The problem with leftists is that they continually fall back on the old, old, old Leninist ploy of promising “the people” the sun, stars, and moon at the expense of “the ruling class.”
Once they’re in power, of course, the useful idiots realize that it’s all bunk, but until then, an occasional handful of goodies and trinkets keeps the masses slavering.
And the morons fall for it every time.
People fall for it because people are addicted to idols. They figure that maybe THIS time, the idol in the capital will do what it was put there for. When usually, the idol itself gave pretty fair warning in its own words.
Only thing worse than a Fascist, is an “Anti-Fascist.”
They wind up being one and the same, in the end.
But then Citizen Stakhanov asks an Embarrassing Question about some point of cognitive dissonance someone carelessly left lying around ..... and then the process of revelation begins.
Gorbachev's glasnost, his programmatic openness to facts, killed Soviet Communism in about three years flat. That's pretty impressive. An American journalist said he was in a big room with a TV in Russia when Gorby's TASS and other agencies opened up. The TV showed a typical big grocery in the States, with people shopping for a wide variety of foods, and the Russian announcer was explaining that this wasn't some Potemkin setup by the clever American propagandists, but instead a typical American shopping experience.
The American visitor didn't say anything but just watched the older Russian women, the babushkas, to see how they would take it in, having been lied to all their lives, from Stalin's time onward, about American life and what big liars the capitalists were. The women didn't say anything or overtly demonstrate a reaction, but the American visitor noticed after a while a tear rolling down one woman's cheek.
Game over.