One of the most frustrating things about being on the left is the profound number of clowns who situate themselves beside me. We’ve got
generational warfare clowns. We’ve got New Age gibberish clowns. We’ve got conspiracy theory clowns. And of course, we’ve got hippie drum circle clowns.
I call these, and others, clowns because they’re behavior seems primarily aimed at personal performance and tends to be accompanied by self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes. While they seem to retain a broad thematic interest in left goals and can even occasionally explain them to you, their actions are more about personal lifestyles than about any principled interest in success.
This is especially true among the often-ridiculed, privileged, college student radicals. You know the type: the white kid going to an expensive private school on their parents’ dime, just wanting to learn how to lead The Good Life. These individuals are not generally interested in the kind of boring, long, and often unsuccessful work of running campaigns and winning. They are interested in their own personal purity, ridding themselves of the toxicity of living wrongly, oppressively, with unchecked privilege, and so on.
