/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

For a brief moment from 2016-2022 this was supposedly the pinnacle of online left-wing politics. Bernie was about to win, Democratic socialism was the future, China would inevitably democratize and the old boring MLism was dead. A few DSA-backed candidates winning city council seats in already progressive districts was treated as if the Bolsheviks had just stormed the Winter Palace.

The most ridiculous part was that the supposed divide between the Dirtbag Left and the DSA left barely existed. They agreed on healthcare, labor, foreign policy, housing, policing and virtually every other major issue. The defining ideological conflict of the era was essentially whether you were allowed to make edgy 90's raunch comedy jokes on podcasts. Entire feuds and endless Twitter meltdowns emerged from a disagreement that amounted to "can you say slurs ironically?"

The confidence was incredible, leftist genuinely talked as if DSA-aligned leadership of every major American city was inevitable, as if Bernie was one good news cycle away from the White House and as if a handful of podcasts by stand up comedians had somehow cracked the code of political history.
In retrospect, it all seems absurd. There was never a realistic path to any of it. The movement's grandest ambitions had essentially zero chance of materializing.

Then reality intervened. Bernie lost, The post-COVID world arrivedm Housing crises worsened, Migration became politically explosive, Major wars returnedm China didn't democratize and instead looked increasingly capable of navigating long-term crises without becoming a Western liberal democracy and the assumptions underlying the entire scene collapsed one by one.

A lot of the old supporters ended up as tankies. A smaller but noticeable number drifted toward the far right. Sometimes they somehow became both at once. The aesthetic transformation is almost as funny as the political one, the old Dirtbag Left revolved around schlubby podcasters making jokes about being ironically gay, the people who inherited its audience are often obsessed with MMA, military history, geopolitical realism and posting shirtless workout photos. The few remaining loyalists seem to have finally realized that their politics were never meaningfully different from the DSA's in the first place and appear perfectly content settling into the role of ordinary progressive liberals.

What a strange, stupid little farce that was.