The Post-Dirtbag Left: We're Funny But, Yeah, We're Not Cool
Cool or powerful? Your choice.
So I was reading this New Yorker article about how the dirtbag left is over and…
…many of the more ‘radical leftist’ readers have already rolled their eyes at that sentence and immediately written me off.
‘Dirtbag left’ is shorthand for the millennial/Gen Z, supposedly ‘hard-left’ folks who revel in a politics based around vulgarity and nihilism. There’s a place, a necessity, and an inevitability of and for anger if you are paying any attention, but it’s become fairly normal and in some people’s minds, very cool, to commit to living *in it*. In the polarised world we’ve sleepwalked into over the last ten years, the narcissism of anger and verbal brutality is the dirtbag left’s chosen home.
It’s an equivalent corner of the left to the right’s ironically-and-definitely-not-really-supporting-Trump 4channer. Author of the New Yorker article Andrew Marantz focuses on the most famous dirtbag brand: the podcast ‘Chapo Trap House’, but also podcasts such as ‘Cum Town’ and ‘Street Fight Radio’, and pundits such as… students on Twitter who never/always do the course reading, smoke too much weed, and believe that their refusal to read/photographic memory of every Hegel quote means they’re always one step ahead of you.
Angrily and loudly not caring and never compromising = More Politics.
Building actual arguments, allowing for complexity when needed, engaging with conservatives in debate or conversation, giving a shit about being basically decent to others is somehow ‘less radical’:
“This presupposed that American politics consists of a single spectrum, on which Nazi-punching is to the left of civil disobedience and insults are to the left of arguments. But there isn’t just one spectrum; at the very least, there’s a quadrant grid, with policy goals on one axis and temperament on the other. The x-axis ranges from a fully planned economy to anarcho-capitalism; the y-axis ranges from solicitous Socratic dialogue to misanthropic bullying.“
Marantz also positions it as, at least in the term’s coining and main play area, an Extremely Online phenomenon: it’s “a common misconception that the only way to be a proper radical, at least online, was to mimic the temperament of the dirtbag left.” But for every person who hides their shadow avatar beneath a more benevolent physical persona, there’s one who’s like that IRL: the hypocritical brocialist who’s obsessed with equality until it interferes with his ability to engage in casual sexism. The person who rails against ‘fascists’ and ‘authoritarians’ but can’t compromise on their own vision one inch, or even bring themselves to apologise when they’re in the wrong.
(Speaking of hypocrisy/contradiction/compromise: plenty of dirtbags on Twitter continue to roll their eyes at the erudition of a New Yorker article on the subject, likely unaware - as I was - of the fact that host of Chapo Trap House Will Menaker is the son of two New Yorker writers.)
The article, called ‘The Post-Dirtbag Left’, is essentially a shout-out to what Marantz posits as an antidotal podcast: ‘Know Your Enemy’. The piece ends with a kinda lovely, Very Online exchange from ‘Know Your Enemy’ host Sam Adler-Bell:
In April, on Twitter, a fan of “Know Your Enemy” wrote, “I love this nerdy shit,” referring to that show and to four broadly similar ones (“Time to Say Goodbye,” “Left Anchor,” “Death Panel,” and “The Dig”). If “Chapo” and its ilk make up the dirtbag left, the fan wondered, then what should this newer subgenre of podcasts be called? Adler-Bell tweeted two self-deprecating options: “the ‘not funny or cool’ left” and “the ‘your parents might like it’ left.” Others commented below, proposing alternatives: the dorkbag left, the Norton Critical Edition left, the “joy to have in class” left, the earnest left. Adler-Bell objected to the last of these, writing, “You get a reputation for being earnest around here”—Twitter, that is—“you’re in trouble.”
The idea that being earnest, humble, or caring is not compatible with being cool or funny would be baffling if it didn’t perfectly highlight the adolescence of online culture. Plenty of ‘erudite’, ‘socratic’ leftists - take Contrapoints as an example - are hilarious and cool, but I mean, is that really the most important thing about her? (I’d say it’s more that her lengthy, well-read arguments are so convincing, purposeful and uplifting that she’s frequently credited by young ex-alt-right men as the person who de-radicalised them.)
She made an excellent, adjacent point about humility and decency with regards to Dave Chappelle on TYT recently:
I’m an aspergic, “conflict-averse introvert”, as Adler-Bell is described. If I had more of an attention span to read, I’d model myself entirely on OG dorkbag Chomsky.
But in place of an ability to commit to reading all government documents and academic papers relevant to my interests, I’ve found the following dorkbags very helpful in cultivating my inferior bitesize version of Noam:
Unlearning Economics (anyone know this guy’s real name?)
Whatever the post-dirtbag left is, it started with these pre-dirtbags.
Have a look. Or read a book.
(Start with Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing and the James Baldwin essay, which in terms of both length, and value, might as well be a book.)