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

by Chapo Trap House

More bad news: since 2016, the Democratic Party—the standard-bearer of left-of-center policies like replacing unions with low-interest Uber loans and bringing charter-school apps to Haiti—has stopped even pretending to fight for you.

Our case is simple: Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under thirty who is not a sociopath. It’s not supposed to. The actual lived experience of the free market feels distinctly un-free. We’ll tell you why, and offer a vision of a new world—one in which a person can post in the morning, game in the afternoon, and podcast after dinner without ever becoming a poster, gamer, or podcaster.

The 1970s produced only disappointment, from the breakdown of labor power to the incompetent McGovern campaign to the crypto-conservative-Evangelical presidency of Jimmy Carter. After Reagan primed the pump for the final stage of dystopia (amping up the war on drugs, sanitizing racial resentment, and perforating the last vestige of American union muscle), Bill Clinton rode into office and finished the job by passing welfare reform and a draconian crime bill, eviscerating consumer protections, and transferring huge amounts of political power to the superwealthy—all the while posing as a bleeding-heart pinko. In fact, Clinton would have privatized Social Security and gotten away with it, were it not for a certain meddling intern.

The fact that they’re supposed to be decent people’s only form of political representation is proof enough that we’re living in hell.

And you can’t really understand America’s internal rot—its inflamed, wriggling bowels—unless you understand its role as a brutal, stupid, and self-owning empire.

To manage this sprawling enterprise, we reorganized our top talent into a streamlined corporate structure. The newly formed Defense Department was put in charge of human resources; the International Monetary Fund handled accounting, using the Bretton Woods bookkeeping system; the CIA headed up marketing, underwriting radio spots in Eastern Europe and some truly groundbreaking abstract advertisements by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock; and for R & D, we poached a team of bright young go-getters from a foundering competitor via Operation Paper Clip, one of the most successful headhunting projects in the pre-LinkedIn era.

It was where we first proved our commitment to the two principles of our company philosophy: a) Kill civilians to maintain US hegemony, and b) Prop up dictators to maintain control of valuable territory.

So straight out of the gate, the Cold War was emphatically not about democracy versus totalitarianism. In Korea and in every subsequent proxy war, it was about capitalism versus threat to capitalism.

In fact, America was so interested in fighting the evils of Communism that it propped up fucking Pol Pot—AFTER the Killing Fields! Yes, the genocide in Cambodia was stopped by the Communists running North Vietnam, who drove Pol Pot out of power. But because the North Vietnamese were card-carrying Reds, America backed a Khmer Rouge comeback tour and sent SAS guys to train them in the jungles and lay mines that are still around today and probably just atomized some poor soul as you read this paragraph. Yet Pol Pot ends up in the Black Book of Communism.

Yeltsin facilitated a “shock therapy” economic liberalization program, otherwise known as private equity, assisted by American whiz kids like Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers. It led to the largest drop in peacetime life expectancy of the twentieth century.

Despite that, the European Central Bank responded to the ’08 crisis with a Wahhabist-style neoliberal austerity that even the moderate consensus-makers in Washington didn’t have the stomach for.

At the time of this writing, the War on Terror is now in its seventeenth year, becoming, as NatSec intellectuals like to put it, “a generational commitment.”

The Iraq War didn’t demonstrate American might or benevolence on the global stage the way we might have hoped, nor did it inspire any new national purpose or credo. But it was no real loss, either, because not a single person involved was ever held accountable, save for Chelsea Manning.

Iran is our real enemy because, for our national security planners, it represents the unthinkable: a genuine regional power with its own oil resources outside the US fold that isn’t a complete basket case. As such, we’re treated to the semiregular cant that Iran is the “greatest exporter of terrorism” in the world and—even more galling, considering who’s saying it—that it’s “meddling in the region” and is a “threat to its neighbors.”

Despite the gaudy, ongoing celebrations of American Exceptionalism, this country has been reduced to being the military arm of international capital: demoted from manager to rent-a-cop. Everything’s on credit, with a precarious and doomed balance between military spending and domestic debt.

So brace yourself for a lot more talk about a showdown between democratic Western values and mammoth, red, Communist China, and remember that it’s all total horseshit. It’s just cover for a desperate scramble for resources on our wheezing, dying planet, as every country’s elites pile up last bits of obscene wealth to better withstand the inevitable collapse.

Yes, the world’s future is a veritable Choose Your Own Adventure of impending cataclysms. Runaway wealth inequality dramatically expands the underclass as nations race to the bottom to cut wages in a futile effort to slam the brakes on the inexorably falling rate of profit; throw in resource scarcity and overconsumption and we get rationing of basic human necessities among the global poor and outrage among the Western upper classes when the rare earth metals needed to manufacture their animatronic Boss Baby–themed merchandise have been exhausted. Or we could just have a good old-fashioned global economic depression once the cheap-credit house of cards falls over.

And so, New Deal reforms ameliorated the worst of the Great Depression, but it took the completely top-down, centrally planned economy necessitated by waging total war against the Axis powers to fully end the Depression.

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.

Public disgust over Vietnam shot up year after year, but even that might not have been such a problem for Johnson if it weren’t for the disintegration of America’s supposed “consensus” on race.

It’s true that cigar-chomping union kingmakers like George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, were a bunch of pro-war mummies. And it’s true that Team Nixon exploited working-class resentment of rich-kid protesters amid “hard hat” rallies supporting the massacres in Vietnam. But the whole idea that the working class was uniformly pro-war and middle-class hippies were all against it is bullshit: polls and surveys at the time showed that proles were more antiwar than smug, college-educated elites.II

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. But they did nothing to treat the disease, nothing radical that would have been necessary to actually solve the problem, which would have looked something like reparations and the wholesale rebuilding of urban neighborhoods.

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 here’s a dose of irony to sweeten the pill: Reagan selling arms to Iran in order to fund rape squads in Central America really did make Watergate look like a “third-rate burglary.” So if libs want to keep holding up Watergate as a historic triumph for the forces of good, they’ll have to admit that letting Reagan off the hook represents a far greater historic triumph for the forces of evil.

In the Arkansas governor’s mansion, Bill and Hillary enjoyed the services of unpaid black prisoners, a situation detailed in a passage of a book by Hilldawg that Bernie Sanders’s oppo team should be liquidated for not having circulated:

Beats us. Probably some combination of all of the above. But for as smart and as Process-respecting as liberals think Clintonism was, in practice it was a cascading series of desperate improvisations that diluted any ideological potency the Democratic Party had left. 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???

But throughout it all, Gore respected the Process. While Bush traveled the country dissembling without a care, Gore prostrated himself before the judgment of Maureen Dowd and the New York Times op-ed page. When one of his advisors received a package containing Bush’s debate prep materials, the advisor recused himself in the interest of fairness and reported the event to the FBI. (Superfun fact: In 1980, Reagan was leaked papers from Carter’s debate prep. He, of course, did the right thing and used them, because he wasn’t nearly as much of a fucking sucker as institutional liberals.)

Bush’s first term, quite frankly, broke liberals’ brains. Deeply fearful of being smeared as unpatriotic, prominent liberal commentators, politicians, and publications fell over themselves to back the White House’s Iraq War and wholesale evisceration of civil liberties. Funnily enough, this compromise didn’t work. Senator Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam vet, was rewarded for his pro–Iraq War vote by getting called an Al Qaeda lover and losing his next election. Spooked by unexpected midterm losses in 2002, every establishment Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2004 also endorsed toppling Saddam. Howard Dean, a centrist triangulator from Vermont who likened himself to a moderate Republican in his own campaign book, emerged as the radical leftist candidate, because that’s how awful things were.

Instead of Progressives, he packed his cabinet with retrograde Clintonites like Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and, for some fucking reason, Hillary. Instead of a massive jobs program like the Civilian Conservation Corps, he passed a “stimulus” bill that included a greater number of dumbass tax cuts for businesses and mandatory social safety-net expenditures than countercyclical spending measures (about one-seventh of the bill contained actual infrastructure spending). Instead of nationalizing failed banks and frog-marching crooked Wall Streeters down lower Manhattan (like a young go-getter prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani did in the 1980s), Obama administered bailouts and begged creditors to start lending again. Instead of strengthening the right to organize unions like the National Industrial Recovery and Wagner Acts did, he refused to make card check—a system by which employees are allowed to unionize if they collect enough Yu-Gi-Oh! cards—a priority.

Obama for America volunteers to form a genuine movement, he folded them into the DNC out of the fear that—horror of horrors!—they might criticize him from the left. Instead of ensuring durable Democratic majorities by making Election Day a federal holiday, dismantling Citizens United, and admitting DC and Puerto Rico as states, he and the Democrats in charge of Congress refused to tamper with the filibuster (Process!). Obama himself only endorsed DC statehood well after his congressional majority had been squandered.

Instead of the transformation that was promised, we got the internalization of every wretched cop-out liberals had had beaten into them over the preceding four decades. Afraid of being called nanny staters? Hire libertarian dipshit Cass Sunstein to “nudge” workers into saving for retirement. Afraid of being called partisan? Water down your own legislation in a vain attempt at compromise, then watch it get passed on party lines anyway. Afraid of being called socialist? Pass an inscrutable market-based health care bill cribbed from the Heritage Foundation. Afraid of being called a spendthrift? Put an arbitrary limit on the stimulus bill that’s supposed to...

Because Democrats gave up on transformational policies that would have galvanized their voting base and the legion of young volunteers who had sweat and bled to put Obama in office, barely anyone came out to stop the onslaught of sociopathic puppy-mill owners and drunk-driving stepdads that made up the freshman GOP class of 2011. The obstructionist House shut down the government, leading to an unprecedented downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. Voters rewarded Republicans’ inveterate disrespect of the Process by giving them control of the Senate.

At the same time, he vastly increased the scope and brutality of our security state and mass-surveillance apparatus, putting the Democratic imprimatur on the most depraved excesses of the Bush administration.

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.

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.

Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is a political and ideological project that gained traction in the 1970s across the Western world that sought to return to the laissez-faire roots of “classical” or “economic” liberalism; it aimed to curtail the gains made by labor in the twentieth century and to restore upper-class power through “free” markets and unregulated capital.

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

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.

The Republican Party has certainly conquered American politics. The catch, however, is that in the meantime, American culture could not be more inhospitable to them. The monster created by the effete intellectuals may now turn against its masters. Donald Trump is a stupid, gauche, uncultured philistine whose unabashed jingoism and racism has probably inaugurated a new era of right-wing Blood and Soil politics—which, believe it or not, hinders the interests of the well-manicured, multinational cartel of rich Republican vampires that nurtured the conservative movement.

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.

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.

Impressionists sought to capture moments in time through swift brushstrokes, wet-on-wet intermingling

Usually when people invoke “character,” it means some combination of grit, patience, determination, ingenuity, focus, self-discipline, and empathy. And sure, these are all good things that make for self-confident and healthy individuals. But now ask yourself: Does your job bring out these traits in you, your colleagues, or your boss? Or is it much more likely to bring out things like anxiety, impatience, petulance, authoritarianism, and a pent-up sense of homicidal rage?

So when old people tell you that work builds character, what they really mean is that it trains you to slog through hopelessness and alcoholism and to redirect your unexpressed rage toward your family and your loved ones. It doesn’t build character, but it sure does build a tolerance to the antidepressants, mood stabilizers, five-hour energy diarrhea drinks, and “focus”-enhancing drugs coursing through your bloodstream. Another uniquely American lie meant to cover all this up is the idea that “the rich work hardest of all.” The premise that the wealthy got that way from working harder than you do—or, at the very least, that they’re justly compensated—is a central myth of a country that let a hundred assholes on Wall Street get away with deleting $10 trillion in 2008 and (after brutally suppressing a grassroots “Occupy” movement) immediately pretended it never happened.

In fourteenth-century England, however, one man rejected the wisdom of the wizards and decided to wander off the road to serfdom. This plucky lowborn, Wat Tyler, led a peasant revolt, spurred on by the words of radical priest John Ball: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” This insistence that it was against God and the notion of equality for the landed aristocracy to exploit the labor of those born into servitude was one of the earliest recorded organized harassment campaigns. The insurgents captured London and sacked several government palaces before the situation was resolved when Tyler and Ball were captured by Richard II’s men and mutilated to death, convincing the peasants to return home and agitate for incremental change by working within the system.