The contemporary "Left" has become more ideological than the "Right". It rests assured in dogmatic belief that is reinforced through popular culture. The Right, no longer easily defined by a neat ideology of its own owing to the absolute discrediting of traditional Rightist thinking and the hegemony of liberalism, has become a heterogenous bag of all who oppose the prevailing Leftist dogmatism/dogmatists.

This has the effect of producing a very unruly, disorganized and chaotic set of ideals, but if we step back and recognize that dogma and ideology is inherently dangerous and must be checked, for it cannot check itself and is liable to rampancy, we recognize that the diversity of thought currently on display among the Right will be necessary for future progress.

Although I don't fully disagree (I have my problems with the current direction of mainstream leftism), there is one undeniable fact that is missing from your perspective: in many, many cases, political movements have to ask for 1000 to get 100.

This has been the case effectively since modern politics was invented in the XVIII century. The US had to break away from its original government just to get a degree of control on its own destiny. France had to burn its system to the ground, killing thousands from its elite classes, just to entrench a right for the people to be consulted on general policies. It similarly took a bloody revolution in Russia for European industrialists to actually accept some curbing of their considerate powers, recognising a few worker rights (and as soon as that scare disappeared, they started walking them all back...). Hippies pushed completely new ways of life just so that someone could create a few national parks. So many political parties start by spouting fire and brimstone, move the bar a few inches further on this or that subject once in power, and then basically sit down, with the promised apocalypse never really materializing.

So yeah, progressives often push stuff that looks extreme, simply so that they can actually move the Overton window and obtain very small improvements. It would be nice if reasonableness resulted in progress, but in reality it largely results in being ignored.

I thought at first this would mention Diagolon, a far-right group of violent accelerationists based in Canada. A nasty bunch indeed.

I wonder whomever coined that term then - diagonalism - if it's meant to indicate the slide across the political spectrum, why diagonal? Is it because people "switch corners"?

What stands out to me is the anti- stance of these converts. Assuming we're talking about the likes of Brandt, Klein, Taibbi, Greenwald et al., in their media presence they used to stand for something, and now they stand against something. I wonder if that's an inherent characteristic of The Right, or just a populist play to the common sentiment of a disgruntled populace.

The binary oversimplification of the diversity of opinions and circumstances into Left and Right is infuriating, to be honest. It all but guarantees any one politically active person will disagree with 50% of their compatriots. It also guarantees that neither "side" will represent any one person well, pretty much by definition. It is very effective at both manufacturing compliance and at being divisive.

As a life long anarchist and anti-capitalist, NO SHIT. No better time than now to really wake up and end capitalism before it sparks all out war to prevent its demise. If you don't think that was the ultimate premise of past wars, Ha!

I pity these fools with no EQ.

Could see through that thin veil that is "Russel Brand" all along- people like that were always fake talking heads that use visual appearance to attract surface level people and then use complex rhetoric to swing them into the camp. Rock n Roll mega churches, really all of social media, it's always been a PSYOP to make you defend the rich and maintain the status quo. Any one of these people who reach a certain level of wealth needs you to maintain it for them.

Someone said it, "The more money one accumulates, the less interesting one becomes"

> These new forms of populism have taken all of the counter-culture of the 1960s 70s and 80s and moulded it into some new form, a grotesque caricature of anti-establishment, denuded of any political analysis, and leaning heavily into critiques of state power and media power with no conception of capital. This is a Hippy Grotesque, Dead Heads in a post-truth fever-dream, refusing to come down from the high that is conspiracism, a sort of Peter Pan existence of forever living in your bedroom, stoned and paranoid.

Gosh, I can't believe the counterculture is opposing my culture!

I don't want to respond with just a single pithy line, but it really seems to me that's the extent of this article. There's no effort to understand what common interests there might be between self-identified progressives and far-right political parties, or critical analysis of when grab-bag protests featuring all the most oppositional groups in one's country do or don't represent a coherent political movement. It's just rehydrated 1960s-era commentary about how the hippies focus on weird stuff I don't think is important, and have political goals I find strange and incoherent, so therefore they're wrong and we've got to figure out how to get them with the program.

Even the article itself is tinged with the religiosity that has somehow invaded left-leaning politics. If you commit the sin of having a single opinion that doesn't line up with theirs, you're suddenly "far-right" and become the enemy.