If you’re a committed leftist, you need to start to criticize this kind of self-parody, because it’s killing us. https://t.co/WnNEIlRF0R
— Fredrik deBoer (@freddiedeboer) December 19, 2015

Killing us? Don’t abuse hyperbole. Leftism has been nailed to the perch for decades. It’s not like the nation was on the verge of a revolutionary change until those meddling kids fucked it all up with their narcissistic tantrums. If anything, the spectacle of lefter-than-thou college brats striving to outdo their peers in fanatical moral purity is the status quo. It has at least a half-century of established tradition behind it at this point! At worst, it has become a tiresome rite of passage for spoiled rich kids steeped in the politics of resentment; at best, it has ironically become a safe careerist choice for tomorrow’s faux-radical academics.

Still, as Clarence Darrow said, that is an obituary I would read with great satisfaction. Nevertheless, I’m afraid “committed leftists” are currently busy with more respectable work, such as, uh, re-issuing calls to burn the Constitution:

For the vulgar 2nd Amendment adherents, a reminder that the constitution is a garbage document. Burn the damn thing. https://t.co/LbYbCiR9jT
— Amber A’Lee Frost (@AmberALeeFrost) December 2, 2015

Ah, the perennial “burn imperfection to the ground and build utopia in the ashes.” The idea can never fail, it can only be failed. Sorry; who are the serious adults here again?

The only interesting thing about all this is wondering how long deBoer can continue to convince himself that these predictable paroxysms of identity politics represent some sort of regrettable deviation from “true” leftism, rather than its pathetic denouement. Then again, though he doesn’t get a paycheck for it per se, his shtick as the Last Honest Leftist on the Internet depends on him not seeing it that way. After all, if your angle is writing several hundred near-identical posts excoriating the social media left for signaling and status-seeking instead of engaging in useful activism, and you don’t maintain an impervious faith in the true democratic socialist potential of the Twittering masses, well, then, you might need to consider whether you’re just doing a more niche version of the same signaling yourself.