Dirtbag: Essays

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Alex Deane and Matthew Porter, as co-chairs of the Young Democratic Socialists share a vote on the NPC. [3]

Chapo Trap House has been called the leftwing alternative to Breitbart – a subversive, humorous and politics-focused new media presence that has attracted a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic. While there are plenty of woke types queuing up to ‘call out’ Frost, Khachiyan and their collaborators – even accusing them of being Nazis – let’s hope the dirtbag left can resist being ‘cancelled’ altogether. Voices like these, challenging woke orthodoxy and standing up for traditional left values, are needed now more than ever. Here’s to the dirtbags. If you want your small town to get some ink in the Times, you should do something that would infuriate Sarah Lawrence students. Bret Easton Ellis said there could never be the great Millennial novel – we’ll see. I haven’t read that Sally Rooney book that everybody’s writing about’, Khachiyan says, referring to the Irish author’s breakthrough novel, Normal People, which focuses on a millennial relationship. Frost adds that she read the book ‘with the intent of savaging it’, because ‘all the Guardian feminists like her’, but found ‘there was a lot of good shit in there’. ‘I think the women who like it don’t understand why they do… women today aren’t allowed to want a traditional relationship’, she says. Khachiyan adds: ‘Which is what most people since the dawn of time have wanted… There’s nothing reactionary about wanting a boyfriend!’ By the time our little family’s finances got out of the absolute pits—a state of precarity created in no small part by the enormous amount of student debt my mother would not pay off for many years and the many work hours she spent away from her latchkey daughter—I wasn’t little anymore. And that was the end of that. Walkouts and WalkaboutsOf course, co-parenting relationships will still involve pretty regular negotiations. The administrative division of labor will still exist after socialism and will still be decided within the home. And there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case—some people prefer different aspects of the job. Civility is destructive because it perpetuates falsehoods, while vulgarity can keep us honest.” Amber A’Lee Frost, The Necessity of Political Vulgarity My father was a frustrating, sometimes dangerous person, but I have no anger for him. I’m told he’d often be assailed with the regrets that any self-aware absentee father is bound to experience, and I feel nothing but pity for a sad old man who missed so much.

Another recent favourite author among Guardian feminists is Kristen Roupenian, whose short story, ‘Cat Person’, went viral. The story is about a young woman who realises – slightly too late in the day – that the sexual encounter she is about to embark on is not what she wants. When the man finally realises he has been rejected, he lashes out. ‘ Guardian feminists liked it because it “proved” men are trash because the man called her a whore at the end’, says Khachiyan. ‘Actually what it showed is that men can be sad and pathetic’, adds Frost. Compared to the Times, the reporting is usually more in-depth; the reporters generally have more expertise; the coverage is more comprehensive both geographically and substantively; even the op-eds are better (likely because they are far fewer, and they’re not used to pad the paper with “content”—confessionals, puff pieces, listicles—rather than reporting). Most refreshing, the FT does not lose itself in the mire of myopic American culture wars, which very rarely breach the surface of material politics and/or economics. When it does run soft news, it’s higher quality (Rana Foroohar’s “Lunch with the FT” with Rebecca Solnit, for example, transcends the genre of fawning celebrity profile into an understated but scathing critique). I asked how the seeming frigidity of the #MeToo moment, let alone the alleged epidemic of uterus removals, sits alongside modern feminism’s ‘sex positive’ celebration of polyamory, pansexuality and sex workers. ‘It’s because these people would rather negotiate sex than actually have it… They don’t want to take responsibility’, says Khachiyan. ‘That’s why nerds love this stuff’, says Frost. ‘It’s huge in Silicon Valley. They like games and rules. These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags.’

Looking to the future

Frost and Khachiyan have a Marxist understanding of race. ‘We invented race to justify exploitation’, says Frost. ‘Splitting people on the basis of race was used to morally justify slavery… Racial discourse was created after hyper-exploitation.’ But ever since, argues Frost, ‘When we tried to not be racist, we ended up using the same framework’, which today also lives on in identitarian form. ‘All “race” is, is that some people don’t sunburn. That’s the entirety of racial difference.’