Originally posted by War Angel
Communism is the farthest thing from liberalism, short of Nazism and Facism maybe. Liberalism is about the freedom of a person to do all he wants (almost anarchy) and pursue his dreams...
If we're talking liberalism in 2004 in America, the two are comparable at a very basic level. One of the main functions of communism was to regulate wealth and distrtibute it as seen fit. Liberalism, if taken to an absolute extreme, follows that path because concepts of wealth redistribution are some main points of liberalism. Aside from that, they're polar opposites, but it's a common thing for high school dropouts turned pseudo-intellectual like Sean Hannity to cash in on such a tiny similarity and use tremendous amounts of sensationalism to make the two seem equal. Name-calling, demonization, sensationalism all of these are weapons of Hannity, Limbaugh, or any other Neanderthal Republican political commentator to make liberalism resemble communism. But still, taken to a very far extreme, liberalism shares economic standards with communism.

And all the other focal points of communism - political oppression, one party leadership, silence of the oppostion, political imprisonment - these are all conservatism at its worst. John Ashcroft, anyone?