[Loq]

Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin ... made similar promises. Did they deliver?

Political movements cannot meaningfully be evaluated by what they promise, for the all promise the world, but by

- Before they come to power: by what they are likely to deliver (which is predicted from what similar policies have lead to in the past).

- Post facto: what they did deliver.

This is obvious. Everybody in this discussion is aware of this.

There is an interesting social phenomenon at play here, that deserves intellectual curiosity and explanation: there is no identifiable political ideology in the history of humanity that failed to deliver so hard and so often with identical policies, as the Marxist position via Leninist cadre parties. Yet even today, we we see apologias like pjc50's despite Marxist / Leninist cadre parties. I've even pointed to the A/B testing that were the division of Germany and Korea.

Many times people have tried to answer this question. I'm broadly in agreement with Nietzsche on this one ...

[bobthepanda]

If we’re talking about governance failures, I’d argue that absolute monarchies also generally ended up failing at delivering results. There aren’t very many left for a reason.