If you're willing to entertain certain theories of totalitarianism, some of which do originate in the Right, with an open enough mind to come to a set of conclusions about the Soviet Union, you will realize that there is a certain degree of veracity to the claim that Marxism-Leninism is a "political religion", which is a rather high flown way of saying that it is just simply a mass cult, an attempt to, though, as a self-respecting libertarian socialist, I would never abandon something like free association in the name of some sort of botched pragmatism, establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or "immanetize the eschatonon", is not only sanctimonious but also necessarily ethically suspect, despite whatever rationalizations may have been made so as to suggest that Communism is an ostensibly "scientific" historical process and not an eschatological humanitarian project, which, in my opinion, only further vitiates the ideology, Karl Marx, whose evocative description of the Paris Commune, "the dictatorship of the proletariat", was later appropriated by Vladimir Lenin, whose political legacy was later exploited by Josef Stalin, for all the nuance, complexity, dynamics, and and skepticism of his theories, by his treatment of Mikhail Bakunin, whom I loathe to defend, or Max Stirner, was kind of demagogic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, perhaps, sacrificed too much in historical scholarship in order to draw a clear through line between Lenin and Stalin, Hannah Arendt, whose, like it or not, The Origins of Totalitarianism does seem to be what began "horseshoe theory", and Leszek Kołakowski are just simply good authors, it is quite common for the Left as a whole to completely ignore or dismiss dissident movements within the former Soviet Union, and that there really are people out there who do casually talk about decapitating their political opponents via the guillotine, you do kind of begin to resent having brought yourself up through a myriad of different left-wing ideologies who, to varying degrees, do seem to be somehow complicit within Soviet apologetics.

Having developed this resentment, what you immediately realize is that you can't really leave the Left. I could give you a cursory overview of the rest of the political spectrum so as to explain as to just why this is, but, for brevity's sake, I would just take my word for that, from any anti-authoritarian perspective, you're effectively relegated to either the libertarian Left or the "radical Center", which is another way of referring to a kind of well-reasoned Liberalism that is particularly concerned with human rights. Because there has now become only one political position for you to maintain, all that you really any longer do is engage in critique. What, while doing so, you do not encounter is an ostensive implicitly Marxist-Leninist media dominant "Liberal elite". What, however, you will encounter is left-wing academia and what left-wing academia will do is to ignore you or anyone else with similar concerns almost entirely. This is extraordinarily easy for them to do, as they can always rely upon an appeal to the hysterical reaction to Communism in general, particularly in the United States, or, accuse you of being complicit within a Western Exceptionalist project orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, as, every last point that I just mentioned was used for just that.

What you then begin to suspect is that thought-terminating clichés like the "Liberal elite" may be more clever than you might expect. The Left does kind of have a tendency to be intellectually domineering, psychologically abusive, and to consistently fall back upon an appeal to ideology, effectively amounting to an assumption on their part that, to be given a voice within a debate, you would have first have to have read this or that text by Marx or this that interpretation of it and so on and so forth, all of which do have the effect of creating an intellectual class that does comprise of an elite, which, though clearly the situation in the West is not so dire, was often referred to as the apparat in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Regardless as to what the CIA claims about this, what I do suspect is that they want for it to occur. Why this is, I suspect, is that they want to leave the West with only two options. You can choose between the apparently Liberal democratic West and the either nascent or evident totalitarianism of the rest of the world.

What I am suggesting is that there needs to be a "third camp". We are told, by Anarchists and Liberals alike, that it exists already and has always existed. When I consider the general political ethos of the world at large, however, I do feel so inclined to suspect that it has been nothing more than a political sect. In order for it to, I do think that a rather sober analysis of the Soviet political legacy is just simply requisite.