It’s a well documented fact that authoritarians utilize leftist terminology as the keystone of their propaganda/branding strategy. The masses, sadly, will always accept charismatic, strongly-worded branding over genuine ideals. There is nothing “no true scottsman” about it.
There was literally a slip split in the first international. You can’t blame those aligning with the lesser influential side for the things the authoritarians did. “The Left” is a far too broad concept to apply the No True Scotsman fallacy to.
Adopting the names of left leaning styles of government does nothing to change their actual oligarch and kleptocratic styles is leadership, so that does not apply.
Unless we’re to believe that Nazi Germany was somehow just a bunch of misguided socialists…
No true Scotsman fallacy
I’m progressive, but we should not deny the failure modes of progressivism
It’s a well documented fact that authoritarians utilize leftist terminology as the keystone of their propaganda/branding strategy. The masses, sadly, will always accept charismatic, strongly-worded branding over genuine ideals. There is nothing “no true scottsman” about it.
There was literally a
slipsplit in the first international. You can’t blame those aligning with the lesser influential side for the things the authoritarians did. “The Left” is a far too broad concept to apply the No True Scotsman fallacy to.Edit: typo
Adopting the names of left leaning styles of government does nothing to change their actual oligarch and kleptocratic styles is leadership, so that does not apply.
Unless we’re to believe that Nazi Germany was somehow just a bunch of misguided socialists…
Well, Elon and German far-right politician Alice Weidel claimed in a recent talk that Hitler was a communist…
(a) love your name… though I do prefer farro/emmer when given the choice ;)
(b) of course those nazis did… always co-opting existing names and symbols for evil
Yeah idk, excluding all the historical Marxist Leninists movements from the leftist continuum feels a bit disingenuous.
Soviet Russia wasn’t exactly a model of progressivism though— it was a rigidly hierarchical society with extreme wealth disparity.
Same for the other examples.
The NTS fallacy is about redefining terms to cherry-pick data. Those regimes don’t match any version of ‘progressive’ I’ve ever seen.
Stalin wasn’t progressivism, actually the opposite, it was the conservative part of the party, that inspired the other dictators.