Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
we're all taking about it, it's going to be thrown around so long as Sanders and AOC are breathing, and it's going to take center stage in the 2020 campaign. this intensely entertaining, observant article digs deep into Brooklyn to find the Tecate-loving heart of America's growing socialist ranks.
as someone who always understood himself as liberal, as progressive, even a part of the left-literary crowd , these people are strange to me and i find them very unappealing. i worry about their potential influence in 2020.
Until very recently, it wasn’t that socialism was toxic in a red-scare way. It was irrelevant, in a dustbin-of-history way. But then came Bernie Sanders’s 2016 candidacy, then the membership boom of DSA, then the proliferation of socialist cultural products like Chapo, and then, finally, the spectacular rise of Ocasio-Cortez.
The politics of the socialism that they helped revive isn’t always clear. Stripped of its Soviet context and cynically repurposed by conservative partisans, the word had lost its meaning by the time it got hot again. For some DSA grandees, like NYC chapter co-chair Bianca Cunningham, socialism means a planned economy that replaces market capitalism. “It means we own the means of production. It means we get to run our workplaces and our own government,” she says. But that is unusual. For Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and most of their devotees, it’s closer to a robust version of New Deal liberalism — or, perhaps, Northern European social democracy.
Still, among New York’s creative underclass — cash poor but culturally potent — it feels like everything but socialism is now irrelevant. “I’ve noticed that there’s a kind of baseline assumption in the room that everyone is a socialist,” says Brostoff. “And if they’re not, it’s because they’re an anarchist.” Coolheaded Obaman technocracy is out; strident left-wing moral clarity is in. And while this atmospheric shift is felt most acutely among the left-literary crowd, it’s also bled into the general discourse, such that Teen Vogue is constantly flacking against capitalism and one of the most devastating insults in certain corners of the internet is to call someone a neoliberal.
The word socialism has become a kind of blank canvas on which young leftists project their political desires. The reason to call it socialism, the lefty journalist Kate Aronoff has said, is because people are calling it socialism. At least in Brooklyn, and the spiritual Brooklyns of America, calling yourself a socialist sounds sexier than anything else out there, without necessarily advocating anything too risky.
[...]
Many socialists distance themselves from Chapo, which for many embodies Bernie-bro machismo. But its zero-sum politics and caustic nihilism — the exact inverse of the Establishment-liberal Pod Save America—have set the tone for socialist discourse, especially in contrast to the pieties of the identity-politics left, the righteousness of the #resistance, or the smug wonkishness of Vox. As a result, its enemy isn’t so much Trumpism as the gauzy liberal triumphalism — like the Broadway musical Hamilton — that papers over the indignities of American life. Anyone who feels otherwise is clinging to an outmoded West Wing fantasy of American politics.
In this way, socialism is as much a repudiation of crash-era capitalism as it is of postrecession liberalism. The Democratic Party, which gave us the New Deal, had long ago lost its working-class soul. Democrats promoted valuable causes — gun control, combating climate change — but rarely challenged the economic elite. As n+1 editor Nikil Saval wrote, liberalism had become a “politics in which government cravenly submits to corporate power and cultural debates distract from material needs.” He cited examples: “The chief executive of Patagonia being hailed as a leader of ‘corporate resistance to Trump’ or Chelsea Clinton’s accusing Steve Bannon of ‘fat shaming’ Sean Spicer.”
The race to the left was stoked by an attitudinal shift in the young, mainstream press. Before it was sued out of existence by a revanchist libertarian billionaire, Gawker Media embodied the arch, ironic sensibility of New York’s online-media ecosystem. Now its alumni earnestly proselytize labor unions. (“Peace to the Denver teachers on strike today. America is with you,” tweeted Gawker alum Hamilton Nolan recently.) Across the industry, editorial staffs of a number of publications, including this one, have unionized.
Meanwhile, the magazine Jacobin — named for the insurgents who led France’s murderous Reign of Terror during the Revolution — has only grown in influence since its 2010 founding, popularizing socialism for a wider audience (“Are Workers the ‘Gravediggers’ of Capitalism?”; “Eight Marxist Claims That May Surprise You”) and elevating a new generation of leftist voices. But Twitter — a medium that structurally encourages moral grandstanding, savage infighting, and collective action — is where young socialism lives.
as someone who always understood himself as liberal, as progressive, even a part of the left-literary crowd , these people are strange to me and i find them very unappealing. i worry about their potential influence in 2020.
Last edited: