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

by Chapo Trap House

Anyway. There’s no point in litigating the Iraq War too much. It’s the defining disaster of this new American Century. It should be sufficient to say that the justifications for it, from WMD to any supposed concern for the freedom and well-being of the Iraqi people, were obvious confabulations that fooled only those who wanted to be conned and those who just didn’t care because the thought of war excited them so much. This included pretty much all the media, government, and cultural elites of this country, and it remains the gold standard for how we should judge them. (One demographic decidedly not fooled was black Americans, almost 70 percent of whom opposed the war out of some sense that America is actually kind of bad.II)

By then, everyone reluctantly realized that there wasn’t going to be any good ending or VJ Day moment that would retroactively make their support of the Iraq War look noble or wise. They realized the money and credibility they invested in this project—clinched by a particularly impressive Herbalife presentation at the UN—was simply not coming back.

And then, in 2008, we got Obama, the living refutation of swaggering idiot cowboys like Bush and snarling, sneering blood drinkers like Cheney. Nevertheless, Obama pulled off a much trickier job: Febreze-ing our national conscience without ever truly reckoning with what happened or winding down our blood-soaked “strategic interests in the region.” Despite Obama’s gloss as a liberal beacon of hope, this was the moment the War on Terror stopped being an emotional spectacle in American life and became a new baseline for reality. It joined the background static of our society, with the imprimatur of both parties and therefore all acceptable points of view. It became something that simply is, existing perfectly outside the realm of politics and ideology. The days of “boots on the ground” and “nation-building” were over, and the phrase “War on Terror” now meant harnessing our technology to manage a global drone assassination campaign.

Meanwhile, China, carved up by Europe in the nineteenth century, expelled those powers in the twentieth. They kicked off this century with a supercharged, state-guided capitalism that’s carrying out the most mind-boggling planned industrialization in world history.III They’re developing domestic markets, not just exports, and starting up their own imperial designs in Africa—the last remaining spot on the planet yet to be turned into a base for cheap industrial manufacturing. In twenty years, that pang you get when you see “Made in China” on a clothing tag will be replaced by a wince from seeing “Made in Africa,” and it may even sting a little more. But China is doing just what America’s done—what the world’s been doing—for the last two hundred–odd years: consuming and growing more and more each year, with no end in sight, driven by a deep, deep madness.

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. Books with names like The Patriot’s Playbook and American Lion: How to Thrive in Life after Marriage sit on their nightstands. Their lives are the epitome of the much-derided “safe space,” and they are constantly offended by everyone and everything who ever hurt their feelings or, even worse, hurt the feelings of America.

For a long time they masterfully triangulated racial and class resentments to enrich the upper classes while the Democrats gave up trying to offer alternatives. Within a couple of decades, the New Deal was dying, and “conservatism” was back, with an ideology, a coalition, presidents in office, and a vast customer base—er, voter base—of angry, aging white cranks. Only problem was, by opening the doors to the CHUDs and the riffraff, the Republicans let in a bunch of wackjobs who actually believed the intellectuals’ Noble Lie, or at least pretended to in order to out-crazy an increasingly batshit wave of GOP populists. As the years rolled on, the movement’s homophobia, racism, and authoritarianism started to unnerve even the very ghouls who set the whole thing in motion.

The clash of these two titans of the Left and Right makes for an interesting contrast. On one hand you have Vidal, who produced a major body of work, including dozens of novels and plays and hundreds of essays touching on every aspect of American history, literature, and politics; on the other you have Buckley, who wrote a book about how there are too many Jews at Yale, a few lyrical essays about how much he loved sailing, and a series of spy novels in which a thinly veiled alter ego named Blackford Oakes fucks the queen of England. Vidal and Buckley’s famous spat on television is also funny because it involved Buckley calling Vidal a homo and then threatening to beat him up in the gayest way possible.

White suburban boomers were aging and getting ornerier, growing ever more concerned about the proximity of millennials to their lawn. Despite whatever liberalizing drugs they’d consumed in the 1960s, they were now being fed a steady diet of unadulterated rage from scaremongering local TV news, AM talk radio, Fox News, crypto-fascist publishing grifters, FreeRepublic.com, chain e-mails from Bill Cosby warning of the looming saggy-pants crisis, and the nascent right-wing blogosophere. It gave them a junkie’s craving for something harder than Bill Frist or Roy Blunt.

Remember—and remember well—that anyone who tries to feed you a line about how Donald Trump is not a “real” conservative is absolutely full of shit or is trying to sell you the next big lie. Trump represents everything that this vicious and corrupt project has valorized and promoted for the last forty years, and what’s more, the disasters of right-wing governance have created a country exactly as stupid and desperate as the one that actually elected a buffoon like him. The problem Trump now presents for the conservative intelligentsia is that he’s simply too much like the hogs who’ve been lapping up the slop of conservative ideology for decades and not enough like the undead ghouls who’ve been ladling it out. Since he has absolutely no intellectual foundation, he lacks initiation in the rites, rituals, and codes that have allowed previous conservatives to present themselves as thoughtful. So strap in, folks. This is only the beginning. Trump himself, with his Heritage Foundation brain trust and Goldman Sachs cabinet, may look like a creampuff compared to the next generation of Republican demagogues who take the bloodthirsty, nativist, white-power ideology far more seriously.

Still, united by their mutant neoliberal politics, he and Matty had different styles: where Ezra was always a soft touch, Yglesias started his blogging career as a liberal hawk, trying to get the coveted Instapundit link, which meant shitting on weenie human rights types, fantasizing about a war between Islam and the West, and daydreaming of Gitmo prisoners being shot while trying to escape. (Wink, wink.) But for both Ezra and Matt, supporting the Iraq War was never a moral failing on their part but an analytical one. For them, the main question was not “Should the United States invade a country that poses no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11?” but was “If we oppose a war every reasonable person supports, how could we possibly look ‘Serious’?” In a 2004 blog post, Ezra explained his support for the war like this:

As Matt and I have both noted in the past, part of what sent us towards the hawk camp was that, without much historical context for what war means, we simply evaluated the arguments (and sadly, that means the spokespeople) for the two sides. In that calculus, becoming a hawk seemed not just warranted, but unavoidable. That’s not fair to the doves and not fair to the Democratic party, and while we (hopefully) won’t make the same mistakes again, it’s really incumbent that the anti-war wing funds a media savvy opposition (instead of protests organized by subsidiaries of Maoist groups [read: ANSWER]) so future generations aren’t turned off by the absurdity of their spokespeople.XI In their own words, they really had no choice. Camp Hawk was where all the “serious” jobs were! You see, if the antiwar side had developed a “savvier” media shop in 2002—instead of simply turning out millions of ordinary people into the streets, all over the world—there’s a good chance they could have given Matt and Ezra the “historical context” that war involves mostly senseless cruelty and slaughter. People like M&E generally regard everything to be a matter of “optics,” and at the time, being against the War on Terrorism would look very, very bad! To their finely calibrated moral and aesthetic compass, the hippies and dopey Marxists shouting in the street looked absurd and clueless, whereas Donald Rumsfeld, Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz looked dignified, smart, and fuckin’ hot to b...

The fresh, sleek presentation of new media—held together with fictitious venture capital and sponsored content like “Why It Takes a Pregnant STEM Graduate to Build the Perfect Missile” or “What My Poly Triad Breakup in Big Sur Taught Me about the Smooth, Low-Key Independence of the Ford Focus”—is a departure from journalism’s humble past, but no one can deny that it retains the goofiness of its origin. The future may hold horrors for the blogmasters, whether it’s everyone finally figuring out that no one buys stuff from online ads, young people seeking op-eds further left than Steny Hoyer, or a disastrous accidental reply-all e-mail wherein every single editor accidentally sends hentai to senior White House sources.

For a long time people had a crude but basically correct understanding of culture’s relationship to politics: Marx’s idea that the “superstructure” of society—law, morality, and culture—arises out of the economic meat grinder hidden underneath, the “base.” This rough version of the theory gets criticized as simplistic, and to be fair, it is: there are all kinds of inputs and outputs that determine culture, and there’s plenty of good criticism of this bastardized version of Marx. Still, as far as we’re concerned, it’s always better to err on the side of this crude theory than to go in the opposite direction, the For Dummies version of Antonio Gramsci: the idea that a nation’s culture is self-reinforcing and affects all other walks of life, so if you change the culture, you can change the political reality. To quote the Italian Communist himself, “Ingredienti migliori, cultura migliore, Papa John’s.” The taste of Gramsci-lite won a lot of people over during last the few decades, trading away material and economic analyses for an overwhelming focus on culture. But this approach comes from the generally bad side of 1960s radicalism (incidentally, the only part that survived). It was embraced by middle-class hippies whose demands were not material and collective but aesthetic and individualist—which, once you smooth off the edges, is just libertarianism. We know this because almost all those baby boomers grew up to become square, greedy marketing consultants for UBS who also ha...

That’s because capital has no problem assimilating pop-cultural rebellion and antiauthoritarian imagery. In fact, that stuff creates all kinds of new markets, new consumers, new suckers. All the cultural modes of resistance slowly turned into marketing categories, and the brave hippie dipshits of the sixties left us with an even more powerful money machine, totally compatible with social liberalism and openly unafraid of the militant but always shrinking left-wing movement. In the absence of real political power, liberals and lefties stumbled into a pathology where we only hold power over—and wage struggles for—the realm of fantasy.

This is not to say people shouldn’t seek comfort in art, in TV, in movies. It’s the only way to not go mad! But, in our view, do it knowing what you’re doing is fun and aesthetic, not militant and subversive—it’s never going to substitute for real political action. It may make you feel better to watch a show that’s calling out Trump, or oppression, or our podcast—but if you stop there, you’re demobilized as a political actor. Again, between half-assed Marx and half-assed Gramsci, it’s better to go with the former: of course being in control of what is “cool” in our culture is a kind of power, but it’s one that liberals increasingly rely on in lieu of actual politics, to the detriment of politics—and culture, and cool people.

On the other side, for the culture warriors of the Right, a death grip on power maintained through gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc., will never be enough to give them what they truly crave: popularity, celebrity, and the admiration of the same cultural elite they despise. Despite witnessing a rich pedigree of reactionary artists in the early twentieth century (Céline, Ezra Pound, Leni Riefenstahl, Hanna-Barbera), the contemporary American right-winger is congenitally incapable of being funny, entertaining, or interesting in any of the ways art demands, relying instead on ham-fisted sentimentality and self-abasing ressentiment. The paradox is that the further their liberal enemies get from holding real power—the more they rely on the symbolic and pop-cultural—the worse they get at the very things that built liberal cultural hegemony in the first place. Libs find themselves aping the shittiest habits of their right-wing culture-war opponents. As this war on culture progresses, both the general public and cultural elites ask less of art and reduce their interests to a checklist of “good points” or “progressive portrayals” while ignoring anything that doesn’t superficially conform to the immediate political conversations of the day.

To truly understand America in the twenty-first century, one must imbibe the entire run of The Sopranos as it was originally intended to be seen: in one seventy-hour sitting. In The Sopranos, creator David Chase gave us a host of characters who represent the grand archetypes of our culture and where it was headed at the dawn of this new millennium. In patriarch Tony, we have the cheap and nasty criminal sociopaths who would inherit the world, namely Trump and those who voted for him. If you want a vision of the future, just imagine America wearing a soiled bathrobe, sullenly staring at a bowl of Honeycomb cereal in a gaudy exurban McMansion. As a counterpart to Tony’s criminal depressive, we have wife and mother Carmela, who represents the complicit suburban petit bourgeois, happy to live a life of comfort funded by blood money in between charity bake sales held to assuage the phantom pangs of a nonexistent conscience.

Hovering above everything like a black, odious cloud of shit is the sour and berating matriarch Livia, who represents the crushing weight of olds on the American psyche, sapping us of joy, independence, and any chance to escape our history. As a corollary to all our collective efforts to overcome the psychological damage done to us by Livia (i.e., all previous generations), there is Dr. Melfi, Tony’s therapist, who represents the ultimate and final failure of educated, cosmopolitan liberals to meaningfully confront—let alone reform—evil. Throughout the run of the series, Melfi’s attempts to treat Tony serve only to help him manage his criminal empire more efficiently, making her at best an enabler and at worst an accomplice. Finally, in the Soprano children, we see the two paths laid out for the millennial generation. In Meadow we have the “success daughter,” a high-functioning and ambitious striver with a superficial interest in social justice who is well adapted to the world of neoliberal hegemony. In AJ, we have the great American failson, a figure uniquely ill suited to the times. AJ is lazy, petulant, insouciant, and one Howard Zinn book away from realizing how fucked-up shit really is. He is the ur-figure for what would eventually become the podcast listener and host.

And sure enough, the show telegraphed every single failure, error, and misapplication of power in the Obama years. Why? Because the people in charge finally got their chance to play out their fantasies of being characters on The West Wing! In so doing, they ran straight into the maw of real politics, power, and ideology. Anyone who may once have believed in the Sorkinverse discovered, if they were paying attention, that the person who had the most data at their fingertips and owned the other person in the debate did not automatically win. To give an example of the show’s diseased politics: In season five, episode twelve, Toby Ziegler voices the dreamy prose of Sorkin’s pen to make a bold, brave, and moral case to cut Social Security. The whole episode chronicles his effort to form a commission that will reduce benefits and save the program from an (invented) financial doomsday. And were it not for the CHUDs of the Freedom Caucus who spoiled it for John Boehner in 2011, President Jed Obama would’ve gotten his Grand Bargain, which had been designed to obliterate the American welfare state to appease the honorable Republicans on the other side of the aisle.

Of all the off-the-cuff imbecility that Trump spouted during his soggy march toward the White House, this nugget is one of the most revealing bits: How could anyone define the extraction of surplus labor from thousands of people—to fund the construction of Trump’s diamond-encrusted sexcopter—as an act of “sacrifice”? Because, somewhere along the way, a Chamber of Commerce messaging gremlin turned the base metal of capitalist exploitation into the shimmering gold of “job creation.” And, because we’ve torn organized labor to pieces and shipped the shreds to China to be reassembled and shipped back to us as Emperor’s New Groove Happy Meal toys, there’s no one in a position of power to call bullshit on it.

But what about the good ones? “Small businesses”? This fetish is widespread even on the Left. It’s nice to think that, far away from the Borg-like monopolies of Wal-Mart and Comcast, there exists a benign, plucky, authentic type of business, perhaps run by a cute old Italian couple who employ a bunch of young boys in aprons with slicked-back hair who carry big paper bags of groceries to your doorstep. If this kind of shop even still exists, it’s likely that those slick-haired boys have no stake in the business, have shitty or zero benefits, and are probably huffing vitamins every hour to make it through the day. Little old Giuseppe works everybody till 8:00 p.m., doesn’t pay overtime, and has a tendency to pinch all the young women on the hip any chance he gets. Meanwhile, his wife day-drinks and occasionally slips the word eggplant into her unnecessary monologues about “urban types” hanging around the neighborhood. Even more likely, this mythical old couple is actually a loud, crew cut–sporting Trump voter or anti-vaccine Wine Mom who gets away with abusing his or her employees even more than the corporate droids working for Target and McDonalds do. Small-business owners are, generally speaking, insane egomaniacs who believe enough in their “pizza restaurant with a night club atmosphere” to borrow $250,000 and lord it over a workforce of desperate people. And you know what? Even if the boss is a nice person (it can happen), they still deny their employees an equal share i...

If you weren’t lucky enough to be born a lord, duke, or prince but were absolutely amazing at murdering serfs, you could still be a knight. Knights were the Special-Ops guys of this time, in that they loved gear and functioned as tools for moneyed carriers of syphilis.

But for the burgeoning middle class and above, life couldn’t be better. The wonders of factories, railways, and overall more efficient technology allowed them to acquire wealth while doing very little, and at a greater pace than had ever been seen before. Around this time, the culture of the upper middle class was created. These lucky folks who achieved a decent income needed to differentiate themselves from their mud-drinking forebears, and they did it with the dullest cultural affectations and lamest hobbies possible. They formed a scene that differed from that of the gentry, who entertained themselves with bum fights, “racism orgies,” and pederasty. So, the petite bourgeoisie started eating curiously wet cheeses, seeing plays to make sure they were bad, and babbling endlessly about university wait lists. These things remain the cornerstones of the global upper middle class to this day. Trends such as dog therapy and making one’s own bead jewelry may come and go, but the most boring people you know today can trace their intellectual lineage to these middle managers of yore.

The party came to a stop when everyone finally realized that 98 percent of those Internet firms didn’t generate any revenue, but a lumpy crew of sociopaths got in and got out with expert timing. Guys like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk sold their grossly overvalued stakes in computer crap for nerds, walked away with billions, and were able to transform Silicon Valley from a community of weird garages to a speculator’s paradise, where men in quarter-zip sweaters shuffle around ten-figure capital allocations in between blogging about sea barges where ephebophilia is legal.

The present and future of work is a lot like its past: stupid and arbitrary, and everyone’s terrible boss gets to fail upward to the next thing he can fuck up. These days, most jobs are positions that used to be done by five different people, squeezing out every last drop of labor with more hours, more intensity, and more productivity. You receive the privileges of e-mailing people who have sublimated their personality disorders into “management styles” and playing the pawn in bizarre office power plays between proud MBAs. And you’re lucky to do it.