What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left? (original) (raw)

Christman saw a political lesson in the show’s fan base. “The twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers or as laborers,” he said. “That manifests itself differently in different classes and geographic areas. For white, middle-class, male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty—they become failsons.” The “Chapo Trap House” guys are sincerely concerned with American inequality; at the same time, their most instinctive sympathies seem to fall with people whose worst-case scenario is a feeling of purposelessness. “Some of them turn into Nazis,” Christman continued. “Others become aware of the consequences of capitalism.”

The guys have gotten e-mails, they told me, from listeners who have started organizing, and who told them that they had started to think of their lives politically for the first time. You wouldn’t necessarily expect jokes about Antonin Scalia getting horseradish in his neck folds to spur people toward activism. But Biederman compared “Chapo” ’s style to the recessed cardboard filter on Parliament cigarettes, which, according to an apocryphal story, were designed so that soldiers could bite down on something during battle. “Irony is what allows you to keep your bearings when you’re looking at the horrors of the world,” he said.

As their big Election Night show approached, the “Chapo” guys told me about their plans. They want to set up a Web site, publish essays, bring in more history and international coverage, and produce sketches and short films. The Hillary Clinton Administration would set them up as the dedicated opposition. “The show would suck under a Trump Presidency,” Menaker noted. “We’d end up getting into that John Oliver thing. The emperor has no clothes, ladies and gentlemen! Trump outrage of the week!”

“Every episode would end with an open letter,” Biederman said. “It would be like—listen, you orange ignoramus, how dare you call Seth Meyers a kike on Twitter.”

“A few weeks ago, Virgil was trying to convince me that Trump would win,” Christman said. “I was like, we would be so fucked.”

On Saturday morning, I biked to James’s apartment, in Clinton Hill, where the guys were taping their first post-election podcast. James set up his laptop on a coffee table and dialled Christman in from Cincinnati. The room was cozy, with liquor bottles decorating one corner and audio cables coiled on a beat-up Persian rug. Texas buzzed the door, walked in, and sat down between Menaker and Biederman on the couch. “We ate shit,” Menaker said. “And the fact that we’re not alone doesn’t make it less acute.”

“It makes me feel worse,” Biederman said. “I’m lumped in with these idiots. We’re exactly as stupid as them.”

The live show on Election Night had been planned around a sequence of states going blue. The loose theme was “Dr. Strangelove,” and Biederman, in character as General Jack D. Ripper, was going to end the evening by committing suicide in the bathroom after Clinton’s victory was announced. Instead, as Trump took Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, the Chapo guys improvised, and the air in the room curdled. “Look, it’s Bernie’s fault,” Biederman said at one point. “Second of all, if voters are too immature to vote for someone that collapses and vomits all the time, the joke’s on them.”

In James’s apartment, they talked about the bad tweets and smarmy posts that they’d seen about President-elect Trump. The mood was perky. Not for the first time that week, I was jealous of their freedom from the paralyzing personal investment that I felt in the election.

“We have a duty to our fans to keep up the show, to provide some sense of community or solace,” Menaker said. “Strategically and politically, I think we must declare eternal, holy war on the Democratic Party, because they’re the ones that let this happen.”

“Yeah,” Biederman said. “The Democratic leadership has to be purged. Our mission statement, for the time being, is to paint these targets.”

I asked them if they blamed the Party exclusively. Didn’t it make sense to attribute some of the fault with the people who chose Trump despite his racism and sexism? They scoffed.

“Even if you do blame the electorate, where do you go from there?” Biederman asked. “Do we shame these people into liking us?” This debate, pitting the economic concerns of the white working class against a focus on minority and women’s rights, as though it were a zero-sum game, will go surely on for years. We weren’t going to resolve it that morning.

James pressed record, and Biederman launched into an impression of Hillary Clinton in the cheesy rhetorical pattern the “Chapo” guys call “Democrat voice.” “I may not be David Carradine, but I fucking choked,” he said. “I may not be Johnny Knoxville, but I ate shit on live TV. I may not be Dale Earnhardt”—he paused—“but I smashed into the fucking wall because I couldn’t turn left.”

And then they were off, discussing Clinton’s loss. Clinton was too focussed on rich suburbs; she didn’t visit Wisconsin; she brought Jay Z to Ohio like a chump. She gave her base no reason to vote for her apart from the fact that she wasn’t Trump. The barrier between entertainment and politics is now nonexistent, they argued, and people voted against the political class. Clinton—“the Supreme Lady Clinton, the nice girl who just doesn’t know why minorities won’t give her votes that she’s entitled to”—wasn’t capable of getting the Obama coalition. People simply did not come out.

But minorities, I thought, did vote for Clinton. The “Chapo” guys elided the role that bigotry played in the election. “Be on the lookout for everybody who’s trying to play it off like this was inevitable, saying that America is this irredeemably racist,” Menaker said. “I’m sorry, but that’s as ignorant as the most baying moron that voted for Trump.”

James snuck into the center of the room to adjust the mic levels on his laptop, stepping around piles of books and an electric guitar. Biederman ranted about Clinton’s behavior at the Javits Center. “This entitled fucking slob,” he said. “This fucking asshole brought all her donors to have a big party about how great they were. She’s never been a fucking leader, ever, in her life. She just has these fans who are psychologically weak, tormented, élite freaks.”

This was their mission now—to rail on Clinton, the liberals who had supported her, the Party that hadn’t demanded enough of her, the media that cheered her on. They say their primary goal is to entertain, but their ethos—radically anti-élite, anti-capitalist, redistributive—may have been validated by the results of the election. I wondered if “Chapo” could eventually attract some of the liberals they hate, if they would continue to target, exclusively, the disaffected. The affected deserve better than what they’ve been given, too.

“We are in a new era,” Texas said, at the close of the show, addressing his comrades. “Politics is now an endless thing in our lives. It will transform our culture top to bottom. One thing that everyone should keep in mind is that fascism seeks to destroy nuance and irony. For the next four years, people are going to need you guys to know that they’re not alone.”

“Well, that’s the plan,” Menaker said.