Our society is not without faults. Our domestic and foreign policies are also often flawed. To correct failings, we need people who point them out, however unpopular that may be. We should be enabling a wide framework of public discourse, not seeking to silence people. To date, we haven’t quite reached the level of hysteria of 1950s McCarthyism, but we are perhaps coming close.
Actually, it sounds more like you’re dismissing a standard political spectrum model to make communism sound less extreme than it is. Would you feel better if I used the word ‘radical’ rather than ‘extreme’?
So extreme and radical to you are just “the further away an ideology is from our current form of capitalism, the more extreme it is” then?
No, extreme is the further away an ideology is from centrist/moderate ideologies. At one end of the spectrum is fascism, at the other is communism.
And who gets to dictate what defines a centrist or moderate ideology?
Moderate communists.