I think the lesson here is that it's better to be hated but respected than liked but disrespected. For all the anticommunist bullshit, there's still a degree of respect that liberal society has towards MLs, even if it's filtered through contempt. Liberal society reserves no such respect for anarchism and it's not like liberal society particularly likes anarchism either outside of very surface adoption of its aesthetics.

It's incredibly precarious for a political ideology to be seen as a joke because it's going to attract dead beats and losers who will hold that political ideology back.