JimC wrote:Hermit wrote:pErvin wrote:Yeah, but they had a name (and still do) - 'socialists'. Assuming that's who you are talking about.
Nah. I'd no more bundle the alt-left with more or less main stream socialists than the alt-right with more or less main stream capitalists, and I'd be at a total loss as to where I'd put the various shades of social democrats and democratic socialists.
The looney left is a reasonable name, and it includes the tiny but loud clan of university PC leftists that keeps 42 so exercised...
Going by people I am personally acquainted with, those lefties don't know much about the working class. They are the sons and daughters of solidly middle class parents who assist them financially and emotionally to obtain the relevant qualifications for whatever solidly middle class career they have their minds set on./
Before long, most of them return to that background, replete with mortgage and children of their own in a suburban setting, and a job to match. Before you know it, they'll complain about "kids these days", meaning the types they themselves were ten or 20 years earlier, and they'll share stories of "those days" when they were so idealistic, committed, passionate and soooo naïve.
There is nothing new about this. Every generation has had a proportion of youths who protested against whatever the previous generation held dear ever since the masses became literate and relatively mobile. In the late 1700 the German version was the
Sturm und Drang movement, a sort of counter-rationalism. Those people were basically proto-postmodernists who didn't think much of the age of Enlightenment. Goethe and Schiller were among those for a while. The next generation flipped back comprehensively, taking classical Greeks and Romans as their role models - which the following generation rejected in turn. They were the romantics. After the Great War, the first one dominated by heavy war machinery and the heavy industries required to produce them, it was back to nature. it's anthem was the much misunderstood song with the refrain
- We will continue to march,
When everything shatters;
Because today Germany hears us,
And tomorrow the whole World.
was a rejection of this soulless industry that made the wholesale slaughter possible. It was, as the first stanza indicates, a society that turned out rotten to the core and needed to be smashed.
- The rotten bones are trembling,
Of the World for [because of] the great War.
We have smashed this terror,
For us it was a great victory.
(The WIkipedia's translation is really crappy, but I can't come up with a more accurate one, so it will just have to do) The Nazis appropriated that song by changing one word. By adding a prefix "hears" became "belongs to".
And so it went on. I don't need to tell you about the beatniks, hippies and the Red Brigades, I suppose. It's enough to keep in mind that in all cases the vast majority of rebels returned safely to the fold. Today's preachers of the progressive stack and campaigners against the right of people they don't like to speak at university functions and conferences are tomorrow's dentists and art consultants. (You could also have a look at what has become of you since your uni days

. I am sorely tempted to help you out by reposting two photos of you, one titled "then", the other titled "now"

) As for left wing academic staff, just look at what the formidable team of the Frankfurt School has accomplished: Their books and articles resulted in the death of a lot of trees. As far as government and society is concerned, that school may as well never have existed.
Forty Two's dread bordering on panic is founded on profound ignorance of ancient social dynamics.