Since most people don’t have any real principles underlying their beliefs, it is often easy to slowly drag them in almost any direction. For example, once upon a time, almost all Americans were rabidly “anti-communist.” No, they didn’t know what the word actually meant, and didn’t realize how much the U.S. ruling class was already an authoritarian collectivist empire, but they were sure that “communism” was something bad. And so they hated it (or thought they did).
Now, starting with tiny little mentions here and there, gradual whittling away at their empty belief systems, socialism has reached the point where it is being openly pushed by plenty of politicians, pundits, “news” outlets, etc. And since most people never knew what the word meant to begin with, now that it’s NOT spoken of as a taboo concept, they forgot why they ever objected to it.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the same damn thing is happening with national socialism (Naziism) and fascism. So now the “land of the free” is approaching a rerun of late WWII, where two sets of scared, authoritarian imbeciles argue over whether we should have one flavor of authoritarian collectivism, or a slightly different flavor of authoritarian collectivism. And both groups are too stupid to have learned from history, and too muddle-headed to have anything resembling a PRINCIPLE keeping them tied to any philosophical position.
This is why history repeats itself.