Did we prevent a communist takeover of Steem? As far as I know, "the commies" have that now, and in doing so they made us look rather foolish. They made us infringe upon the dPoS of the largest stakeholder. Had we gone dhimmel's route, we would have gotten to the same place, but without preemptively infringing on dPoS.

Excluding Justin would have come after he forked and as a result of it. Witnesses would simply choose not to follow the path of the fork by maintaining the old code (a boycott), and the chain would have effectively forked because of Sun's actions and the decisions of those who chose not to follow.

At that point, Sun is on his version of Steem, and the Community, we are on ours. That is when it is appropriate to isolate his stake on the sister chain that sprung into existence because he chose to fork with an inorganic consensus. His stake and STINC's stake (and socks) can be ignored, but regular voters who bought stake and have a dissenting opinion should not be excluded, otherwise, the entire voting mechanism is fugazi and they may as well just hard fork the chain to auto proxy only designated witnesses of the current top 20's choosing. This, for the "protection of the chain," of course.

Then what do you have? You have centralization because we forked up in trying to avoid it? At that point, the CCP can simply come to the top 20 at a later date after they're all comfortable in their lofty and permanent positions and simply buy them off. And we'd deserve it for not allowing free and fair elections. A glaring example comes to mind.

Bush Jr. Logic
The terrorists hate you because of your freedoms, so
we have to hide those from you so they can't get'em!