This phenomenon, I think, is due to a campaign of obfuscation and a continual attack on the meaning and substance behind these things.

These concrete terms and concepts have been reduced to vague inclinations and undefined and fundamentally nebulous and ungraspable phenomena. Instead of critiquing solid beliefs and ideas accompanied by a rigorous body of academic work, you are now critiquing and defending a “feeling”. A constant, all-encompassing and omnipresent feeling, but a feeling nonetheless. And arguments about feelings don’t have anything to do with academics. All you have to do is argue from some inherent, innate knowledge that you know you must possess because doing the reading is too much work, even as you spend hours a day posting screeds about Chinese cum machines on twitter. This is why debate has been reduced to such an uneducated joke that it can scarcely still be called debate. “Marxism” and “capitalism” - these terms have been robbed of their meaning and therefore any debate can only be devoid of intellectual vigor. How many anticommunist can name a single Marxist concept and form a coherent critique? You’d be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t just go on a meaningless tirade about 1984. This is the result of decades of American anti-intellectualism. Now we have to live in a world where the aesthetics of intellectual meaning are still there but the thing itself is dead.

Obviously, meaningful discussions occur every day. But about Marxism and in a mainstream setting? Forget about it.