I think you’re confusing “responding to a point someone is trying to make” and “making fun of someone”.
Fair point. My comment was unnecessarily snarky.
Maybe the average progressive has neither the power or the inclination to put me in a gulag but the side of things that they historically have lent their power and rhetoric to sure does.
There have been sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to support Soviet communism. There have also been significant sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to vociferously oppose Soviet communism. Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus and George Orwell—a few big names that come to mind immediately—all had political views that would probably classify them as “progressive” in today’s political climate. In addition, progressives have been at the forefront of most movements to expand civil liberties in the 20th century.
If you just focus on progressivism’s criticisms of capitalism and conservatism, then yeah, it doesn’t seem like a different kind of thing from Stalinism. But that ignores another prominent tendency in the history of the movement—a strong strain of civil libertarianism (the ACLU, for instance, is regarded by many as a progressive institution) -- which is qualitatively distinct from Stalinism.
Fair point. My comment was unnecessarily snarky.
There have been sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to support Soviet communism. There have also been significant sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to vociferously oppose Soviet communism. Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus and George Orwell—a few big names that come to mind immediately—all had political views that would probably classify them as “progressive” in today’s political climate. In addition, progressives have been at the forefront of most movements to expand civil liberties in the 20th century.
If you just focus on progressivism’s criticisms of capitalism and conservatism, then yeah, it doesn’t seem like a different kind of thing from Stalinism. But that ignores another prominent tendency in the history of the movement—a strong strain of civil libertarianism (the ACLU, for instance, is regarded by many as a progressive institution) -- which is qualitatively distinct from Stalinism.