There are plenty, now on the left and the right, who in the past, and sometimes too recent past, dabbled in ideologies that did not include an unwavering commitment to democratic government, the rule of law, and peaceful change through the ballot box.
Ex-communists: they are allowed back into polite society and into left-wing political parties often without have to admit and openly repent for being the fools that they were. Some of these ex-communists took a long time and were well past their immature youth to see the foolishness of their ways.
The forgiveness for ex-communists is odd as Hayek in the Road to Serfdom challenged the general view among British academics that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism, instead arguing that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and the power of the state over the individual.
The inter-war communists hated the Fascists because both competed for the working class vote and because ex-comrades such as Mussolini had worked out that co-opting nationalism with anti-big business rhetoric was a sure path into the hearts of the working class, lower-middle class, and small business and greatly increased the chances to seize power quickly and legally with wide support in times of discontent.
The economist Joan Robinson gazed on China and North Korea with “starry eyes”, as Geoffrey Harcourt put it, as well as making some utterly devastating criticisms of Marxian economics at earlier points in her long career. Robinson became more left wing as she aged, and in Economic Management in China (1975), she praised the Cultural Revolution! Her colleagues were quite embarrassed.
Noam Chomsky spoke when he should have listened on Cambodia under Pol Pot.
Orwell’s Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ is a wonderful dissection of renegade liberal that glorified communist experiments. For Orwell, these intellectuals loved the Stalin’s Soviet Union despite the purges, mocked bourgeois liberty despite their own pleasing bourgeois circumstances, and identified with communists would who have shipped them off to camps straight after the revolution. The renegade liberals excused the Moscow purges because communists were just ‘liberals in a hurry’!
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Oct 17, 2015 @ 09:55:37
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