material interests, is brushed to the side or treated as a footnote. So it’s not just there’s an ignorance of historical context, it’s that they outright dismiss it as being important.
This is why we get “Communism 200 billion dead vuvuzela no iPhone” when it comes to nominally socialist states but when it comes to US atrocities it’s always “that’s not what we truly are, those are hiccups on the path to a more perfect union.” If they think the logic puzzle fits, then deaths don’t matter because we need to trust the process.
Idk, my version of that as a former lib was "wait so if the solution is social democracy, why can't we have it?" which inevitably drove me to communism.
Yeah it's like, gee the world would be a better place if the capitalists in charge simply allowed us to have a better and fulfilling life that isn't an endless struggle to earn resources that aren't even scarce using the left over money we earned them after they skimmed 99% of it. They could be more generous and still stay insanely rich! Everybody wins!
Yeah that would sure be great. They're never going to do that. Become a communist.