But Buck hauled "communism" into the conversation, essentially shoehorning anyone who was concerned about a government that was too powerful and had too little effective opposition into an anticommunist lunatic.

Go look at the thread again. The original article never even mentions "communism."

It's difficult to deal with this since they've effectively shredded every political term that can be used in this context, and I'm usually reduced to spelling out the charactistics in a long description.

It's as though the word "elephant" was forbidden, and I have to keep saying "very large, gray, land-going, vegetarian mammal with a trunk, tusks, and big ears."

This has evolved to the point where good liberals believe there is no such thing as communists any more. Just a lot of people who think that a nation run the same basic way as Cuba would be a great idea.

Just as an aside: If the Republicans got that much control of a state or country, totally veto-proof and filibuster-proof majorities across the board, every liberal here would be screaming about the Fall of Civilization. Note: I wouldn't think much of it either.

Hell, the Republicans had a maximum 55-seat majority in the Senate during the entire Bush administration, and Bowser thinks that was a dictatorship. It was 59 seats in favor of the Democrats after the 2008 elections, and liberals I knew back then universally believed that finally this country would be run right without having to deal with that crappy opposition party.