And on a more meta note, I'll mention that I sometimes see a similar dynamic playing out on the left -- especially the anarchist/socialist left -- when it comes to conflating some bad David Broder-esque take with an imagined monolithic "they". Often the label used for "them" is "liberal", but it's just as commonly "centrist" or "neoliberal".

And here's the insidious part: it's usually entirely accurate to ascribe "neoliberal" or "centrist" to the original take, but there's a handwave in the middle that turns the focus away from a bad columnist and the people who agree with his bad column and toward All Non-Anarchists-or-Socialists Everywhere.