Since when did the Left start demanding anarchy?

The woman whose account appears at the top of this picture started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke. She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence….

I find this attitude has become inescapable. It’s not just the attitude that the enforcement of societal rules and norms is bad, but that this is the default assumption of all right-thinking people – it’s not just a left-wing perspective but the left-wing perspective. Like so much else in contemporary left-of-center discourse, it demonstrates the total ideological poverty we’re working with. Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. Like I said before, we’re living in definitional collapse; the struggle right now is not merely that socialism can’t win but that so many self-described socialists have no deeper ideological moorings than whatever they’ve absorbed from Tumblr and “breadtube.” They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

[Well, from my perspective, that follows from the inherent contradictions of socialism. If one thinks about it too much, they risk disenchantment with an ideology that has sent tens of millions to the grave in death camps, slave labor, deliberate famines, and the like. Once you’ve read The Road to Serfdom and watched the trajectory of socialist governments over any period of time, you realize that intellectualism and socialism are only theoretically not mutually exclusive. — Ed]