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One's moral position is entirely irrelevant to descriptive analysis.
You're playing the Botero to my Machiavelli here. The idea that the USSR is better or worse than the USA is less than useless to predict the behavior of either power. I won't have the Prince submit to God's higher power as a prerequisite of our discussion, because I'm interested in how politics actually works, not how it ought to.
This is a widely believed myth that does not understand that Hindenburg's maneuver to the right was precisely meant to repress the communists in a way he thought he could better control. He couldn't of course. But Weimar had much stronger repression than people think.
You are directionally right however in that it is his own scruples that led to him being circulated away. A common feature of the fall of elites is that they grasp for hard power at the last minute but do not possess the resolve to use it when it is actually necessary.
This I think is our real disagreement. You (and you are in numerous company there) believe that ideology is the precursor to political action, that people think of things to do and then do them, and therefore that various ideologies can justify themselves into doing various levels of things.
I disagree. I think ideology comes after political action, and is merely a justification mechanism. I think any group who has large enough an interest to do something will find a way to justify it within any ideological framework, to degrees that look absurd from the outside.
And I can engage to my side the countless points in history in which politicians have acted seemingly against their declared principles. They are almost too numerous to count. Was Reagan collaborating with Iran really coherent? Was Mao declaring himself "right wing" at the end of the cultural revolution coherent?
It was not, but coherence is a luxury you build on top of power. Not the other way around.
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