Shitlibs more strongly identify along ideological axes. This is why, for instance, they can’t tolerate the company of those with differing world views. (White libchicks are the absolute worst at tolerating those with opposing political views.)
And, although I don’t have confirmatory data at hand, I suspect shitlibs are more likely to wander and become itinerants, always looking for a shiny new city to infest. Personality studies have found that shitlibs tend to be more novelty-seeking, or to put it less charitably they tend to have higher disgust thresholds. This desire for novelty and filth probably contributes to the shitlib “born to run away” compulsion. They just can’t handle too much niceness (read: Whiteness), order, and comfortable functionality. They need to feel distressed. They crave chaos in their lives.
How do I know this? Well, I have been surrounded by shitlibs. I’ve swum in the deepest waters of their subterranean cultures, taking what I wanted from them while leaving behind that which repulsed me. I know them pretty well, tbh, how they tick and what emotional keys are tickled in their hamsterchords.
I bring this up on the heels of the recent exposure of Stephanie Wilkinson, the proprietoress of the Commie Shrew, excuse me, the Red Hen, who hounded Sarah Sanders out of her restaurant and followed her like a psycho down the street screaming libanities at her, as a shitlib vagabond.
The rootlessness of shitlibs is intimately connected to their ideological fence-guarding in a positively reinforcing feedback loop. The shitlib leaves for a strange new locale, loses touch with everyone before her, and finds new friends at work, bar crawls, or expediently through shared housing.
Each move in the shitlib’s life brings more severing of social connections and greater stress finding and stringing together replacement social connections. (Family connections are surrendered for good.) There’s very little organic or authentic thread tying together the nomadic shitlib with her new sets of friends…no common upbringing, no schooling experiences, no history or unique local culture, and most importantly no shared memories which is the most powerful bonding agent.
Into this toxic atomization the one binding agent strong enough to overcome the disintegration of traditional social and family bonds is ideology. A fevered, frantic, hysterical attachment to ideology becomes the substitute for natural bonds, and the shitlib leans on ideological identification — in herself and in those who would be unwittingly auditioning for inclusion in her social circle — to screen for friends who will meet the lowest standard in friendship: someone who won’t irritate her with an opposing viewpoint.
This is why shitlib friendships (and similarly, romantic relationships) in the big blue cities are typically superficial, transient, and transactional: the only common ground is hatred of [X] and how one votes. When ideology is the foundation of friendship, those mystic unspoken bonds of reassuring familiarity get twisted into a grotesque facsimile of affinity, one based on an overweening insistence of ideological compatibility and purity. With nothing else to connect them to each other, the shitlib relies on ideology to shoulder the burden of standing in for the missing authenticity.
And ideology can work, for a while, as a values substitute and proxy for relationship complementarity, to create and maintain relationships (which is why city chicks will stress “shared values” and “Trump voters swipe left” when pole shopping), but woe to the friend who steps out of line one day and utters a deplorable bit of crimethink through the bottom of a cocktail glass. When ideology is the glue, a trivial difference of opinion on a point of order can feel like a gross betrayal.
The problem is a long-run one. Besides the lapses into crimethink, shitlib relationships dissolve easily and perfunctorily with work relocations and life stage changes that demand more social involvement and commitments than simply ideological conformism. The shitlib is bothered by these demands because they throw into stark relief the inauthentic nature of her friendships.
What is evident to the meanly keen observer is that shitlib friendships start to take on the veneer of artifice, fraying at the edges and duct-taped by snark and late nite talk show references. The very fact that shitlibs strive so hard for social authenticity prevents them from ever realizing their goal. They are their own worst frenemies. It’s a variation on the old “if you have try to be cool, you aren’t” aphorism.
De-urbanization and a revitalization of towns and smaller-sized cities geographically dispersed more equitably throughout the country will go a ways to helping shitlibs form real, lasting friendships that can survive the occasional disagreement with a Colbert monologue.
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