Leftist doomerism as a gateway to reaction

I have a very long time friend — someone I’ve known for 30 years — who has always been just about the most left wing person I’ve known. He’s in his 50s now, and over the past few years I’ve slowly come to the realization that he’s turning into a political reactionary. The change has been very gradual, and he very mucb still self-identifies as a leftist, but I can see it happening in real time.

He has become part of what I’m going to label the “Trump is awful but” genre of leftism. TIAB’s tenets are that while Trump is an extremely corrupt authoritarian with fascist aspirations, he’s really just neoliberalism/late capitalism with the mask ripped off, and in that sense he’s in some ways no worse and possibly even preferable to [all current leaders of the Democratic party].

Obviously this is anecdotal, but my sense is that this type of leftist has such a profoundly pessimistic view of the world that, ironically, nothing short of a genuine social revolution qualifies as the kind of political change that’s even worth pursuing. This obviously feeds into a heighten the contradictions type mentality, but, less obviously, it also feeds into a fundamentally reactionary psychological orientation toward the world. If everything is terrible and nothing ever really gets better, then the temptation to give into the delusion that life was actually far better prior to [fill in any and all social reforms and advances from the past X years/generations] becomes, for at least some people, irresistable.

Anyway watching this happen in slow motion, over a period of several years, has been both sad and a kind of cautionary tale.