The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

Despite their practical cultural hegemony in movies, TV, and academia, liberals have an uncanny knack for losing elections and being generally loathed. This is in spite of their strong record of liking ethnic food, bombing ethnic countries, privatizing education, and gutting welfare. This collection of punching bags and pratfall artists whose only principle is not being Republican have somehow fallen out of favor, despite being right about everything.

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? —ANTON CHIGURH, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

The essential problem is not that liberals are “as bad” as conservatives but rather that there is a giant sucking void at the core of their being. In place of real beliefs, liberals have guilty consciences; in place of politics, they have a Democratic Process to assuage those consciences. This process pits tepid reforms against a deranged and revanchist right wing with no such inclination toward consensus or incrementalism. Despite its claim to the mantle of American Progress, the liberal algorithm produces positive social change or legislation only when pressured—sometimes terrorized—by militant and/or popular left-wing movements. Without an organized and popular Left, liberals end up negotiating themselves into oblivion, moving the country, inevitably, to the right.

But the litany of bold, progressive legislation liberals always point to is at least thirty years old, and it’s been eroded by both Republican and Democratic governments since. All those great liberal achievements have been systematically dismantled both by the Right—who’ve made such destruction their mission—and Democrats and liberals themselves, who believe they have to “innovate” their ideas and move to the center to win elections.

Your parents likely considered themselves pretty radical when they were your age. They were known to enjoy “good vibrations,” solid wages backed by union power, a college education that cost a nickel, and the ability to go to the doctor without selling their car to pay for it. But since those days, America has jerked to the right, and so liberals had to do the same in order to win elections and keep the country from moving further right! This is the basic liberal mantra, and it’s fitting that it takes the form of an excuse. Its end result is a political system irrevocably weighted toward the forces of reaction. Coincidentally, by almost every metric, you are poorer and your life is more precarious than your parents’ were at a similar age. Get over it, snowflake; this book is your participation trophy.

But this tradition lives on today—for example, in the words of Uncle Joe Biden, who in fall 2017 laid down this wisdom: “Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”

In colonial New England, most people’s lives were defined by hard work, NoFap, and an austere Puritanical religion that offered scant opportunity for undoing the belt on your hat and having a good time.

The greatest liberal icon of the first half of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Henry Clay, fittingly known as the “Great Compromiser” for his preternatural ability to bring both sides together. Clay understood that at the end of the day, everyone—Whig or Democrat, slave owner or abolitionist, Irishman or human—was a white male landowner and ought to put their differences aside and come together over a cup of switchel to hash out pragmatic policies that would work for every member of the ruling class. To that end, Clay designed the Compromise of 1850, a package of reforms he helped pass by telling Southerners, “If you like your slaves, you can keep them.” Clay’s Compromise stands as a towering achievement for radical moderation and centrism that managed to postpone a bloody Civil War for just under decade.

Ever vigilant for ways to demonstrate their moral superiority, Civil War libs sent around a collection plate to raise funds for the damage done to Harpers Ferry by the radical extremist John Brown, preaching, “This is not who we are.”

In a last-ditch effort to bring the Southern states back into the Union, libs put forth the Crittenden Compromise, a bold piece of bipartisan legislation mandating that the Constitution could never be amended to end slavery, and in exchange slaves would receive tariff credits they could use to buy their freedom after sixty years of labor.

The Compromise of 1877 was another landmark of civil moderation: on the one hand, it prevented Democrat Samuel J. Tilden from winning the presidency, and on the other hand, the antebellum slave-owning aristocracy regained total political control of the South, engaged in violent repression of freedmen, reinstalled the institution of slavery in all but name, and perpetuated a racial crisis that would last for the next 141 years and counting—so, win-win. One can picture the ancestors of today’s libs standing by, hands over hearts.

For some reason, very few people—be they former yeoman farmers driven from their land by collapsing commodity prices or immigrants seeking new lives in the New World—were thrilled with the deal offered by the rising robber-baron class: short, miserable lives spent toiling in mills, factories, and mines in exchange for twice-weekly ice deliveries to their hovels.

Thankfully, Progressives conceived of a smart policy that would nudge the teeming urban hordes into lives of rewarding employment: eugenics. By pairing up the most intelligent and physically robust of the laboring classes and using nimble public-private partnerships to permanently dissuade the less competitive from procreating, desirable cultural traits and skull shapes would be passed along to future generations as less-desirable ones perished. It was a win for taxpayers, who wouldn’t have to foot the bill for jugs of liquor and frayed overalls; a win for employers, who could count on a ready supply of well-bred workers; and especially a win for the congenitally undesirable workers themselves, who could bust nuts without fear of consequence.

The policy received a seal of approval from the US Supreme Court in 1927 when liberal lion Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ruled in Buck v. Bell that state eugenics programs were constitutionally permissible. Holmes famously said, “Three generations of morons is enough,”

The good things that came out of the New Deal: unions, regulation of capital, massive investment in infrastructure, Social Security, seizing people’s dumbass gold, dams, street art, and two-for-one happy hours. The bad thing: black people were excluded from pretty much all of it. FDR’s administration systematically upheld white supremacy and segregation as a way to get the votes it needed from Southern Democratic politicians. (Also bad: Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, Japanese Americans were sent to Camp Grenada, during World War II.)

The Kennedys’ Camelot is considered by many libs to be the high-water mark of postwar American liberalism. It’s the administration every subsequent Democratic presidency is consciously and unconsciously compared to: a matinee-idol president with charisma, a pinch of exotic ethnicity (in 1960, many Americans still thought Catholics were a type of bipedal goat), and a cabinet full of Ivy League smarty-pantses.

The Kennedy regime was in fact so bold and so beautiful that they bungled and equivocated on civil rights, steered America directly into the future bloodbath of Vietnam, and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stood ready to nuke the earth to a crisp if one Russian submarine commander hadn’t slept in that morning.

For all liberalism’s bragging about “getting things done,” the only person who really got anything done during the Kennedy years was a young Marxist go-getter named Lee Harvey Oswald.

in a turn that would cannibalize the Democratic Party and end America’s long liberal epoch: namely, the gory vortex of Vietnam. Technically, it was Eisenhower who initiated our presence there, but JFK deepened it, and LBJ positively juiced it. It wasn’t conservatives who gave us full-blown slaughter in Vietnam—it was a cabinet of educated, elite, enlightened white liberals.

You see this kind of thought process when people react to the latest US mass shooting by saying something to the effect of, “These guns don’t belong in American streets, they belong in their proper place: in the faces of Afghans and Iraqis.”

Truth is, the downfall of the liberal era was contained in its original triumph, the New Deal. That was a massive reshaping of government in response to outcry from the masses, a groundswell of popular rage over the failures of capitalism. But it was still a compromise, one meant to alleviate the pain of the Depression while retaining the basic structure of capitalism—its racial caste system included.

So, liberalism from FDR to Johnson was about accommodating white racism in its most quotidian form while eventually trying to tamp down its more old-fashioned form—i.e., de jure segregation and Jim Crow.

For some reason, Carter is remembered as wildly left-wing, immortalized by conservatives as Satan incarnate and by liberals as proof that governing to your left is a losing ticket. They’re right, too: Carter’s pie-in-the-sky Marxist policies of deregulating trucking, airlines, and the credit industry while sending arms and cash to the proto-Taliban alongside Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s ISI—this stuff was just too idealistic. And so President Peanut-Lookin’-Ass-Boy lost to Ronald “I Smell Toast” Reagan in a triumph against ableism, causing liberals to hurl themselves back into the darkness until another weird centrist governor emerged from the South a decade later.

If fake friend Jimmy Carter cleared the path for Reagan’s assault on workers, poor people, and minorities, Bill Clinton picked up Ronnie’s gun and put the dying New Deal out of its misery.

Clinton ran for president as a cerebral, charismatic figure who harnessed Boomer coolness to play the sax while sticking to the playbook of the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council.

Clinton perfected the “Third Way” politics that splits the difference between what the people you represent want and what the people who despise you want.

Once in office, he declared the era of big government over, “reformed” welfare by kicking a bunch of poor mothers off the dole, ballooned the prison population, vastly expanded the war on drugs, smashed a handful of small countries with bombs lest anyone call him a pussy, and made sure any gay people at the tip of the imperial spear could get killed but not married.

The telecom act he signed into law is also the reason why you fucking hate your Internet service provider. Oh, and he demolished the firewall between commercial and investment banking, which set the stage for the greatest financial crash since that big Depression liberals are supposedly so proud of FDR for fixing.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill paid a $20 million prize to states willing to cut down on out-of-wedlock births.

Executing a mentally disabled black man doesn’t placate the Right?V Let’s sign their flatly racist, eugenic welfare bill into law. That doesn’t work? Let’s legitimize their dehumanizing rhetoric and flatter their tribal instincts by calling young black men “superpredators” and signing an anti–gay marriage bill into law. No dice? How about deregulating Wall Street banks—that ought to make suburban moderates like us, right? Oh fuck, why are we losing so many working-class voters???

Or you might hear it was because of the Democrats’ “New Direction for America,” a six-point platform featuring such revolutionary proposals as a tax deduction for college tuition.VI

Voters rewarded Republicans’ inveterate disrespect of the Process by giving them control of the Senate.

Ah, jeez. Oh boy. Yikes. It seems the human culmination of American liberalism lost to a senile (alleged!) rapist game show host.

The meanest thing you can say about liberalism (to a liberal, anyway) is that it’s not really a set of beliefs. The values liberals think they own were always historically borrowed from the Left—e.g., racial equality, which American Communists agitated for way before mainstream libs, or women’s and LGBT rights, which the Bolsheviks legalized while US liberals were still coming up with new sodomy laws and barring women from voting. Beyond those values—which liberals tend to commercialize and monetize anyway—the rest of liberalism is just a system for managing capitalism. It’s a collection of political and social norms that safely discharge the chaos generated by capital through gradual reform.

A generation after the neoliberal turn, the Democratic Party, headed and staffed by self-professed liberals, is arguably to the right of Nixon on most economic issues and committed to a largely symbolic (and almost always negotiable) progressive cultural agenda to mask it.

This is where we are now: American liberals have spent their entire lives focusing on norms, rules, and processes. They’ve chortled at the wacky radicals to their left and conducted the science of the possible, operating on what is “realistic,” the only meaningful political value. In so doing, the Carter and Clinton administrations jettisoned a fair share of liberal principles: Yikes, did we shaft unions and sign health care over to insurance companies? Sorry, we were busy “getting things done,” like deregulating the financial sector and ballooning the war on drugs.

They embraced his realistic positions, like protecting Wall Street after an epochal public looting and massively expanding a War on Terror that will now last 150 years.

And what happened? Fact-checked, focus-grouped, data-driven Clinton lost to the most deranged presidential candidate ever: a clown, a fraud, a sexual predator, an inveterate liar who has faked every single thing he’s ever done—a giant cube of flesh who embodies all our vilest instincts and our ludicrous celebrity culture. She lost—the Democrats lost, the liberals lost—to him.

As of this writing, right-wingers control every branch of government with only about 30 percent of the country actually supporting them.

Even though the standard American lib might desire many of the same “good” things as you and I, their politics have a congenital defect that makes them easy marks for capital and empire. Their problem is not only their beliefs but also their lack of conviction. Conservatives, on the other hand, have no such void at their core. They know what they want, and they have a political vision for how to get it.

In what passes for conservatives’ moral vision, they embody all the worst demons of Protestantism and capitalism. They’re the living, breathing id of hierarchy and oppression. A descendant of America’s Calvinist tradition, modern secular conservatism exists to settle the same pinched-faced hysterics into a comfortable and pampered suburban existence.

Despite its religious affectations, conservatism long ago replaced God with country, which allows them to directly worship America as both their lord and personal friend while celebrating the same petty and punitive characteristics that defined an earlier deity. To the conservative, America’s vast wealth and power are signs of its goodness, because if there’s one thing the Bible is clear about in both the Old and New Testaments, it’s that rich and powerful empires are good and blessed by God.

In the right-wing vernacular, freedom means the freedom to exercise one’s God-given right to dominate anyone deemed lower than you. This includes rich over poor, men over women, employers over employees, white over black, and America over the rest of the world. This is why, in the conservative mythology, there are few greater enemies than “big government.” In the modern era, it’s usually the federal government that has unjustly intervened in this natural order.

Conservative religion holds that the representatives of that sadism, its prophets, are the tough, stoic heirs to America’s rugged frontier tradition. But the collection of penguin-shaped dunces in Under Armour polos and khaki shorts grazing through America’s exurbs tends to spoil this myth. These war-dads and bow-tie perverts are unable to reconcile their actual lives with the values of primitive domination and masculine authority they hold so dear.

Since the noble qualities conservatives obsess over have been bureaucratized out of existence in the “civilized” West, they fetishize military “operators,” cowboys, and business entrepreneurs, imagining themselves to be rebelling against modern culture. Unbearable, treacly self-regard gives them a lump in their throat when they think of parades, the flag, baseball, and other people running into machine-gun fire on D-Day.

They smuggled in right-wing economics, something middle America didn’t care about, by draping it in cultural bullshit, something middle America couldn’t get enough of.

Rand didn’t really become famous in America until she published The Fountainhead, her novel about an architect named Howard Roark who is better than everyone else. By creating a character who was supposed to be the coolest guy ever and who directly said all the things she believed, Rand took literature to a brave and bold new place. She would use this technique again in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a novel about a big, powerful train that also features a character who was the greatest person who ever lived and said exactly what Rand believed, sometimes for stretches of ninety pages, all of it shimmering prose.

So, she created the Collective, a group of what the weak and timid usually call “friends,” who would meet at her apartment to go over the latest draft of Atlas while Rand berated them for their many personal failings.

A young Alan Greenspan was an early acolyte and member of the Collective who would go on to apply the Objectivist beliefs of anti-altruism and ethical megalomania to great effect as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Rand’s legacy in right-wing thought is clear. Not only did she write several thousand pages’ worth of pseudo-philosophical drivel that declared the highest moral good was achieved in being the biggest asshole possible, but, in elevating reason as supreme among all human faculties, she was the first philosopher to elevate facts over feelings.