The insanity of the modern left is not a conspiracy, and no one is minding your imaginary control room. They watch insightful BBC documentaries about how the US went facist, rather than reading Adorno. They get their pop psychology from glossy magazines and self help books, not from reading Marcuse. The people reading Adorno these days are conservatives. Liberals could not get through Minima Moralia, it would make their head hurt and they do not remotely have the background required to understand a tenth of it. They don't know Gramsci either, you have to tell them who he was.
Parties and ideologies run on autopilot, as the disorder in the heads of the dons emerges in the world a hundred year later. If it were an intellectual debate it would be easy to discuss their sources with them, but they have no idea who they are. Not the bum at the bus station, not any imaginary rank and file, the elite, the MIT and Harvard grads with money and power.
I do believe that the elites on the left, especially academia, operate out of a consensus which is so dogmatic as to be almost Orwellian or even Stalinist in an intellectual context. No, the Adornos and the Gramscis of the movement did their work too well and the poison has already permeated the culture but there is no password or secret handshake.
But in every leftist movement there has always been the party insiders and useful idiots.
