Stupidpol and its detractors are an interesting glimpse into American political realignments.

They’re not “Strasserites” but I get the sense they are basically Reagan Democrats who went to grad school. They’re clearly fluent in canonical leftism but as a definable group their positive politics are [Rage Against the Machine guitar noises] and much more going negative on “radlibs”.

I mean the “Reagan Democrats who’ve been to grad school” thing seriously, I think for a lot of them their origin is they came from a poor white background where they absorbed left identity with mother’s milk and went into academia.

But, I mean, how’d that work out for the Red Diaper Babies? A lot of them softened from communism to social democracy or Freudianism; their kids softened to hippie- and yuppiedom. None so zealous as a convert.

But by “radlibs” they seem to mean two different groups - first those who started with a liberal base and got more radical-as-in-pushy though their demands aren’t particularly incompatible with any given system - the HIRE MORE WOMEN PRISON GUARDS woke capitalists. They’re the converts, at least in that Catholic way where you slap a coat of paint on your pagan idols and call them saints. I’ve seen them rising and so they don’t really surprise me.

What does surprise me is the second type of “radlib”, the one who also quotes leftist canon like a grad student (enough to call them “Strasserists”, at least) and maintains a pose of like, The Nation-in-1987 leftism at least but their program cashes out to “support for the Democratic Party of America in its current form with its current elite”, I honestly can’t tell where that came from but it is a thing. I think part of it’s residue of the Bernie Wars, maybe even if I eyeroll at the moral valence of the complaints I shouldn’t have scoffed so hard at those women’s-centrist articles about “Bernie Bros” as reflecting a inter-left conflict that newly exists.