So you can blame it on horseshoe theory, or right wingers posing as lefties in order to disincentivize the get out the vote campaigns, or simple trolling by otherwise disinterested people, but there’s a phenomenon that seems to be getting more prevalent - on lemmy in particular but also our there in social space.

It’s folks who will unironically brand Bernie Sanders as a capitalist reactionary while praising Putin as an anti-capitalist hero standing up against imperialism. The dialog is actually remarkably close to what we saw in the early days of the_donald, where the over the top jokes about the trump train and the line transformed via some kind of sea change into what was considered serious dialog.

There was an actual fracturing off of some elements of the relatively far left (think pacifica radio not the weathermen) with the trump-russia thing and that might have its own causality to explore, but I don’t think that does anything but provide a nucleus for the rest to organize around.