[DireStrait]

Your initial comment is on-point, except I don't think any of these people are identifying with or as nihilists.

They are invariably politically leftists. Which is where contemporary "bad words and cancel culture" come from.

The irony of being ostensibly "leftist" while flashing a 0.1% lifestyle of "knowing the room service menu at the Ritz by heart" and getting high in first class.

You may be referring to a particular brand of "excuse me for being a degenerate occasionally, but you know my heart is in the right place and I'm a friend of the proletariat" sort of leftism, but it's definitely not a nihilism and they'll definitely parrot the right leftist lines at parties or they'll lose their little perch in a heartbeat.

[pasabagi]

I think leftism has a particular appeal for culture types because it's traditionally been the case (until 1980 or so) that capitalism didn't really have much of a place for culture - which was traditionally a poor product, and the better it was as culture, the worse it sold.

There's also the traditional aristocratic looking-down-upon-the-bourgeois for their grubby and banal mindsets, which has got sort of subsumed into leftism because there aren't many aristocrats left. Adorno is a kind of good exposition of this sort of thing.

Lastly, it's very traditional. The French revolution, at least in the early stages, was basically bankrolled and sheltered by L Phillipe de Orlean, the first prince of the blood.