There is a sociological tale to be told about a certain kind of person who had some intensely negative personal interactions with snooty liberals in college, or in their youth, & have transmuted the resulting resentment into a full-on cosmology.

I'm not talking about conservatives (though they share the obsession). I'm talking about people who ideologically incline toward liberalism but view annoying liberals as an overriding national emergency, to the point it occludes all their other political instincts.

Greenwald, Taibbi, that Conceptual James guy, lots of the IDW & Quillette & Persuasion types -- it's clear reading them that their personal resentment is so intense that they feel the need to build these giant theoretical sand castles around it, to lend it deep significance.

They're not alone in projecting their affective resentments onto some grand ideological screen, of course, but it just results in this case in such a strange, misshapen theoretical product. @lionel_trolling touches on it today: https://johnganz.substack.com/p/an-anti-totalitarian-totalitarianism

Exhibit A: I was sent this Conceptual James essay by a fan of the writers in question & I willed myself to read it with an open mind, but ... holy shit. It's like a crude satire of Jordan Peterson. https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/

Thousands & thousands of relentlessly pompous pseudo-academic words that add up to: those people I don't like are dumb & wrong, while I am correct & in touch with objective reality. Not argued, really, just stated, again & again, as though self-evident.

And that is who the essay will speak to: people who share that same burning resentment of liberal swells & know-it-alls, who share the desire to give their resentment some intellectual heft, & thus will accept just about anything that claims to do so.

It strikes me as the kind of thing (a little bit like libertarianism) that you either flirt with as a young person & grow out of ... or end up clinging to it, doubling down, and following it until you end up on the right, as Greenwald's doing.

Anyway I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about these folks (whose ranks seem to be growing), other than: I'd love to read a smart sociological essay tracing this tendency & explaining its current flourishing.

After all, it is weird, on its face, to conclude that annoying liberals on college campuses are the primary threat to the country *while armed anti-democratic right-wing violence is on the rise*, having just attacked the capitol. It needs explaining!