If you're on the right you think he's a Marxist commie, and don't like commies.

If you're a commie you don't think he's a commie, you think he's full of shit and uses left wing intellectual language to hide that he's an apologist for liberal social democracy, but in a bad way where social democracy is a step toward capitalization and away from revolutionary socialism.

If you're an anarchist probably think he's an avatar for a certain kind of former Soviet bloc intellectualist elitism, and he actively discourages direct action (I've never spoken to an anarchist about him, I might have to ask one.)

Gender critics and feminists don't like him because he's more than a little chauvinistic, and a vocal critic of Judith Butler.

If you're apolitical you think he's annoying and incomprehensible.

I think he appeals to a certain sort of budding or wannabe left intellectual. Someone who doesn't completely understand his work as a decades-long project, probably because they are still discovering it, and the political consequences of that project. Like he says things that are interesting and sort of novel because he's a Hegelian and Hegelian analysis can be full of all kinds of cool insights. When you assemble his arguments together as a body of work though it has a much different character than some of his more interesting points in isolation. But as a moderate Hegelian he neither fits with the right "end of history" Fukuyamist Hegelians or the left Marxist Hegelians, and he is critical of both groups.

I think he understands intellectualism as a social force, and likes to bother different stripes of intellectuals. He's controversial enough to stay relevant, and good at working the media. I think he is very intentional with all this stuff.

But he broke Jordan Peterson when they debated, and got him out of the spotlight for like a year or two and that was pretty funny