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The left-wing politicisation pipeline still seems to be doing its thing (#contrapoints). Each new crop of radicals think they've had the eternal truth of <the current year> revealed to them, and then confuse politics with interpersonal struggles of affirmation and denunciation.
Unfortunately, by the time people have learned not to dissociate from their past, ignorant selves by fervently criticising anyone they associate with that ignorance, and more generally *chill the fuck down*, there's another batch driving the same dynamics.
Worse, it's now possible to remain in one's political adolescence forever, never moving past the stage of identity formation through overcompensation, because there's a now an endless pipeline of political adolescents from which to spin a distributed network of peers.
If you think this is about age, consider: the Brexit vote began a process of polarisation, and thus politicisation, that is ongoing, which mainly acted on older people that either had no need for politics, or for whom politics had no need. These are old political adolescents.
This makes a lot of sense of the completely crazy politics in the UK since the referendum, because there have been opportunists on both sides who have taken advantage of the political naivety of the newly radicalised: embracing signalling and ignoring strategy.
To be completely explicit: I've met 18 year old students who are more politically self-aware than their Gen X parents, I've also met ageing millennials who think that politics is principally a matter of who you cleave to on twitter in disputes over Game of Thrones hot takes.
There are various reasons to pay attention to politicisation, but none is more pressing than polarisation, which goes well beyond Brexit. What we see here are interactions between processes of politicisation that drive demographics into separate communicative worlds.
I may not have agreed with every aspect of Nagle's analysis in Kill All Normies, but it's hard to deny that she put her finger on something: the origins of a pair of processes of politicisation that drove each other in opposite directions over the course of the last decade.
Now I've gone from one cancelled person to another, the problematic circle is complete. After all, what is Absolute Spirit but self-cancellation?
