Left bugaobobos

The modern American left by and large isn’t waging material struggle. Even the most active of activists are locked in fights for symbolic gestures and recognition. This lack of any real stakes marginalizes the left to begin with and leads to subculturalism. Mass appeal by definition debases the social currency of subcultural affiliation.

The left (not me but the modern western left only) stopped representing the average worker ages ago. I mean, they may SAY that they have an investment in unions and whatnot, but most leftists (not me though) loathe everything your average worker stands for. 

I don't think this is organic really, I think it's a feature of infiltration. The "powers that be" have a decided interest in making sure that most social movements are impotent and ineffective. Leftism has been infected by group that want to destroy established norms (like abolishing family by force and using  'grooming' via drag queen story time for kids to abolish heteronormativity instead of abolishing heteronormativity the leftist and correct way [without using such methods]) and replace them with new "Transgressive" norms. Your average worker is not in favor of this. 

Their lives are (on average) built on Tom Landry's three Fs. Faith, Family and Football (football, in this example, being a calling or career). "The Left" (not my left) has been mislead and manipulated to a point where they feel like the three Fs have to be destroyed or subverted. This puts them directly at odds with the workers.

This is all by design. The powers that be don't want a movement that actually functions. They need to prolong their status quo by making sure we argue with each other to make almost no real change.

Not my leftism but western Leftism nowadays is all about coddling and nurturing everyone, even if it’s the most lazy, sad sack motherfuckers.

It doesn’t help that the left, at least the left that many people associate with today’s left wing, is obsessed with cancelling things other people like and demanding compliance with whatever nonsense pronoun some autistic NEET demands they be addressed with.

How do you attract people looking to build class solidarity and fight the bourgeoisie while navel gazing over radical queer discourse and other trite shit? They don’t.

That kind of hogwash, the navel gazing I mean. It is the stuff that draws people away from the left. The normal people who have lives and stuff don’t want to be in a community where they feel they have to walk on eggshells to avoid offending others’ ridiculous sensitivities. They get driven away. And who is left? Kids who are trying to force Latinx on fresh out of the Rio Grande immigrants and people who collect “genders” like they’re Pokémon cards

“Everything normies like is bad, everything normies hate is good, no exceptions” - and then wonder why people can’t stand them.

Frankly, I don’t think the politics have much to do with it. Every cultural conservative working class person has a horror story about working for a shit boss, and not getting an honest days pay for an honest days work

This is nail on the head for a lot of people on the left. People that feel like they have been unjustly excluded from society in one way or another and has an axe to grind about it.

I absolutely do not understand this thing (like DSA San Antonio FALSELY saying that the Alamo is a monument to 'white supremacy' (LOL that so called leftists in the US compulsively do, where they sh*t on things that are broadly love by the public. I am the type of leftist who would never utter such defamatory nonsense  (though the Alamo was technically built on anti blackness per Afro Pessimism but I digress)

I don't have to go around waiving flags but maybe I don't lead with the Amerikkka nonsense either. For a lot of poor and working class people, the four years they did in the military remains one of the proudest accomplishments of their life and they generally have positive connotations around America.

But everyone on the left except for leftists like me doesn't actually care about building mass movements, they care about showcasing how morally superior they are to the people around them. This requires taking more and more radical sounding positions until they become utterly incoherent to anyone not balls deep in left discourse.

For people who claim to “know the real history of America” those people leave out a whole lot of good things. Want working class white folKs on your side? Tell them about Blair Mountain, or Eugene Debs. Show them their own history. Blue collar whites used to be pretty based. Where’s the pride in that heritage?

Right now we should all be coming together as workers. I realize working class whites and me have much more in common than a rich person of my own race. Solidarity!. For some of the US leftists kinds of people like the San Antonio DSA, none of that is important and in fact to them trying to talk about that or encourage any kind of pride in it would be labeled as 'white supremacy' (i.e FAKE WHITE SUPREMACY) 

It’s b/c Upper/upper-middle class white lefties genuinely seem to think the way to win over minorities to their political positions is by calling things racist. 

In their mind, the more things they call racist, the more gross pandering you do to “POCs” the higher percentage of the minority vote/support you will get. They’ve rarely met any working class black or Hispanic voters, so they assume that they are constantly angry over statues and Aunt Jemima b/c that’s what the media they watch portrays. Call it the “hot sauce strategy”. I am not a hot sauce strategy leftist since I don't play that game like those so called leftists do

Yeah, this is one of the most frustrating things about the American left to me.

Tearing down monuments and symbols doesn't change anything. But Americans have been fed this steady diet that if you change the symbols and language, that you'll change the entire system.

No, my dude, that only works if we have a fair system to start with. Right now, we have to attack this at the systemic roots, and we have to start with the biggest source of inequality for everyone before we can properly address other systemic inequalities.

Like the people crying about M4A in 2016 by saying the British system has unequal outcomes for certain ethnicities in rate of death births - which is entirely unique to Britain's NHS by the by. "We can't do this system, because it doesn't fix this specific problem." But look at ALL the other problems it fixes.

Also, it turned out that the reasoning behind those rate of deaths was that the ethnicity in question largely didn't trust the British government.

No shit?

So now that we've solved all these other problems, we can work on addressing that trust issue, which is entirely fucking warranted mind you, because Capitalist Britain has been exploiting those people for hundreds of years now.

By all means kick off the confederate statues, fuck them. But attacking the American founders as Imperialists, even though they objectively were, has absolutely no fucking value to building a movement, because of the amount of propaganda people have been fed over the years about how idealistic and moral they were.

It just makes people think you're a fucking loon. I am a leftist who is not that type of loon

I am a Fred Hampton type of leftist. Fred Hampton like me did a damn good job at appealing to a multi-racial working class, without shitting on any particular group's heritage.

His Rainbow Coalition which I am part of famously included the Young Patriots - an all white Socialist organization comprised of Confederate flag flying Appalachian's.

Like me, Fred Hampton understood that despite their use of that flag, and their ancestral origins, that the white working class had been shafted much the same as the black and Latino working class (albeit in different ways at times).

His alliances with White, Asian, and Latino groups (including the Chicago Mob) made him public enemy #1, hence his brutal assassination. Point is, if the Left wants to make progress in the US, we have to drop a lot of this "shitting on other people's cultural history".

The vast and overwhelming majority of "leftists" (in the anglosphere) are just cosplaying liberal 2.0ers that are in actuality hard right. Unlike them I really am a true leftist

Left erasure was the most essential act of the Democratic party. The Bernie movement reignited the notion that the Democrats aren't left wing, and those who were burned and saw Bernie cuck out lit a new fire, one nobody sees burning. I am such a Bernie leftist

During the 1990s, real leftism like socialism basically died and there were no more truly socialist states to be loyal to except for Cuba (which is horribly irrelevant),

I have come to the conclusion that class is the central category for understanding politics and the proletariat is the revolutionary agent

I never said that lefitsts like me being oppositional to racism and sexism amounts to us ignoring the class struggle. In fact, us Marxists have very specific analyses of racism and sexism, and we are generally involved in opposing them. That is something very different from what is called woke politics.

We have to fight against the palimpsests of ongoing oppression

When people cry about "wokeness", what they're ACTUALLY referring to is usually the white moderates MLK complained about and not actual leftists. "Progressives" and Republicans are both happy to pretend that liberals are the left. Any American too young to remember the antiglobalization movement and the Ralph Nader campaign has never actually witnessed a "left."

I didn't get that Slavo Zizek is saying that left-right antagonisms are pretty much entirely cultural in this moment and not material. says explicitly that his position is not "beyond left and right" because these are not outmoded notions, but rather to (in a sense) reconstitute leftism to its traditional class struggle heritage (this might be one reason why he calls himself a "moderately conservative communist"). 

Left-right antagonisms that are material first and also less cultural (like Slavo Zizek wants)

There is no left wing in the US

Because there is no left in the US, the European centrist liberal capitalist welfare state, like the US sort of was 1950s to 80s is seen as left. 

Since it is the same status quo but with only difference being some social services , it is seen as caring. So left wing is seen as caring, overbearing, mothering. Feminine trait. Right wing is less people oriented, hard numbers, pioneering, so masculine. 

That is what you are seeing, the signaling of gender roles. Of course these left/right attributes are totally fictional arbitrary and limited to our time and place. In some times and places being a hard man tough soldier or worker or farmer meant being far left and being a dandy or a princess throwing balls at a palace meant you were conservative.  I am however a real leftist

What (Chris) Hedges said in this piece is correct though. There is almost no left in the USA (except for people like me). I don’t know if the ability to think clearly about “root class issues” has not existed for the last 70 or so years. But it’s worse than that. They don’t even know how to think strategically for the things they supposedly want.

There's not "almost no" Left in the USA, there is no left, full stop. There are leftists and leftist orgs, sure. Sometimes we'll score the odd mayor to rally around, like Kshama or Bernie. But there is absolutely no broadly-based, politically capable left. Such a thing does not exist in the country, and its the Dems job to ensure it stays that way.

Unfortunately the Old Left era is just never coming back to the modern world. The Old Left was born in the factories of the early industrial era, where you went to work for 16 hours a day with 1,000 fellow comrades doing menial tasks, and afterwards stewing about the factory owners at the village pub. Service industry economies don’t seem to be well-suited to building worker solidarity, perhaps because the labor isn’t so densely concentrated. Anyways technology has nuked face to face interactions, and we have actual thought police in the form of camera phones and social media outrage.

The mainstream liberal 2.0 line since Ronald Reagan has been "everything is irrevocably broken, yes, but that's for reasons outside of any human being's control and so discontent is a sign of stupidity."

For decades they blamed "economics" broadly wrought, as if the economy was handed down by god and adhered to scientific laws humans could only observe, never change. People got fed up with that about 2 years into former President Barack Obama's first term, so liberal 2.0 institutions replaced economic pessimism with racial pessimism. At this point, the stupidity of malcontents was recast as a sort of all-consuming evil, as it was now associated (however tenuously) with racism.

So now, you're not just uneducated if you think the government should serve some purpose other than dropping fire on Muslims and keeping Citibank solvent. You're a populist. A fascist. A danger to all those around you.

I support economic pessimism , Afro Pessimism instead of Afro Pessimism 

Well the "communist" world order that the right likes to freak out about these days isn't exactly what was I had in mind... in fact now the other side (in contrast) seems like the reasonable one, if you wanna keep thinking strictly binary. What was once the left is no more (except for a few rare old school leftists like myself), it's only a freakish imitation made compatible with the fascist or whatever you wanna call it new world order. 

Times change and old categories do not really apply any more, if they even were any good to begin with. If you fail to see that you might be ideologically blinded, most likely thanks to idpol.

Our democracies are literally just what costume you want the neoliberal to wear. Would you like them to pretend to care about climate issues or pretend to care about illegal immigration? Perhaps you'd like for them to pretend to care about taxing multinational corporations? I am actually somewhat past worrying about the single issues here, I just feel a need to expose the invalidity of our system. The lies it operates by. We do not choose what goes on in our countries is the simple, central point.

Right wingers can sense the system collapsing around us as well, they just don’t know why (or they think it’s because of “Marxist corporations” or whatever). 

The reactionary nature of conservatism also naturally means they’re already primed through religion and sexism toward the idealization of “trad” pre-industrial lifestyles, so plastic toy collections and infantile franchise worship becomes another one of the many things they hate about the modern world alongside secularism and gay people in the media and openly promiscuous women.

The problem is that the ideology that you're referring to as reactionary is the only position which can offer a critique of industrial society. The best a Marxist critique of capitalism can do is make the distribution of widgets equitable and give you common ownership of the widget factory. It's not just capitalism that is in crisis, it's industrialism. The social pathologies that lead to plastic toy collection are the inevitable result of modernity.

But I (in a left wing way) critique industrial society without doing so using a right wing framework

The entire purpose of certain intelligence agencies is among other things to gaslight the working class to specifically not find out anything truthful regarding Karl Marx. The entire neoliberal dictat of lies is a symptom of that. 

I remember to have read some article about Vladimir Lenin collectivising women and turning them into socialist sex slaves in 2015 and being very appalled. Just recently I heard Michael Parenti debunk that. Who would spew such lies for what purpose? 

It is obvious. that's why MAGA communists are actually so so precious, they lost faith in the system and need Information. seeing 'leftists' shat on them made some people feel like I was joining a sinking ship. Like, they already identify as something communist because they wanna be as edgy as possible Vis a Vis the neolibs, with something resembling class consciousness, while not turning to something with outright fascist esthétique

 It was said that you would destroy the culture war, not join it! I bring balance to the left, not leave it in darkness!

The local Marxists like me have the same problem as a city with a bad football team during the playoffs. There's a game being played, and our guys and gals aren't anywhere near it.

Back when a Bernie Sanders presidency was conceivably possible, we leftists had a lot more energy and thoughtful [leftist] conversation because people had hope. These days there's not much to do but bitch about the teams who're still in the brackets and hope to god ours gets its act together sometime in the next decade.

My point is that the "real left" does nothing to earn the trust of non marginalized groups left out of the idpol game and expects them to forgive and forget while refusing to stand up for them the times they are attacked (which happens or could happen and is thus wrong according to sympathetic voices like Ryan Grim, Afro Pessimism,  Menlib reddit, the feminists from Bloodlust A Feminist Journal Against Civilization etc)

So I can't be a 'transcend idpoler' person without at least acknowledging that since otherwise I would be seen as a scam to leftist anti idpolers. Of course it is ironic that white straight cis people can be considered marginalized groups according to reddit site rules and in France all groups are protected. So that stuff feeds the victim mentality for white male cishets and gives them a excuse to selfishly engage in their victim complex rhetoric

I mean the mod policy in the left wing anti pol sphere has been pretty clearly anti-engagement, and it's generally worked in the sense that theres declining engagement. 

The "curated" posts, the bans, the score-hiding, etc., are all part of this. It's only disappointing if you ignore the actual stated purpose of those subs, which is to be a Marxist discussion board, so if you're looking to this place to be a big tent or movement builder or "cool antiwork" you're already in the wrong place. The other day I got 3 posts from the stupidpol sub on my r/all in a row, all from the same mod, which never would have happened even like a few years ago. It's... a choice, but as with the entirety of the American left, the urge to exclude people based on impurity will always override even the pretense of actual movement building.

But as with the entirety of the American left (not real left like me), the urge to exclude people based on impurity will always override even the pretense of actual movement building.

The mass movement is right there to be built too. Frame everything around building up the US. Make the US great as it once was. But this time by out building, out thinking, and out culturaling everyone else. 

We don't care what your identity is, (so please shut the **** up about it) we care that you're an American citizen and by extension a citizen of the world (which will come in handy when we abolish the US government since governments are evil and need to be abolished)

We don't care that not hiring gays hurts their community, we do care that it keeps talented people from giving their full contribution to society and causes American citizens to suffer. As we value freedom, the onus is not on them to conform to you. Any attempt to discriminate is unpatriotic. 

Reform the prisons before we abolish them the leftist way because we're harming and wasting the potential of American's, Protect the environment because it's mother fucking America. Don't take care of the poor because "they need it," do it because they're Americans and they deserve it and if we can't provide it then we as a people have failed. And, Americans do not fail. It's time to Make Americans Great Again.

American companies should be owned and run by American workers, not these fat cat elites sitting in board rooms. What do they know about real Americans?

We work building this country, stop letting some unpatriotic big wig take all your money. Look at what their greed is doing to our small towns. We have to regulate business to keep money on main street and our nature intact. Anyone saying otherwise values themselves more than America. Thank God George Washington's men at Valley Forge didn't.

That's appealing to an existing ideological framework.

"These globalist corporations are selling out Americans!"

I'm of the opinion that us true leftists (i.e class-conscious leftists) need to learn to speak at least some Republican, tailor the message to the audience. Of course it's the truth. That's why, worded on a way they can easily understand, it has a decent chance at landing,

"How do you do that when most righties believe that there is nothing wrong with someone becoming filthy rich through capitalism."

I'd say start small, issues like the shrinking middle class, declining home ownership, and so on.

I find a lot of people on the right aren't too fond of the elites, and conservatives tend to value family. Neoliberal economics hurt and erode families.

Try to understand what makes them tick, and don't dehumanize them. They are people too, with their own worries and concerns. 

Sometimes they see the same problems we do but filter it through a different lens. Sometimes what they call communism or crony capitalism isn't too different than what we might call late stage capitalism.

Don't push the scary S word, they're not ready for that yet, maybe never will be.

Honestly, I've been looking at famous speeches throughout American history. We need to inspire people, get them to believe in a cause. So many out there fetishize End of History-type ideals that we need to put faith in the people again, get them to believe we can have the good days again.

Unlike leftists like me, the PMC-Soy left despises physical and mental strength. They wrongly view it as 'authoritarian', fascist, abelist, hetero normative, and worst of all...masculine. They become really triggered by this. As a true leftist, like over 90 percent of Americans, Canadians, Europeans etc I view physical and mental strength as positive

They promote 'body positivity' only for those that are obese, unathletic, soft and weak. They also wrongly despise winning and victory (as a true leftist like nearly everyone on Earth, I celebrate winning and victory), and wrongly celebrate losing (I hate losing I don't celebrate losing at all and nearly everyone on Earth is with me on hating losing and not celebrating losing)

So any socialist movement by such pmc soy leftist freaks comes to power is hated, while martyers who lose are icons in their warped braindead minds

Those pmc soy leftists despise physical labor.  I support physical labor and I am a physical laborer myself. The soy left exist in the PMC world of mental masterbation and I do not exist in that hell world. 

You really want to trigger them, ask those soy left lazy chumps to chop wood, repair a car or appliance, use a shovel or lawn mower etc (all jobs I do). Not only will they not know how to do this, they wrongly believe it is beneath them and suspect it is somewhow fascist.(like me , over 99 percent of Americans, Canadians, Europeans and everyone on Earth as a whole etc would say doing such work is not fascist and is perfectly fine for them to do)

The pmc soy left despise sports (with the possible exception of women's soccer). Because they suck at sports and are weak snowflake loser freaks

All the things that rural and working class people do and enjoy, is despised by the pmc soy-left. 

There has to be a way to re-frame these pmc soy leftist people as class traitors to the salt of the earth working class. Maybe that’s a terrible idea, creating more division, but people like the the pmc soy leftists seem more like temporarily embarrassed yuppies (which might be good, I wish I could have been a yuppie in the 1980s and 1990s since I have become a retroactive 1980s-1990s yuppie fan but I digress), creatives, and intellectuals than they do working class proles, and they’re only going to present an obstacle

However, most of them re not class traitors though. The bulk of them come from PMC or even capitalist class backgrounds. If working class people attended elite four year colleges, and then years of graduate school studying CRT or gender binary studies or some such thing, not producing an income through their 20's, and then bounced around working for NGO's, then they would be class traitors.

The soy-left represents a strata of the non-productive PMC. It is the same mileu that made up the temprence and womens suffrage movement in the 1920's; the social reformers; woman's liberation etc. They later made up the church ladies of the 1980's. They are essentially a feminine strata of moralistic busy bodies, who love 'fixing' and regulating working class people, imposing their morobund social views on them and correcting their grammar and language.

The uptight spinster school teacher of the 1920's, who would berate proletarian kids for their poor grammar, is now the pink haired, obese feminist grad student who corrects blue collar workers on their uncouthness and improper gender pronouns.

George Orwell was complaining about this tendency in the 1930s and it's only gotten worse since then.

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got onto it. 

They were both about sixty, both very short, pink and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. 

The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured, 'Socialists', as who should say, 'Red Indians'.

Without getting into an essay-length comment, it's a consequence of an excessively (or at least, placing emphasis on the wrong aspects) individualist culture warping the entire concept of what it means to be oneself.

This ties into consumerist attitudes in neoliberal nations as well. Individualism can be defined as emphasizing individual autonomy over what exists outside the individual. However, within the context of neoliberal order, individuality is defined more by your ego's desires rather than actually increasing your ability as an individual to work towards self-determination and self-enrichment.

In other words, such people see themselves as, "Just fine the way they are" and view forces that ask them to start making changes to their life for their own or others' benefit as anti-individual. It's considered a sin to not accept someone's uniqueness, considered a virtue to embrace differences, and the epitome of virtue to be uniquely chaotic and embody an image of rebellion.

If people are criticizing you, then their solution is to find people who accept you as opposed to consider whether the criticism is valid and work to change themselves.

Leftist spaces easily fetishize and commodify the trappings of authentic individuality with relatively little actual ability for members to improve themselves. They're able to rationalize being defined by their appearance, consumption, and communication rather than their merits as autonomous activists. These spaces can easily even take on the qualities of cults, except lacking potency and internal coherence.

Ironically, leftist spaces often reject conventional religion unless they're appropriating the exterior of a relatively, "exotic" and/or, "underground" worldview.

Islam calls for believers to work against against their imperfections before trying to improve the world. The Buddha taught that rejecting both internal and external illusions is vital to freedom. Christianity (West and East) traditionally says that faith is dead without works and faith doesn't exist without unconditional compassionate martyrdom. These aspects get severely downplayed by mainstream leftism.

I don’t know if politics was ever cool. Online politics is meaningless to those with real life power. The terminally online folks believe twitter is politics but 90% of normies don’t care about twitter or online larping.

Because leftism concerns itself largely with the critique of systems, and how these systems are often more powerful than individual agency.

Personally, I use this as a lens to forgive and persuade: "I don't hate you, because I believe the things you are doing are a result of the system of incentives and disincentives you are forced to inhabit. Here's a possible better system, where we wouldn't be forced to act in this way."

However, this is also very attractive to those who are themselves failures and wish to rid themselves of shame: "It's not my fault; it's the system!" While this may be a reasonable argument for some behaviors, it isn't for others. And even in those areas where the system creates or exacerbates an issue, you still should seek ways to better yourself for your own benefit and the benefit of your community, even if the thing you need to better yourself on isn't your "fault".

But that's not attractive, is it? Taking responsibility for your own self and working to improve yourself however you can. The ability to offload any and all personal responsibility onto an ethereal "system" is too tantalizing, especially for those who have a great gulf to cross if they want to better themselves.

I think leftism + personal responsibility (for those myriad things which truly are our personal responsibility) is the only way to keep leftism from descending into this madness every time.

tl;dr: Systemic critique can either take the "fuck the system, we shall rebuild it" route, or the "let's wallow in how fucked and pathetic the system forces us to be there is no alternative look at me" route.

This is also why nihilism/doomerism/hedonism is very popular too. It's just really easy. It takes zero effort to smoke, eat garbage and beat it all day, especially when you have convinced yourself that nothing in the universe matters.

I would be an active member of the YCL. It was never really online, but still full of losers. That is one reason it has been so hard to get actual progress, because some of the strongest supporters are failures/grifters/bigots.

Righty spaces have the same problem.

People who are successful, well-adjusted etc, have a stake in society, so they don't usually worry about changing things or being activists.

A post in anti-work yesterday from a European flabbergasted about how American workers can keep taking a dicking without really fighting back in meaningful numbers was met with a flurry of insults, indignation, excuses, and charges of "victim blaming." 

What else can this be called other than pathetic? If the working class is too busy being victims to accept that nothing will change -- no matter how high the cost -- if they don't demand it, then how will anything change? I've put my job on the line at several jobs to make things better. I've improved policies, gotten abusers fired, pretty much everything short of unionizing since the overwhelming majority of Americans still think union is a bad word. It's just so fucking pathetic.

"I went to a Corbyn-era British Labour Party meeting, and there was competitive mental illness. People were trying to out-mental each other, because that’s how they got status. Don’t believe it when people say Leftists are against competition.

The problem is the status you get with being 'oppressed'. If you get status being oppressed, then you are going to exaggerate your oppression. Not only that, you are going to exaggerate how little control you have over the outcome of your life, and only a mythical socialist paradise can solve it. Overwhelmed by the feeling of oppression and stripped of the feeling of agency, the only way is down through an endless plughole of nuttiness."

I honestly think that the leftist “brand” has been permanently tainted by these terminally online spaces and people beyond repair. Ask a rural American what they think a leftist looks like, and then take a shot for each hair color you hear.

2: It's a way they can both at once take control of a system they see as currently disadvantaging them.

So, basically, people who aren't successful get to blame "them" for failure. Without making significant changes to themselves, they can suddenly demand big changes to the system (economic or otherwise, which, I'm sure that it is a pure coincidence that these changes benefit themselves and people like themselves, often at the expense of other people who are not like themselves). In the current era of IDPol, they can blame white people, affirmative action programs, straights, gays, whatever else.

Being healthy is able-ist. Therefore, being fit is white supremacy adjacent, (even if you're black. Sorry, I don't make the rules. These people are also rent-seekers/grifters looking for any shred of power, since they have none over their own lives.) Being bold or making jokes is non-depressive friendly and upsets neurodivergents, and so on. Think that DSA meeting "Point of Privilege" meme that came to life.

And once in a blue moon when a group of leftists do actually become funny or cool they get shunned.

Rule #3: Loserdom almost becomes a badge of honor.

"To each their need." Current "oppression olympics" means that the people with the most disabilities, or most poverty, or most whatever-else, get the floor first. They're the most in-need. Therefore, the most powerful in the group, and therefore the gatekeepers to discussion and discourse. Think of it like how nerds used to gatekeep nerdiness. Sure they got bullied and shoved into lockers- but if you wanted 'in' on their group you had to prove you knew all the components of the X-Wing and why it made an "X" symbol when locking S-Foils in attack position, (and so on.) Here, the same principal applies, but also for libs. (see memes and talking points getting regurgitated from late-night talk show hosts.)

It’s a very small population and sadly they are some of the most vocal, but a lot of people view leftism as a way to subsidize their life. They have no ambition, no goals outside of whatever creative/artistic endeavor they believe they should be doing. But they are not a large contingent at all but as I said they are definitely one of the loudest contingents in leftism. A lot of them are rich failsons/daughters who see leftism as a way to continue to coast through life while giving a middle finger to mommy and daddy. 

But again, not a large population but a load population, yes.

Rightist losers distract themselves with the bootstrap meme. They haven't totally given up and they strive for something, even if they never get it. They probably (not always) don't have a college degree and they probably aren't bookish. Leftist losers (not me other leftists) have given up. Everything is outside their control. They probably have a humanities/liberal arts degree -- inane 10,000 word blogpost essays it is.

I don't fuck with the modern leftist spaces for several reasons (besides me being a non modern, non western type of leftist):

They're full of faux edgy middle-class assholes who project their guilt about their comfy upbringing onto anyone who can be deemed as acceptable of receiving their bullshit (white people or anyone generally accused of some Violation)

Lots of the people that get involved in those circles are there for a very short-lived time, more or less however long it takes for them to be able to take some tangible project or campaign they worked on and apply it to their resume to convey an activist history.

The spaces have become hilariously touchy. I got kicked out of a group for confronting a woman who would constantly draw lines in the sand and functionally splinter groups of people into different camps. She generally just whined about everything and it became clear very quick that she was using the space to boss people around and hear other people agree with her opinions, as opposed to actually bringing people together to change anything. Imagine the industrial workers and Wobblies looking 100 years into the future and seeing a bunch of skinny, oversensitive dweebs broken off into camps, no mention of class and very little of capitalism in general, all pissing around about some stupid fucking "microaggression". It's pathetic and they don't like hearing it.

There is a very small scope of humor and general fun that is appreciated. I love stand up comedy and hate that the "left" turns away from it almost entirely instead of actually being creative and using humor to convey an anti-capitalist agenda.

Men are expected to not be aggressive in these spaces. Straight up, having much confidence or sense of self-respect doesn't mean much to those folks. Accordingly, you get a bunch of weird incel type guys who challenge nobody and just agree with everything in the hopes of getting laid.

I could go on, but as a whole it's a lot of the same stuff as the far-right: people with nothing going for them bickering about dumb shit online and getting nothing done.

Both the "left" and the right are profoundly fucking dorky and cringe. The coolest folks are those who have respect for themselves, respect others, have an open mind, are actually well-read, don't take themselves too seriously, and actually appreciate the fact that we're all here for a very finite amount of time, and that there's nothing wrong with laughing and having a good time. Those folks are increasingly hard to find.

Politics that fall significantly outside of the Overton window attract social rejects with shitty lives more so than any other demographic. People who are generally happy/well adjusted will be far less attracted to any political movement that promises significant changes in the social order. 

The main difference between DSA lefties and proudboy type alt-righters is their respective views of the role of the individual within political movements. Ideologies on the far right place a much greater emphasis on the role of the individual and individualism in general, so self improvement (especially physically) tends to be of far more importance. 

Despite self improvement not at all being at odds with leftist politics (and in my opinion still being very important) leftist philosophy is far more appealing to people fully content with placing the responsibility for all of their shortcomings on capitalist society while entirely ignoring the importance of what is within their capacity to improve. 

Compound this with the aesthetic of physical and mental strength generally being associated with traditional masculinity and the social baggage attached to that and you get a epidemic of soft-faced aspiring revolutionaries who can't do 10 pushups and have a panic attack every time they have to open an email.