I had a dream some time ago of leftists going through Navy SEAL training, in the long term pursuit of winning leadership roles, and the following possibility of supporting leftist aims in taking over America. What I think people fail to grasp is that once you have undergone the decapitation ceremony, you are cursed to conformity. You can do nothing else. It is your life. This is why Whittaker Chambers–a name far too few people know–put his money in the long term on the Communists.
As Sergei Nechaev–perhaps the original Nihilist (it is a Russian term)–put it:
The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no
business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name.
Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the
single passion for revolution.
They have not quit. I see no reason to believe this. They have nothing else. If you go study philosophy at virtually any university, if you are not a devout Christian, Jew or the like, you will come out a leftist (if you are not an Objectivist). That is the virtually invariant result: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Our shared Meaning System has been systematically broken by both stupid and malignant people. This has consequences.