askchapo

I think you're right that they do it as a defense mechanism, but it's just as much a defense against things that actually becoming communists would cause as it is a defense from the bad image of liberalism. It's because actually taking the plunge into opposing NATO, defending AES, opposing imperialism, and generally deprogram themselves would require them to:

• Not only have disagreements with their reactionary family members and friends, but now also their liberal ones, reducing their social support network
• Become genocide deniers in the eyes of polite society if they're pressed on topics like the Holodomor and the Uyghur genocide. This particular point also applies to a ton of other specific points of anticommunist propaganda that they would have to be able to identify as false in the first place (how often do you put yourself in the kind of headspace to question whether a historical event like the Armenian genocide is accurately portrayed by your education? would you take the social risk of deciding to become a revisionist on it? would you trust that your revisionist position is actually based on the evidence and not your ideological bias?). Generally, it's very socially punishing to "defect" from the established historical narrative. In the case of the Polish person you mentioned in the other comment it's definitely worth noting that there's been a concerted effort by the European far right (especially in Eastern Europe) to construct the Double Genocide Theory to make the USSR to be just as bad as Nazi Germany. So to contradict the hegemonic anticommunist position is equivalent to becoming a Holocaust denier. Not a lot of people are willing to take that social risk.
• Unlearn how they see the world in a more fundamental level than the simplistic anticapitalism that you see from the soft left crowd. Fundamentally, a lot of radlib types who nominally oppose capitalism still see the world through a neoliberal postmodern perspective that they've only subtracted free market capitalism from, but is otherwise untouched. Replacing that with something new is hard because one of the traps of postmodernity is making people think that believing in anything is cringe.