this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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I started seeing r/ShitLiberalsSay recommended to me, and it made me realize I needed to do some reflection. I used to be a "vote blue, no matter who" liberal, but it took others point out that no matter who you voted for, the bombs dropped on the same targets. I think the most liberal thing I've ever said was in reaction to someone saying "eat the rich" with "they are people, too." The subreddit made me start question what liberalism even is, and a recommendation that kept being thrown around was Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo. I lost a lot of sleep due to how unbelievably angry I was reading the history of liberalism and realizing that it hasn't really changed.
So I started spending most of my time lurking in online left circles. The thing that finally made me want to start learning about the USSR was seeing the images of people visiting Stalin's grave during the anniversary of his death. I was having a conversation with my wife and her Navy, Poli Sci / History major brother and brought that up. "How can people want to visit the grave of someone described as a monster?" He responded with Stalin caused the 1950 famine by introducing communism to plant growth. I didn't know much about it, but that didn't stop me from wanting to dive deeper.
There were a lot of small things I learned here and there. I noticed that no matter how progressive the USSR was, the reaction was always "they were worse than the Nazis". Which led me to Blackshirts and Reds. It was the best explanation to the vitriol coming from the western "left." It was the explanation for my liberal brother in law that had a Poli Sci class that talked about the media being the fourth wing of the government, all while repeating the "Biden was the most progressive president since FDR" line spatted by the media... I tried to give him the book, but pretty much just called me a tankie and blew me off. That made the line, "scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds" really ring in my ear.
But that wasn't everything that helped push through the propaganda. Listened to Proles Pod, The Deprogram, lurked here and Hexbear, joined my local DSA and CPUSA, and of course read.
I've learned that CPUSA are just Democratic Party's puppet (because they used to endorse Hillary Clinton) and DSA are reformism. Isn't it true?
Yeah. It all started with Popular Front strategy of the Communist Party USA (1936). During the 1930s, the CPUSA did have a visible presence in unions, black freedom struggles, and anti-fascist coalitions, but this did not come about due to the popular front strategy, but in spite of it. The major successes of the CPUSA in organizing workers occurred before the popular front was implemented when the party experimented with militant united front tactics and still maintained its revolutionary identity. After adopting the popular front strategy, the CPUSA retreated from all that and, in the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, the Communists ceased all their criticism of the labor bureaucracy, the Roosevelt administration, and liberal organizations. Over the course of the 1930s, the class character of the CPUSA changed as its members took up positions within the labor bureaucracy and clamped down on working class militancy.
As a result of the popular front, the CPUSA retreated from its advocacy of communist revolution and ended up as the “left-wing” of the Democrats and the New Deal. The “hidden secret” of why the anticommunist Michael Harrington (the founder of DSA) idealized the popular front was not because it was proof that socialism had mass influence or spoke the language of ordinary people. Rather, he liked the popular front because it was when the communists ceased to be revolutionary and gave up on militant action, self-organization of the working class, and “sectarian” political independence in order to become loyal allies of the labor bureaucracy and liberals. In other words, it was when communists acted like Michael Harrington's ideal of a democratic socialist.