Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
I have seen that at work in EE immigrant communities, which offer a rare opportunity for ceteris paribus comparison of reaction to different ideologies and power relations. Thus, ex-party apparatchiks who were nominally "communist" generally embraced the nominally "capitalist and individualistic" Repugs on the side of the pond. At the same time, the opposition figures, including the yours truly - who were nominally anti-communists on the other side of the iron curtain - frequently fell into the liberal of the left camp here.
This tells us that ideology itself is not a good predictor of party affiliation, but a cognitive attitude toward the dominant power is. The apparatchiks tended to defer to powers that be regardless of the ideology, while the dissidents defied these powers, again regardless of ideology.
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I agree. I toured Eastern Europe a bit in the 80s and have worked around a lot of anti-Communist emigres when I was at Stanford. I never met member of a Communist Party from that region who could be described as anything more than a Social Democrat. I only met one or two communists and they weren't in the Party. As for the rest of the emigres, they were 90% socially conservative, Republican voters when they came to the U.S with about 10% liberal to conservative Democrats. Some emigres viewed themselves as a more or less, elitist band of neo-monarchists. One of the saddest legacies of Stalinist rule was that most of its officials were mere opportunists who, as Woj observes, developed equally repugnant, symbiotic relationships with Power when they moved the the West. Their ideological labels had next to nothing to do with the content of their poltical praxis.
Best, Mike B)
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