I know better than to romanticize prior generations of leftists, they've always been this vile. But I don't think they've always been this retarded. My experience engaging with them over the years has been that I used to engage in actual arguments with them, to nowadays trying to educate them about their own ideology.
Also, engaging with boomer Marxist professors and the like is infinitely more pleasant than engaging with millennial and zoomer activists, though I'm sure a lot of that has to do with age. Plus these boomer Marxists laid the foundation for the California Baizuo pozz to emerge in the first place.
Maybe it's as simple as back when conservatives and even classical liberals still had a seat at the table, leftists had to be on their best behavior, to stay in their motte so to speak, which meant adhering to a modicum of intellectual standards. But now that they have a monopoly on cultural production and social discourse, they can finally enjoy the bailey.
Plus college standards have taken a nosedive, esp outside of STEM, and frankly calling the average proglodyte with a grievance studies degree a "Cultural Marxist" is giving them way too much credit. Most of them probably couldn't tell you the first thing about Gramsci or Horkheimer or Foucault.
Speaking of, most of them are frankly clueless about their own ideology's past with promoting pedophilia. They're genuinely useful idiots, who are super animated about being activists, despite having never read a book by any of the demons they may or may not have even heard of. Which is why "proglodyte" is such an apt term for these types, they're genuinely just ignorant and stupid and it's legitimately more difficult to argue with a retard than with an intelligent opponent because the retard is genuinely too fucking dumb to even understand their own "arguments," let alone your arguments.
Do they really seek to learn and understand? I don't think they do. They've been told all through the years while they attended school that they are smart because they are "educated" they have credentials and what not. They have made their whole life being doing what's prescribed and counting it as being intelligent.
Einstein on the other hand said, "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
They don't question....they accept.
Sowell refused to teach in the late 60s because the rot was set in by then. Colleges saw the CRA for what it was, an excuse to lower standards and start the machine printing of cookie cutter jobs. Everything has followed suit since then, we now have students who swallow the stupidest crap out of fear, compliance, and the need to appease legitimately stupid people.
Commander Rockwell's collage speech's show how pozzed they were even then in full force, and even speaking of his own days in uni (before WW2) he was talking about how degenerate art was encouraged so he just made slop to get by and got good grades.