Had to chuckle a bit, and wonder if Matt isn't conducting his own little psy-op experiment with this statement.
I suppose if you polled my students, they?d declare me to be left wing, but not a rhetorical bomb-thrower. Am I closer to Karl Marx than to Ayn Rand? Well, naturally. Progressive politics were part of my upbringing and education. And of course that is also the best way to get along in academia, and I do like to get along.
That said, the whole right/left paradigm of political divisiveness drives me bonkers at times.