this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Well a lot of that can be explained by the fact that conservatives co-opted the left wing movements for communism and largely turned them into dictatorships. These governments endured several decades before collapsing, which allows newer conservatives to think of them as "the good ol days."
It doesn't mean they ever were communists. They just stole the name and ruined its reputation.
A simpler explanation is that the people who seek power are the worst of the bunch and they'll say whatever it takes to get there and keep it - it's a pretty well know thing since Ancient times that the best rulers are the ones who do NOT want to rule.
Sociopaths will just as easilly sing praises to Marxism-Leninism as they will to the Free Market, so don't confuse whatever bullshit they spout to get to and stay at the top of the pile in an the power structures created by a specific ideology with their actual beliefs and don't excuse the failures of the structures created by that ideology that allow such people to get to the top.
Even if the "Revolution" isn't led by assholes, any power structure which centralizes power and doesn't have hard to subvert mechanisms for constant change of who is in power, attract the worst vermin and they're the one who will knifes as many backs as it takes to get it and keep it so they're far more likely to get it than "good people". This is true even in Power Duopoly systems like the US, and much worse in power monopolies like the Soviet Union and even Modern Russia.
That blaming of "others" for one's own failures is just you having internalised the typical propaganda from the power hungry assholes (just as much from the ones portraying themselves as Fascists or from the ones portraying themselves as Communists) to deflect the blame for their own actions away from themselves.
Back to the specifics of your point, the inherent weakness of Socialism and Communism as opposed to more Democratic systems like Social Democracy, is that the former require a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat to reach the final utopia which was Equality For All, and invariably that supposedly temporary step were power and the Means Of Production are centralized becomes permanent, and they're exactly the kind of structure that pulls is the worst assholes: Lenin was probably somebody who, at least to begin with, had his hearth in the right place (though with him too, the Power Corrupts dictum applies), whilst Stalin was a pure Sociopath.
I don't disagree with you, but I wasn't trying to explain the origins of communism, but rather why conservatives would feel nostalgia for it today.
I get the impression that a lot of conservatism (in the original sense of word) is really old people yearning for something from their old days, which is just the image they have of their youth beautified by the passage of time.
I can see that with old Communists in the country I lived in: they grew up with the fire of their youthfull belief in Communism, back in the days of Fascist Dictatorship and even more so in the days of the Revolution which overthrew that Dictatorship, so they yearn for that feeling back, not for the Fascist Dictatorship but for that "simple" Communist and the fire of believing it and acting it from their youth.
The thing is, it wasn't that Communism back then was simpler (sure, the practical implementations of that ideology invariably had simple emotion-appealing slogans accessible to all people of all educational levels, but that was just the Propaganda and the reality of it was never simple), it was they themselves who were comparativelly simple as teenagers and young adults compared to their much older selves of present day.
Then around that you have a lot of young people who are attracted to simple explanations for things - same for Politics as for Religion - many of whom get swayed by those older people who trully believe that Communism of old was simple and pure.
So my theory is that it wasn't as much conservatives who took over Communist, it's that the ones who have been there and stuck with it their whole lives became conservative.