FluxBlog

I started listening to Chapo Trap House in early 2018 after I heard on reddit that it was a Pod Save America alternative that hated the Democrat Party. I wasn’t on Twitter or maybe I would have heard of it sooner, and much of what they said on the show was initially impenetrable to me because I wasn’t on Twitter. But I listened to it with relish, going back through the two years’ worth of episodes I had missed. The show was the soundtrack to my life: what I listened to when I walked the mile from the far commuter lot to my crowded office, when I washed dishes in my tiny kitchen, when I was paralyzed from anxiety. I laughed and laughed.

Suffice it to say that the moment in my life when I discovered Chapo was pretty dour. I was in my third year of grad school and had given up on any hope of rich friendships with my colleagues. I cut ties with my first group of friends after the “leader” tried bullying me; I was twenty-five and not about to become the victim of bullying or simply part of a friend group with a leader. My second group of friends was just not a good fit. One of them deadass took me aside to tell me that I was being homophobic because I called someone’s cat effete for eating only liver pâté. It doesn’t take much to feel alienated from grad students, but it takes a lot of emotional resources to cope with that alienation for years or to try to figure out the fault lines (class differences? senses of humor? regional personalities? undiagnosed autism?). Living in a rural locale, I didn’t have easy options for friendships outside of the university, so I mainly kept to myself. For years.

It’s easy to mistake causality in these cases, but I believe Chapo Trap House was one of the media products chiefly responsible for “parasocial relationship” discourse—or the tacit belief that media personalities are your close personal friends. I don’t think I ever had that level of delusion, but I remember feeling a spiritual relief, like when a piece of art speaks to you, when I came across lines from interviews with the hosts:

Making people feel that they’re not as alone as they thought they were is a big thing, too. Believing certain things, be they about the brutality of our foreign policy or inefficacy of liberalism’s current form, can be very isolating. Maybe it isn’t politics. Maybe it’s just being such a strange person that you want to get deeply immersed in ironically cosplaying as a Turkish deep state operative, or read The Federalist for laughs. Whatever it is, we’ve tuned into a lot of people who share our sensibility and felt singular and dislocated in their beliefs and sensibilities, and now realize they’re far from the only ones. That’s pretty cool, too.

For all the discourse about parasocial relationships, nobody opens up much about theirs. We all understand that it’s too embarrassing, and to be sure, I was in a pathetic place. To have people, other men in particular, admit to the loneliness of contemporary life was, spiritually, what I needed as much as unforced laughter. I didn’t mistake the hosts for my friends, but the show was as important to me as a friend.

Every criticism of Chapo is probably true: it isn’t really socialist; the hosts are smug, annoying, Twitter-brained, drugged-up, bourgeois, and irony-poisoned; they bray and cackle unattractively; the show can be, in a word, grating. I gradually stopped listening to the show sometime in 2021 because of these things, though I still sometimes tune in when I’m nostalgic. These days, the show has given up its creativity and experimentalism and become just another news commentary show—an anti-Democrat Pod Save America. It’s a little sad.

I managed to score a review copy of Chapo co-host Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag, a long-delayed political memoir now coming out this winter. Frost was known for her contrarian takes on the show, and in this book, perhaps her most contrarian position is her still-unabashed belief in socialism. The aftermath of Bernie 2020 sent some of the online coalition to the “post-left” or the “dissident right”; the offline coalition may have sided with Biden or, more likely, disengaged entirely. I imagine that a number of editorial writers have a document on their computers labeled “What Was the Dirtbag Left?” that they’re ready to dust off and push out with the official publication of Frost’s book. Even though Chapo has more subscribers on Patreon than it ever has, it seems time to ask this question. The show feels passé or at least hard to place within the current political horizon. The Chapo hosts, I think, even demur about calling themselves socialists or referring to socialism explicitly on the show anymore. With Bernie went everything. 

Not for Frost. Frost traces her own lineage back to activists who believed in socialism when it was a dirty word and sees herself carrying this torch with her book. Within this history, defeat is common; humiliation is optional. Almost surprisingly, Frost makes emphatic and unironic shows of continued support for Bernie and the Green New Deal—both of which seem more like vestiges of the book’s earlier publication date than authentic beliefs grounded in 2023. But her lack of polite, self-conscious shame at losing should perhaps chastise a number of online leftists who cut all ties to socialism out of anger and hopelessness. 

Frost is a good person to make this sort of critique. Her book—which roughly traces the arc from her early encounters with leftist politics during the Tea Party revolution through the Occupy Wall Street fiasco and, finally, to Bernie—at once measures a very specific phenomenon of what we might call “millennial socialism,” a project that deserves isolated scrutiny, and makes clear that these political projects or flashpoints, whatever their flaws, do not spell out doom for the socialist project as a whole, which has a far longer history with many defeats and some victories as well.

At the outset of the book, Frost says that she has ADHD and that the structure will reflect this. It does. The book has churning elements of memoir, reportage, history, gossip, and political commentary; a three-item typology of bad leftists turns into a twenty-page screed against Gabriel Winant’s promotion of care work over blue-collar work. The book has energy, to be sure. It makes points; I’m not sure that it is much interested in making a thesis. Personal stories sometimes swerve into the political; sometimes, they’re just personal.

The political thrust, though, feels dated. Despite the popularity of the so-called post-left and dissident right in the online space formerly held by the Dirtbag Left, Frost ignores these newer elements of the political landscape. She takes on exhaustingly familiar targets on the liberal-left: the Occupy movement (admittedly, the book’s greatest offering), Planned Parenthood, “community organizers,” Twitter SJWs, anarchists, anxious academics, career-driven journalists, etc. The book even reprints Frost’s entire 2019 article denouncing Warren in favor of Bernie—a topic nobody needs relitigated. To the extent this book is a history, it’s fair for Frost to recount the main political opponents of the left during the Bernie campaign (though she might have included the alt-right too, if this was really her intention). But we’re living in 2023 and know the aftermath of the Bernie campaign beyond its defeat. Why not consider that?

However, the book, save a few proleptic mentions of COVID, quite literally ends with Bernie’s defeat in 2020. Frost has the good sense not to write an apologia for Bernie’s failure—a left-wing equivalent of Clinton’s What Happened—but the book does conclude on a resigned note. Frost sees no immediate path forward for the socialist left and recommends readers try to recover their energy: disconnect from the media, read novels, and keep vigilant and faithful. In another parlance, she could have recommended that readers practice self-care and go to brunch. The supreme irony of the book is that for as much as Frost loathes the progressive libs, she takes what were once the insults she and her ilk lobbed at them and offers them sincerely to her readers.

Readers expecting a lot of discussion of Chapo will walk away disappointed. Frost gives a few backstage glimpses but only a few: a two-line spat between Christman and Frost, a breezy explanation for why Frost isn’t on the show much anymore, and a rather predictable disclosure that they do a lot of drugs. (For the more gossip-prone, she does include an email correspondence lambasting an unnamed, but obvious, Aimee Terese.) Her focus is more broadly on what has passed as socialist activity over the past two decades and why the working class and labor unions remain central to any socialist project, despite those who have tried to substitute it with another group of oppressed people.

Frost is quiet on this point. I don’t recall the word “dirtbag” appearing once in the book after the title page. Frost frequently criticizes the groups of “progressives” who fall into the Hillary supporter or SJW manager categories and their resistance to the needs of the Actual Left, but I was curious to hear her thoughts on the coalition of people Chapo attracted (and ushered into the DSA). Were these people—mainly downwardly mobile millennials, many college-educated, some lonely grad students—any better for the socialist cause? What do we do about the fact that most “socialists” come to their politics online or through college—not unions? In the final analysis, was the “dirtbag” the correct political answer to the politics of the Obama administration? Is it still now? In short, was/is the “dirtbag” just another poor substitution for the working class?

Frost declines to answer these questions, and somewhat understandably. Dirtbags are hardly a political group, but a Very Online parasocial tribe. “Listening to podcasts isn’t politics,” the Chapo co-hosts liked to say. But it isn’t entirely separate from politics, either. You can deny the meaning of the phenomenon, but you can’t deny the phenomenon. I don’t care whether Frost ultimately denounced the very audience and approach to politics she, however unintentionally, created, but I find it odd for her not to offer an analysis at all. Like, what was the Dirtbag Left? What was millennial socialism? Did it have specific characteristics? Was it a faulty coalition or just a fandom with delusions of grandeur?

The questions I’m raising may well lay in the other pieces sure to spring up from the official publication of Frost’s book, anatomizing and gleefully eulogizing the Dirtbag Left. (Who better to cast dirt over the coffin but the journalists Chapo built its brand on dismembering?) The book declines to address the question it seems most qualified to answer.

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