Tl;dr: in the words of another poster in this thread, it’s all ideology shniff.

This long post is going to have a “new guy just dropped” vibe to it, but I can’t resist. I have to paint this portrait of someone who is about as close as you can get to being a socialist, but just refuses to take that final leap of faith. Be warned, it’s basically just a long description and doesn’t really go anywhere.

It’s about one of my closest friends. He visited me a few months ago and talked with me for hours about China, Russia, Marxism, etcetera. He fully admitted that everything is fucked under capitalism, but refused to endorse anything to the left of Bernie, and basically maintained that Marxism = everyone must work in slave labor camps forever, and also millions of people will just randomly die for no reason if communists ever take control of anything. He became extremely angry when we discussed this because thanks to being terminally online I was ready for every point he made.

This guy is a big fan of Noam Chomsky. He’s also said too many positive things about Jordan Peterson and has probably spent hours watching his videos, although he said he stuck to like the Joseph Campbell / Jung-related monomyth stuff that Peterson focused on earlier in his career before the guy started grifting the fuck out of incels. To my friend’s credit he hasn’t brought up Peterson in years and laughs whenever I crack jokes at Peterson’s expense. My friend was also really into Ralph Nader back in the 2000s when I was still a lib and arguably more rightwing than him.

Some random relevant facts about my friend:

He grew up with me in rural / coastal New England.

His mom inherited basically infinite money from god knows where, his dad was a restaurant owner but by far the best one I’ve ever met, and I also washed dishes for him. He cooked free meals for kitchen staff every night and always paid in full and on time; his restaurants were widely regarded as among the best in the state. This means, of course, that he went out of business.

My friend’s parents divorced when he was a teenager. He despises his mother, claims she abused him, and barely discusses his father but seems to hold him in high esteem. Both parents have always been nice to me. His mom failed the asshole test, however; going out to eat with her was pretty embarrassing because she treated the wait staff like shit. My friend maintains that his mother’s abuse was the most spectacular his therapist has ever encountered, although so far as I know it was never physical. The worst story he told me was that she would make him read like classical literature and then reward him with a toy when he summarized books for her. I could be completely wrong, but my suspicion is that he unconsciously blames his mother for the divorce and wants to destroy her.

My friend is really into film and acting and is actually an extremely talented actor and filmmaker, regularly landing lead roles in high school drama and making short films that everyone loved. (I acted alongside him in many plays and movies.) We wound up going to the same college. I studied literature there and loved it; he studied film, hated it, and transferred to a different school like five minutes from home. Then he tried to “make it” in Hollywood and went absolutely nowhere, getting stuck editing footage for cooking shows for several years. He has given up on this dream and is now studying to become a therapist.

I’ve known him for almost twenty years, this guy was almost never without a girlfriend. Women loved him. He was (and still is) kind, smart, and hilarious. All kinds of people gravitated toward him. He’s just generally a good guy. I actually had almost no friends in elementary school and met him on the first day of high school, and meeting him and becoming close with him led to all kinds of other friendships. I met his last long-term girlfriend a few years ago and thought she was great. I believe they broke up because she wanted to get married and he didn’t, but I don’t know this for sure.

Although my friend has been cis all his life, within the last few years he came out as trans. He uses he/him pronouns and has been single since then, to my knowledge. He has never mentioned being sexually attracted to anyone except people who identify as women and would frequently make pretty lewd comments about them when we were teenagers. (Sometimes I would think like this but never actually say these kinds of things out loud.) He would also make homophobic comments and call me the n-word when we were teenagers, although thankfully that phase only lasted for a few months. We’re both basically white. I have never spoken the n-word aloud.

He’s pretty well-traveled but has never actually stayed in a foreign country for more than a few weeks.

When we hung out a few months ago, I hadn’t seen my friend in person in years. His appearance had radically changed. He was just way too fucking thin, like to an unhealthy extent. It honestly looked like he was just falling apart. He also wasn’t taking care of himself. He hadn’t eaten anything but a protein bar in 24 hours—because he had been traveling, he said—and was starving by the time he got to my place. In high school he did wrestling and has always been either kind of chubby or in good shape.

I believe my friend has inherited around six figures, maybe less, but he’s still living fairly frugally because that money actually isn’t going to last for long. (If you spend $2000/month and make no money, you’ll run out of $100,000 in about four years.) He’s basically investing the money in his education to become a therapist. He lives in a major city right now in an apartment with a bunch of roommates. He complains that they’re all communists, but I don’t know if that means they’re actually communists or, like, Warren supporters. (I’m recycling this last sentence from another post, sorry!)

This is just supposed to be a portrait of someone who is good, intelligent, and a victim of capitalism—someone who has been twisted into despising universal human liberation. He knows all about Noam Chomsky, he knows corporate media is nonsense, but he trusts them when they talk about China and Russia because communism ultimately threatens his status as a petite bourgeois.

I think that as capitalism collapses, and the contradictions intensify, people whom we believed all our lives to be relatively decent human beings will ultimately show that they have always been on the side of reaction—they just did a better job of hiding it than your average chud. I maintain that my friend is a good guy, and he’s still my friend, but it won’t shock me that much, I guess, if he starts marching with the proud boys or something within the next few years.