The core focus of left wing activism is no longer that of working-class emancipation—it completely abandoned any semblance of a workers’ movement decades ago (the history of which River Page wonderfully outlines in a recent TwinkRev article). Christopher Lasch documented this tendency extensively, where the authentic transformational desire of the “old left” (embodied by the civil rights struggle “waged in deadly earnest in the South”) was rechanneled into narcissistic radicalism by students and activists (especially in organizations like the SDS) intent on becoming celebrities through pointless militancy and a hyper-fixation on identitarian performativity. He writes that ‘60s radicalism’s “delusion that street theater represented the newest form of guerilla warfare helped to ward off an uneasy realization that it represented no more than a form of self-promotion, by means of which the media starts of the left brought themselves to national attention with its concomitant rewards.”1
When they're right, they're right.
Modern “progressivism” is a sick grotesquerie of authoritarian bullshit, even actual leftists recognize it.