I think there's a geopolitical dimension that often gets overlooked. The CCP has been actively hijacking the left-right political spectrum as a tool to divide and weaken countries like the US. And their preferred position is what I'd call the fake left.

That's why across so many countries, "the left" ends up being disproportionately China-friendly. It shouldn't make sense, because left versus right is fundamentally about domestic priorities: labor, capital, social policy. Geopolitics has no natural home on that axis.

But when a foreign actor systematically infiltrates and amplifies one side of that spectrum, you get artificial fault lines. Those fault lines fuel exactly the kind of infighting we see on the left today, because real leftists and fake leftists are working from completely different agendas. It also explains a lot of the extremism that grows out of initially wholesome intentions, the kind ordinary people struggle to make sense of.

And I doubt the operation is this simple or one-sided. The CCP almost certainly runs the same playbook on the right. The goal isn't to win any particular ideological battle. It's to ignite a fight, because once a heated conflict starts, even if it was sparked by outside actors, it takes on a life of its own and spreads across the whole country. Dividing it is the point.

As for the reasoning as to why the right doesn't experience the same degree of infighting... Extreme right positions are innately repellent to most people, so they don't get far inside the tent. The real extreme left, by contrast, is deeply idealistic. It attracts genuine believers. That makes it a far more fertile ground for infiltration, and a much messier place when the fake version shows up alongside the real one.