Stupidpol and its detractors are an interesting glimpse into American political realignments.
They\u2019re not \u201cStrasserites\u201d but I get the sense they are basically Reagan Democrats who went to grad school. They\u2019re 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 \u201cradlibs\u201d.
I mean the \u201cReagan Democrats who\u2019ve been to grad school\u201d 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\u2019s milk and went into academia.
But, I mean, how\u2019d 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 \u201cradlibs\u201d 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\u2019t particularly incompatible with any given system - the HIRE MORE WOMEN PRISON GUARDS woke capitalists. They\u2019re the converts, at least in that Catholic way where you slap a coat of paint on your pagan idols and call them saints. I\u2019ve seen them rising and so they don\u2019t really surprise me.
What does surprise me is the second type of \u201cradlib\u201d, the one who also quotes leftist canon like a grad student (enough to call them \u201cStrasserists\u201d, at least) and maintains a pose of like, The Nation-in-1987 leftism at least but their program cashes out to \u201csupport for the Democratic Party of America in its current form with its current elite\u201d, I honestly can\u2019t tell where that came from but it is a thing. I think part of it\u2019s residue of the Bernie Wars, maybe even if I eyeroll at the moral valence of the complaints I shouldn\u2019t have scoffed so hard at those women\u2019s-centrist articles about \u201cBernie Bros\u201d as reflecting a inter-left conflict that newly exists.