This, by John Ganz gets at something about the reaction of certain segments of the Left to the Insurrection (boldface mine):

Sorel hated first and foremost the institutions of liberal democracy and thought their destruction was a more important revolutionary goal even than ending capitalism….

The Sorelian left has as its “myth” the notion of a spontaneous revolt against the system by the alienated mass of American workers. Anything suggestive of that revolt is potentially or actually legitimate. This Sorelian left can’t accept the official, liberal account of the riots as something deplorable or dangerous; it has to find within it some kernel of virtuous behavior and just regrets that the energy was not directed in a slightly different direction.

This belief is related to another myth, that of the alienated American worker, usually a white male, dissatisfied by the deranging influence of neoliberalism on their way of life. As such, the Sorelian left has to seek out this figure in the social composition of the rioters, either ignoring the quite diverse social backgrounds of the participants or emphasizing and insisting upon it when they are characterized as “petty bourgeois” or even in some cases actually quite wealthy. The main important thing is the supposed absence of the Professional Managerial Class, the caretaker of hypocritical liberalism.

…there is a marked ambivalence on the part of the Sorelian left towards other uprisings and insurrectionary forces in the U.S., like BLM or antifa. There is definitely a racial component to this ambivalence, but I believe it’s also because the goals of the BLM movement have largely been embraced by the institutions of mainstream liberalism (not without significant hypocrisy, of course), rendering it immediately corrupt to the Sorelian left. So too is the antifascist street fighting too close to the broad liberal revulsion against the radical right. (I think Antifa are also too counter-cultural in their own way, the Sorelian left is paradoxically quite conservative.) They are also impatient with Gramscian left’s tactics of electoralism, grassroots organization, or elite persuasion and pressure, viewing those as avenues into the corrupt halls of liberalism.

Only the radical right appears to the Sorelian leftist to be authentically anti-bourgeois, truly unassimilable into the corrupt framework of mainstream liberalism. This is why there is a lot of curiosity in these Sorelian corners about the notions and culture of the radical right: about nationalism, about populism, about conspiratorialism as holding a rational kernel on the subject of corrupt elite domination, about avant-garde ironic shock tactics to épater la bourgeoisie, and so forth. This creates the need to insist on the core legitimacy or ultimate harmlessness of the Capitol riot: that its participants are good folk misled by corrupt politicians but are the potential shock troops of a future, genuine revolt.

I think this goes a long way to explain why some on the left think they can make common cause with part of the right (leftists yearning to be free!). It also gets at what I’ve seen: there are people on the left who dislike the ‘moderate’ left more than they do the right.

Those who belong to ‘high-target’ groups, even if they are far left typically do not hold the Sorelian perspective because the right, especially in its current form is viewed as an existential threat. Members of groups where eighty to ninety five percent of people vote Democratic are not doing so solely based on policy preferences: one does so when the alternative is seen as potentially lethal.

Anyway, it’s a good piece that crystallized what has been bouncing around in my head about certain ‘left’ pundits who are possessed of rage boners towards those who oppose the Republican Party.