> I don't even know what the whipping boy was before facism. Possibly Bonapartism
It depends on the time and place. The favorite boogeyman of the Bolsheviks were the bourgeoisie at first, followed by the Mensheviks (communists of slightly wrong persuasion), and then counterrevolutionaries. The boogeyman for the royal regimes of the 19th century Europe was the French revolution, anything not sufficiently orthodox was automatically suspect.
Re:The case against crisis-mongering
by FooBarBizBazz on Saturday August 14, 2021 @08:05PM
(#28185045)
There's a throwaway line somewhere in Kenneth Clark's Civilization, where he says that railing against "tyranny" (sort of gesturing back to the Roman Republic) was the rhetorical go-to of the pre-Marxist revolutionary.
Given the absolutely absurd number of real-world experiments run over the last 2,000 years the ultra-short-term view people have of political history is a bit silly. Eg, I don't even know what the whipping boy was before facism. Possibly Bonapartism. We've tried everything at least thrice by this point and it is clear most people don't want to learn from the past and aren't particularly interested in having a clear language to discuss politics with.