re: #566 Killgore Trout

I do think you’re crediting them for being far more influential than the actually are. The modern left is the Democratic party, basically. These guys are on the fringe. They’re good at social media, but the number of people they’ve got showing up to places is hardly immense.

This isn’t the modern left. It has the potential to become it, but that’s all it is, potential— and it seems rather unlikely. The GOP got pulled down mainly by its Reagan-era pact with the religious right; that’s a large part of what’s fueling the turn to the right in the GOP.

The Democrats don’t have anything like that, that I can see. These people are on the fringe of influence.

We’ll see if we start seeing a similar primarying of Democrats in a serious manner because they’re not ideologically pure enough, and whether the primaries are at all successful. That’d be, to me, the sign that the hard left had really gained significant influence in the modern left.