Glad for this comment. There’s a lot of sayings I’ve heard around most of my left circles that boil down to “many socialists are former libs who took their ideology too seriously”. I feel that in my bones as someone who hopped from Obama-era liberalism onto “Democratic Socialism”, which amounted to what was effectively Social Democracy, a year into Trump (or rather the Democrats’ performative outrage over him) and Communism by 2019/2020. It’s a mistake to lump in people who are actually involved in figuring out a solution even within a liberal framework and might give a fuck about something other than the Wednesday special at their local grocer with the Brunch libs who are more hateful towards the people pointing out the problem than the perpetrators themselves.

Even in the latter group, in my experience, there are many who are just apathetic and ignorant telling themselves that the toxic lefties are exaggerating things to ignore whatever issue, but have changed as people after seeing the visceral ugliness transpiring in Palestine through social media. The average person is deeply disturbed by seeing a little girl’s dismembered corpse hanging from a wall but can no longer just brush that off as “they’ll punish whoever did this” or “that’s how things just are in that part of the world” when it’s the US and its vassal state committing stuff like this on the daily with full impunity. Israel in its entirety represents a gaping wound in the illusion of a triumphalist liberal new order where full-throated imperialism and settler-colonialism are things for the history books. It’s a new world after 20 years of the “GWOT”, though whether that is ultimately for the better or worse is still to be seen.