George Gissing on His Former Self
These words go a long way in explaining why the youth, and those who refuse to grow up, gravitate toward the Left:

I often amuse myself with taking to pieces my former self. I was not a hypocrite in those days of violent radicalism, workingman's-club lecturing, and the like; the fault was that I understood myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal on behalf of the suffering masses was nothing more nor nothing less than disguised zeal on behalf of my own starved passions. I was poor and desperate, life had no pleasures, the future seemed hopeless, yet I was overflowing with vehement desires, every nerve in me was a hunger which cried out to be appeased. I identified myself with the poor and ignorant; I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs. I raved for freedom because I was myself in the bondage of unsatisfyable longing.

[from page 382 of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk]