There are still people like this

"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal," wrote George Orwell in 1945. He meant not the classical liberal who believed in individual freedoms and small government but the leftist liberal who glorified communist experiments and disdained middle-class life. To Orwell, the existence of intellectuals who loved the Soviet Union despite the purges, mocked "bourgeois liberty" despite the pleasing bourgeois circumstances of their own lives, and identified with revolutionary movements that would speedily ship them off to camps--this was a fact in need of explanation.

That may have been what he meant, but it's not exactly what he said. Then I found this:

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in
half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing
about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude,
their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is
little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never
been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked
characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world
of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many
intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for
war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off
when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the
people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are most
defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so
many of the English intelligentsia--their severance from the common
culture of the country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized.
They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the
general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident
thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals
are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman
and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably
true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of
standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping
away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes
squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always
anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it
certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a
real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they
were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual
sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and
the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they
had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic
Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than
it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed
forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class
must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism
hastened the process.