this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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askchapo

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Do liberals adopt leftist personas to avoid confronting the consequences of liberalism? (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 day ago by yunqihao@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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This might be a silly question, so I want to preface it with an apology in advance and if you think there is a better place to ask please let me know.

I’ve come across a large number of self-described “anarchists” or “non-communist leftists,” or the like, mostly online,thanks to where I live (谢天谢地). But whenever you look a bit closer, the pattern is the same: underneath the aesthetics and language, it’s just liberalism. Pro-NATO positions, contempt toward the global periphery, and extremely reactionary responses when imperialism or capitalism are seriously questioned.

So my question is: Is adopting these leftist identities a kind of defensive mechanism (an attempt to distance themselves from the real-world damage caused by liberal ideology) or am I misunderstanding what’s actually going on?

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[–] PKMKII@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago

Obviously, it’s hard to speak generally about people in these broad strokes.

However, what I’ve noticed is there’s this instinct with people entering leftist/socialist politics to want to find a “new path” to socialism that avoids identifying with the USSR and AES countries. So they see opposition to those countries while doing a perfunctory criticism of the West as “fighting imperialism of all kinds” without realizing that AES countries are nowhere near the hegemony of the liberal imperial core. It’s an idealist view that sees everything as “marketplace of ideas” and doesn’t consider the material.