This is probably very obvious to everyone else, but it just clicked for me, so…
The Angry Identitarian Left is the way it is, in part, because its practices are optimized specifically for college campus activism.
Within a university, the world is controlled by a nigh-omnipotent authority. If you are a student, it is probable that the authority basically likes you and wants you to succeed; even if the administrators find you annoying, they fundamentally regard you as community members who should be receiving a good education, not as vermin or monsters or fifth-columnists. If you are a leftist or liberal, it is probable that the authority basically shares your fundamental values; the administrators are basically you, thirty years down the pike. But the authority is lazy and venal and (especially) worried about disruptions and embarrassments. By default, you will be denied a lot of the political things you want, because that’s the easiest and cheapest thing, because the most convenient way to keep donors happy usually involves sweeping problems under the rug and not shelling out money.
Under these circumstances, the most flexible strategic plan seems to involve a two-pronged social assault, with the prongs consisting of “moral suasion” and “extortion.” You speak with as much holiness and self-righteousness as you can muster, in hopes that you can guilt the administrators into acknowledging the merit of your points, which has a good chance of working because deep down the administrators probably do see the merit of your points. (They really, genuinely don’t want to be racist or sexist either!) And you make yourself as annoying and obstreperous as you can, with the implicit promise that you’ll stop as soon as you get what you want, in hopes that appeasing you becomes the easy way out.
There’s not much to be gained by persuading anyone of anything, or by looking to compromise with anyone, because there’s not really any principled opposition with whom to engage. There’s also no real downside to using nasty rhetoric and dirty tactics. In the wider world, that shit causes people to hate and fear you, it alienates potential allies and cements the resolve of your enemies…but within the college, you have no genuine enemies and you don’t have much use for allies. All that matters is whether you can break through the sloth and self-interestedness of the decision-makers.
Damn, I feel like that nails it.
So, this does nail one part of the dynamic. I think this kind of US-specific though. Example: in Canada there’s more government funding, so “keeping donors happy” is less important.
Also, who is doing the student activism probably varies. In Canada the student unions do a lot of the left-wing activism, and they are quite organized, up to the national level. They’re not “naive kids whose actions won’t work in the real world”, they’re fairly sophisticated operators who go on to get jobs in (mostly academic-related) public sector unions and so on, while hand-picking their successors, who usually win election based on single-digit turnout. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, sleazy kleptocrats. I’d take “shouty kids who don’t know this isn’t the real world” any day.
Well, the important question is what happens afterwards, isn’t it?
To be sure, even naive shouty kids can do some real damage under the right circumstances. It’s scary to see some of the most venerable universities in the US shutting down free speech norms because students got offended by Halloween costumes. University environments matter. But if the damage here were limited to the fruits of campus activism, it would not be that big a deal.
What we have – as far as I can tell – is a situation where those shouty naive kids go on to define the strategy and culture of American liberalism generally, without ever really being pushed to adopt a different mindset. The left here has long fetishized and exalted the college radical; since the ‘60s at least, campus radicals have provided the movement’s passion and protesting-power. The internet provides many ways for people to “do politics” without having to be absorbed by the big inertia-laden party apparatus and its Kinda-Corrupt But Realistic Norms. The campus-activist zeitgeist is present, not just on campus, but wherever people are concerned about fighting for the left. And so we wind up in a place where celebrities and pundits are pandering directly to the tastes of the shouty naive kids, and where even a hard-nosed veteran pol like Hillary thinks it makes sense to spend a lot of her time acting like a shouty naive kid herself.
Result: everyone in America, not just a few irritated deans, get to see liberalism and leftism being furthered largely by means of self-righteous grandstanding.
I could certainly imagine reasons to prefer the kleptocrats.