The Post-Dirtbag Left
newyorker.com
The Post-Dirtbag Left
Condé Nast
13-16 minutes
On the evening of January 6th, while National Guard troops were still trying to remove an insurrectionist mob from the Capitol, the right-wing activist L. Brent Bozell III appeared as a guest on Fox Business. “They believe this election was stolen,” he said, of the rioters. “I agree with them. They are furious about the deep state. . . . I agree with them.” He offered a limp concession or two—“You cannot countenance our national Capitol being breached”—but spent most of the segment zigzagging across the thin line between explanation and excuse. As many viewers would have known, Bozell’s father, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., was a titanic figure in the history of modern American conservatism, his influence arguably second only to that of his co-author, brother-in-law, and former college-debate partner, William F. Buckley. What viewers would not have known—what even Brent III did not yet know, apparently—was that his son, also named L. Brent Bozell, was part of the insurrectionist mob. In fact, Brent IV, who goes by Zeek, was one of the few invaders to make it all the way to the Senate chamber.
In February, Zeek was charged with three federal crimes. A week and a half later, the two hosts of “Know Your Enemy”—a podcast, founded in 2019, that bills itself as “a leftist’s guide to the conservative movement”—released a bonus episode called “Keeping Up with the Bozells.”
“It’s a fastball right down the middle for us,” Sam Adler-Bell, one of the hosts, said. The other host, Matthew Sitman, added, “This is really a great opportunity for us to dive into some deep-cut conservative lore.” It was less than two minutes into the episode, and already he had made a self-consciously erudite joke about Leo Strauss, and another about the Carlist movement in postwar Spain. “Look, when there’s Brent Bozells in the news,” Adler-Bell continued, “you want to hear ‘Know Your Enemy’ break it down for you.”
If “Know Your Enemy” were like most podcasts, then an episode of this kind—pegged to the news, available only to subscribers—might have consisted of an hour or two of aimless riffing, a few apocryphal anecdotes, and some easy punch lines about how the mighty have fallen. Content production is a high-volume business, and professional talkers, especially political ones, almost always offer up old whines in new bottles. Sitman and Adler-Bell hawk a more artisanal product. To prepare for the episode, Adler-Bell had watched—“for you, the listeners, and for my sins”—hours of speeches by Brent III, including a histrionic 2015 appearance in which he compared the Obama Administration to the Stasi. Sitman drew on several articles and books by and about the Bozells, quoting most extensively from “Living on Fire,” a biography of Brent, Jr., published by a small conservative press. (Listening to “Know Your Enemy” can feel like visiting a semi-reclusive friend whose apartment is crammed with out-of-print books, but who always keeps a stash of good bourbon on hand.) The hosts summarized the life of Brent, Sr., an adman in interwar Omaha, before devoting the bulk of the episode to Brent, Jr., who ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s 1960 best-seller, “The Conscience of a Conservative”; founded the Catholic magazine
Triumph; and spent the end of his life advocating for an American brand of theocracy. The two living Brents were deemed less worthy adversaries. “For us,” Adler-Bell said, the figures worth scrutinizing “are these weirdos who had a lot of idiosyncratic, terrible, dangerous, Fascist-sympathetic ideas, but nonetheless were interesting.”
Sitman and Adler-Bell are serious, in other words, about the “know” part of their title. They seem more ambivalent about the “enemy” part. It’s not that they’re squishy about their politics: they have discussed at length what their socialist utopia would look like, and their only sustained disagreement during the 2020 primaries came in the form of Sitman, a die-hard Bernie Sanders fan, gently ribbing Adler-Bell for even entertaining the idea of supporting Elizabeth Warren. Their hesitancy has more to do with temperament. Last year, they interviewed the conservative
Times columnist Ross Douthat, who has drawn leftists’ ire for several of his pieces, including one called “The Necessity of Stephen Miller.” None of those columns came up. Even Douthat seemed to find the hosts’ questions suspiciously magnanimous. (“You’re just softening me up, right?”) In an introduction recorded after the interview, the hosts warned listeners that what followed would be “a conversation, not a debate.” “He’s a nice guy,” Sitman said, of Douthat. Adler-Bell agreed: “It’s annoying how nice he is.”
Sitman grew up in a white working-class family in central Pennsylvania. His parents were self-described Christian fundamentalists and straight-ticket Republicans—“God-and-guns voters,” he called them, in a 2016 essay in
Dissent—and, in college, he was, too. During his twenties, as a graduate student in political theory at Georgetown, he started to doubt the axioms of conservatism; by his mid-thirties, he was a Catholic, and a democratic socialist. (Adler-Bell, who was reared in Connecticut by secular leftists, didn’t have to defect from much of anything.) Occasionally, Sitman speaks with the zeal of a convert. Once, while complaining about “shytheads on the right” who claim to be “all Second Amendment” but don’t actually know how to shoot, he said, “I was born with a King James Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, and I still know them both better than any of these guys.” More often, though, he speaks with the guilt of a Catholic, the humility of a conflict-averse introvert, and the circumspection of someone who actually knows and loves working-class Republicans (and expects at least a few of them to tune in). In the “Keeping Up with the Bozells” episode, Sitman contrasted Brent III with his more illustrious father: “What a letdown.” Then, in the next breath, he apologized for the insult.
At times, this reflexive solicitousness can itself be a bit of a letdown. (Imagine Jesus, before squaring off with a Pharisee, promising “a conversation, not a debate.”) Still, if forced to choose between not enough light and not enough heat, I’ll take the latter every time. Sitman is a writer and an editor at
Commonweal; Adler-Bell is a freelance writer whose work appears in
The New Republic,
Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. Like many coastal media types, they constantly mock themselves, often on Twitter, for spending too much time on Twitter. But they haven’t allowed their personalities (or, at least, the personas they perform on the show) to be subsumed by the deadening collective affect of social media. “What do you do if you’re not a hot-take artist?” Sitman asked, during an episode about Christopher Hitchens. (The episode, “Sympathy for the Hitch,” was another instance of the show treating its ideological opponents with grudging respect.) His answer, which he admitted was “a little, maybe, self-serving”: “I do find some of the complexity coming out in podcasts.” If the currency of Twitter consists of eye-rolling quote-tweets, drive-by insults, and tortuously recursive in-jokes, then “Know Your Enemy” is, blessedly, in the online world but not of it.
When the podcast “Chapo Trap House” began, in March of 2016, it served a real need. Millions of voters, disaffected and politically homeless, saw in Bernie Sanders an obvious solution to an array of systemic problems. “Bernie won Michigan on Tuesday,” Will Menaker, one of the co-hosts, said on the show’s first episode. “I’m not being facetious here . . . it has really kinda upset a lot of what I thought was gonna happen in this election.” Later, when Sanders dropped out, the fact that he had come so close to eking out a victory made his defeat all the more painful. Many of his admirers—especially the young, angry, and very online ones—wanted to hear their outrage reflected back at them, not in temperate op-eds or both-sides TV punditry but through hyper-specific satire, historically literate left-wing analysis, and gleefully ad-hominem jokes about how John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were neoliberal ghouls. “I can’t wait to watch the debates this fall, when Donald Trump is accusing Hillary Clinton of murder and of looking like a frump, which are equally horrible crimes in his mind, and she’s gesturing to the moderator, being, like, ‘This is just outrageous,’ ” one of the hosts said, in the second episode. This was oddly prescient, but it wasn’t a prediction you were likely to hear on MSNBC.
At the time, the co-hosts were Menaker and two other young(ish) bearded white guys, Felix Biederman and Matt Christman. (“Chapo,” like the mainstream media it critiques, has shown only belated and fitful interest in diversifying itself.) Christman, the one host with any red-state cred, was then living in Cincinnati. Biederman, originally from an affluent neighborhood in Chicago, and Menaker, whose parents met while working at this magazine, lived in Brooklyn and were trying to start careers in publishing. To this day, when people opine about “Bernie bros,” it’s uncanny how often they seem to be talking, directly or indirectly, about these three individuals. Their banter could be stunted and sour, with an endless deployment of dikk jokes and personal insults, but it was often undeniably trenchant, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. (You won’t find a better parody debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek, if you’re into that sort of thing.) For a while, the show was doing something genuinely new.
“Chapo” came to exemplify an online subculture that called itself the dirtbag left. Although its flagship products were podcasts (“Chapo,” “Street Fight Radio,” “Cum Town”), the dirtbag left derived its sensibility from niche Twitter, heightening the attributes that make social media both alluring (the specificity, the absurdity) and toxic (the nihilism, the narcissism, the casual sexism). Jon Stewart, who ended his “Daily Show” run in 2015, had adopted a pose of evenhanded populist anti-politics (
The system doesn’t work because of the bozos in charge); “Chapo” was more frankly anti-capitalist, and more terminally jaded (
This is how the system was designed to work). Years before the advent of audio-only apps like Clubhouse, dirtbag-left podcasts brought the infinite scroll to life, transforming the solitary habit of Twitter-lurking into a parasocial experience.
Some listeners compared the “Chapo” hosts to earlier shock jocks like Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh. As a matter of substance, this was a false equivalence. On a purely affective level, though, there was something to it. “Civility is destructive because it perpetuates falsehoods, while vulgarity can keep us honest,” Amber A’Lee Frost, who later became a co-host, argued in a 2016
Current Affairs essay called “The Necessity of Political Vulgarity.” She gave some examples—“fukk tha Police,” by N.W.A.; a series of “pornographic little pamphlets” distributed before the French Revolution—and concluded, “Rudeness can be extremely politically useful.”
It’s also good business. “Chapo” is now the second most lucrative project on Patreon, grossing about two million dollars a year. With time, though, its style has hardened into shtick. During the 2020 primaries, the hosts were even more zealously Bernie-or-bust than they had been in 2016, and they now had a big enough audience to make a difference. (In the crucial weeks before Super Tuesday, the dirtbag left devoted much of its energy to strafing Elizabeth Warren’s supporters, an approach that may have helped cost Sanders Warren’s endorsement.) But, after Sanders’s loss, “Chapo” seemed to have nothing left to say. Instead of progressing through the five stages of grief, the co-hosts wallowed in denial—“It is still virtually tied,” Menaker said, after Biden’s decisive victory on Super Tuesday—before settling, apparently forever, in the second stage. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called this stage anger, but in “Chapo” ’s case it’s closer to nihilistic despair.
The show’s five-hundredth episode was recorded this February, on the anniversary of Sanders’s victory in the 2020 Nevada caucus, which turned out to be the peak of his campaign. At the beginning of the episode, the co-hosts reminisced about that day, which they had spent in Las Vegas, canvassing for Sanders, then gathering to watch the returns come in. “Bernie had just given his victory speech, and we were at a back-yard bar,” Menaker recalled. “Mingling, having drinks together, smoking cigarettes . . . that feeling was probably the last good thing that’s ever gonna happen.”
They tried to segue to the news of the day. Neera Tanden, a moderate Democrat and one of the dirtbag left’s long-standing nemeses, had been nominated to be Biden’s budget director, but her Senate confirmation hearing was being derailed by questions about controversial past tweets. (Her nomination was later withdrawn.) Menaker mentioned that he had been gloating about Tanden’s demise, and that he’d received pushback from people arguing that Tanden’s replacement would likely be more conservative than she was. “Who cares?” Menaker said, on the podcast. “I don’t give a shyt who Biden appoints to his Cabinet.”
