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.