I know from close of one guy who fell into the patsoc spiral and never came back from it. Leaving aside the grifters that benefit from it and "lead" the movement (kind of sad for a political movement to be led by twitch streamers if you ask me), from what I have seen I would describe patsocs simply as people that, while working class, are in a socially comfortable position (for what I have seen they are mostly straight, white, cis, male and relatively well economically) while at the same time are simply not able to handle the fact that they will likely not be at the forefront of any revolutionary change.

There is an obsession amongst western circles of idealizing revolution into an act of individual heroism and sacrifice (to the point of martyrdom sometimes, it's been talked about here before) and with talks about decolonization, land back and other forms of national liberation for the oppressed people within the USA, these people simply cannot accept that they could not have that chance to be leading the fight and that this one could be spearheaded by the oppressed peoples of the US' settler-colonial project. They want the USA of always but with socialism: a socialist USA with the same colonial administrative regions and borders, with the same race relations and with the same cultural settler dominance, because that is the only way they have to keep being the protagonists in this story. It is, fundamentally, an abandonment of what communism is about.