• zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    For the same reason you can have Proud Boys shouting "Fuck the Police" after getting pepper sprayed.

    Mass Line movements don't exist to take the vanguard on culture issues. They're there to move the ball on economic issues, while letting culture chug along at its own speed. This is one of the first things guys like Lenin and Mao ran into when revolutionizing their own countries. There's simply no nut in trying to tell Catholics to stop being Catholic or Buddhists to stop being Buddhist for the sake of ideology. Far better to incorporate vanguard leaders into the church and turn the institution into another organ of the Proletarian Dictatorship.

    Cuba and China and Venezuela aren't moving along much slower than Texas or Florida or South Dakota, when it comes to questions of social conservatism. And the countries aren't being shredded by culture-warrior feuds, either. The state bureaucracy is moving at the speed of public enthusiasm for reforms. You know, kinda like a democracy is supposed to operate.