June 26, 2020:
He was a much smarter and better educated version of that fool The Ideas Guy: lacking ability to apply his intellectual tools to present circumstances. He at least had intellectual tools. The Ideas Guy had only his personal nostalgia for a bygone youth, where The New Left Review was his model of theoretical heroism and creating new versions of old organizations, but better, was purely a matter of getting to work. Of someone other than himself getting to work, obviously, since he was The Ideas Guy, where within his proposed division of labor it would be others who get their hands dirty.
I group them by their desire to reduce contemporary circumstances to ideal models. That is to avoid confronting their conjuncture, specifically via one or another abstract blueprint derived and reduced from another time and place.
Wank machines. Posturing as rebels, lacking rebelliousness.