I want to be upfront before I even start this one, because I think it matters more here than it has in any of the previous posts, everything I am about to say is speculation, it is my best attempt to make sense of a pattern I keep watching play out, not a claim I can prove with data or citations or anything close to certainty. I do not have a study to point to, I do not have polling that confirms this, I am working entirely off vibes and pattern recognition here, which I know is a little ironic given how much of my argument in the earlier posts has been about not operating on vibes, but this particular post is explicitly a different kind of post, it is me thinking out loud about a possible explanation rather than asserting a fact, and I want that distinction to be clear the whole way through.
Here is the pattern I keep noticing, and here is my best guess at what might be causing it. Watching a huge number of people who identify as leftist or progressive defend Luigi Mangione so intensely, despite his actual documented views running in the opposite direction of basically every value that identity is supposed to represent, has left me wondering whether what I am actually watching is not really about Mangione specifically at all, but about a slower, quieter rightward drift happening inside parts of the American online left, a drift that has been building for a while and that this particular moment just happened to surface in a really visible way. I want to stress the parts of that sentence doing a lot of work, American, online, parts of, not the entire left, not leftist politics globally, not every progressive person or organization or movement, just a specific, extremely online, extremely online-discourse-shaped subset of people who use the language of the left without necessarily being anchored to its actual substance anymore.
My best guess at the mechanism behind this, and again this is speculation, is a kind of accumulated exhaustion and desensitization from years of watching people claim leftist or progressive identity in bad faith, without actually holding the underlying commitments that identity is supposed to require. We have all watched, over the last several years, an enormous amount of what I would call brand-only leftism, people who adopt the aesthetics and vocabulary of progressive politics, the right hashtags, the right phrases, the right performative gestures, without ever actually doing anything that costs them anything, without organizing, without showing up for unglamorous unpopular causes, without applying their stated values consistently when it is inconvenient to do so. I think watching that pattern repeat itself over and over, watching people claim the identity cheaply and then abandon it the second it becomes costly, may have worn down some people’s ability or willingness to actually scrutinize who deserves to be let into the tent, because the scrutiny itself has started to feel exhausting, has started to feel like just one more front in an endless, grinding argument about who counts as a real leftist, and at a certain point, I wonder if exhaustion turns into something like a lowered bar, a willingness to just accept whoever shows up waving something that looks vaguely like the right flag, because actually litigating every single case has become too tiring to keep doing consistently.
If that is what is happening, and I want to keep stressing the if here, because I genuinely do not know, then I think it produces exactly the kind of vulnerability I am describing when I say the movement risks getting taken over by bad actors. Here is the logic as I understand it, if the actual bar for entry into a political identity becomes did this person do one thing I found satisfying, rather than does this person hold a coherent, considered set of values consistent with what this movement claims to stand for, then that bar is trivially easy to clear for almost anyone, including people who do not actually share the movement’s underlying commitments at all, including people who might be actively hostile to them, including people whose broader worldview, once you actually examine it, looks a lot more like the very things the movement claims to oppose. A movement that will take anyone who does something satisfying, without checking what that person actually believes the rest of the time, is a movement that has effectively given up on gatekeeping its own identity, and movements that give up on gatekeeping their own identity do not stay coherent, they get pulled in whatever direction the loudest or most compelling recent symbol happens to point, regardless of whether that direction has anything to do with the movement’s actual stated principles.
I think this is where my speculative diagnosis actually connects back to the specific Mangione situation in a way that feels coherent to me, even if I cannot prove it. If a meaningful chunk of the online left has become desensitized to bad-faith claims of leftist identity, worn down by years of watching people cosplay the politics without living them, then a figure like Mangione becomes exactly the kind of person who can slip through that lowered bar almost effortlessly, because he does not actually need to hold leftist values to get welcomed in, he just needs to have done one thing that felt satisfying to a movement that has, in this theory, stopped checking credentials very carefully. And once he is in, once the welcome has happened, once the merchandise exists and the folk hero narrative has calcified, the actual content of his beliefs becomes almost impossible to dislodge, because by that point defending him is not really about him anymore, it is about defending a decision the movement has already made, and reversing that decision costs social capital that people are not eager to spend, so the beliefs just get quietly ignored instead of being treated as disqualifying, which is exactly what I think we have been watching happen.
I want to be careful here not to overstate what I am claiming, because I do not think this means the American online left has secretly become a right-coded movement, that is not what I am saying and it is not what I believe, most of the actual policy positions, the actual organizing, the actual substantive political work happening under the leftist and progressive banner, still looks like what it has always looked like, still is oriented toward the values it claims to hold. What I am speculating about is narrower than that, a specific vulnerability in a specific online-discourse layer of that broader movement, a layer that I think has become unusually porous, unusually willing to grant symbolic membership without checking the actual contents of what is being let in, and I think that porousness is being exploited right now, whether deliberately or just as an emergent property of how online virality works, by a case that does not actually fit the values being projected onto it.
Here is why I think this matters beyond just this one case, even in a purely speculative frame, because if this pattern is real, even in a limited, partial, online-specific way, it suggests something concerning about the durability of political identity in general in this particular media environment. A political identity that can be claimed by literally anyone who does one viral, satisfying thing, regardless of what they actually believe the rest of the time, is not really a stable identity anymore, it is a flag of convenience, something people attach to whoever happens to be useful in the moment, and flags of convenience get captured, again and again, by whoever is best at generating the specific kind of viral moment that triggers the welcome. If that is happening even partially, even just in certain online spaces, it means the actual ideological content of leftist politics is quietly becoming less important than the emotional payoff of specific viral moments, and that is a genuinely concerning trajectory for any political movement to be on, because it means the movement’s boundaries are being drawn not by its own members deliberately deciding what they stand for, but by whichever outside actor or algorithm happens to produce the next satisfying spectacle.
I do not have a clean answer for what to do about this, if it is even happening the way I am guessing it is, and I want to end this the way I started it, by acknowledging clearly that I could be wrong, that this could be a much smaller, much more contained phenomenon than I am making it sound, limited to a specific loud online subculture that does not actually represent where most leftist or progressive political energy and organizing is actually happening. But I keep coming back to the visceral, disproportionate defensiveness I have watched play out over the last week, the mockery, the account getting taken down, the refusal to engage with documented facts about who this person actually is, and none of that behavior looks to me like people confidently defending a position they have actually thought through, it looks like people protecting an investment they already made, an investment I think they were able to make so easily, so quickly, so uncritically, because the actual bar for entry into their political identity has gotten lower than it used to be, and if that guess is even partially right, it is worth naming out loud, even speculatively, because a movement that cannot tell the difference between a genuine comrade and a convenient symbol is a movement that has already started losing the thing that made it a movement in the first place.