The Dirtbags Won’t Save Us

Ten years on from Trump’s 2016 White House run and over a year into his second term, many Democrats are still asking what is needed to finally drive MAGA from the halls of power. Party faithful and left-wing activists alike have grown tired of Obama-era sanguinity and the noble adage that “when they go low, we go high.” The Trump era has taken its toll, and many find it hard to aspire to a politics of better angels when so many of the worst of us are enjoying the spoils of political power and extreme wealth. This, I think, is the abridged explanation for the rising incidence and appeal of the dirtbag on the American left. And it is the context in which dirtbagism threatens to degrade our politics even more. 

Popularized in large part by the Chapo Trap House podcast and the universe of bro-y, loosely Bernie Sanders-aligned media figures who emerged in the mid-2010s, dirtbagism repackages antisocial and crankish attitudes as progressive authenticity. Rather than being strictly about substance, it’s an affective thing—an approach to politics that relishes aggression, mean-spiritedness, and heterodoxy as virtues unto themselves. In that sense, dirtbagism is a potentially fatal threat to any sort of liberal democratic future for a country already undergoing authoritarian drift and mired in deeply felt social anxieties and animosities. 

Let’s take Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA-backed candidate who just won her primary for New York’s 13th congressional district. Chevalier won a nasty race, marked by racist abuse and ad hominem ads. But she came under fire for many of her own past comments online, many of which were leavened with antisemitism, conspiracism, and a careless hostility. 

She expressed pro-Russian sympathies during the invasion of Ukraine, spread misinformation about the origins of Covid-19 during the pandemic, attacked white women in interracial marriages as “ugly colonizer women,” and reposted a tweet in 2020 that claimed “Israel doesn’t exist.” 

Chevalier did apologize under pressure, saying “I regret the way [my] values were portrayed on Twitter.” But I am not so sure the values can be separated from the messages. I believe people can change and that they deserve grace. But Chevalier hasn’t quite made clear how her values, reformed or not, and her comments really diverge. 

This kind of rhetoric stands largely in contrast to Mamdani himself, who has proven to be a pragmatic and inspiring mayor with a lot to offer national Democrats as an example of positive progressive politics. Chevalier aligns with dirtbagism not because she’s left-wing but rather because she embodies its ethos of edginess and provocation, the sort that inevitably leads to hateful and irresponsible comments. Dirtbagism essentially authorizes any kind of dishonesty or cruelty if it’s deployed by people on the left. Proper progressive positions are presumed to be a pre-justification for bad behavior. 

Consider a recent post about Susan Collins from Ken Klippenstein, whose “smoothgroins” essay in defense of Graham Platner I’ve already covered in previous columns. Klippenstein posted a clip of Senator Collins, who suffers from an essential tremor, speaking on Fox News, offering, “In a pre-recorded interview, a trembling Susan Collins says Graham Platner is the antithesis of "steady" leadership.” There is nothing here other than a joke about Collins’s neurological condition. There isn’t political commentary beyond the idea that her disability is funny. 

Mocking Susan Collins for her tremor isn’t only unnecessarily cruel to Collins. It suggests that anyone with a tremor deserves to be mocked, that any noticeable disabilities are worthy of derision. It says that going for the easy target of someone’s physical limitations or handicap is justifiable if you hate that person for nobler reasons. At the very least, it says to any other person with a tremor that their manner of speaking is laughable. 

None of this means that those of us who oppose America’s slide into authoritarianism have to excuse Susan Collins for the part she’s played. She deserves to lose her seat. And she deserves to be treated as a handmaiden to the dismantling of the republic rather than the sensible, “concerned” moderate she pantomimes. 

This kind of malice isn’t limited to self-styled socialist spaces. Liberals, too, engage in attacks on MAGA figures that are brazenly unworthy of a morally superior opposition. Earlier this year in South Carolina, Lindsey Graham’s Democratic challenger ran an attack ad clearly premised on Graham being a closeted gay man. Daniel Villareal covered it for LGBTQNation:

The ad begins with text that says, “Lindsay Graham has a secret.” Then, Andrews says, “We’ve all heard the rumors about Lindsay Graham, the whispers that circulate around Washington, D.C., and South Carolina, that he has a secret, a part of him that he wants to keep hidden. And then, after all these years, he just comes out and says it.”

At this point, the words “He just comes out” appear in yellow, capitalized letters on screen. The ad then shows video footage of Graham saying, “The Iranian regime is on its knees,” and then displays “on its knees” in yellow all-cap letters. The ad does the same thing with footage of Graham saying, “We’re gonna blow the hell out of these people,” with the words “gonna blow” displayed on-screen in yellow and all-caps.

Andrews then says to the camera, “Lindsay Graham is deeply and passionately in love…” The sound of a record scratch then interrupts the ad’s music as Andrews finishes the sentence: “… with war.”

The ad was rightly lambasted by many on the left. After all, what are we to make of it? That Graham is gay that that this is shameful? That his homosexuality is somehow an integral part of his other bad qualities? The lurid innuendo is itself offensively homophobic, and it doesn’t serve the central anti-war argument the ad goes on to make. It only served to try and humiliate Graham, unaware or unconcerned about how it also might affect any of its LGBTQ viewers—out or not.

What I see in dirtbagism is a left-of-center version of the right’s war on empathy. It’s a mode of politics that is intentionally cruel. It takes pleasure in derision and humiliation for their own sakes. It’s essentially a “fuck your feelings” politics of the left. Take this recent screed by Hasan Piker, in which he escalates an anti-Israeli position into a pro-Hezbollah one, justifying it by demeaning the feelings of anyone who might find such rhetoric extremist and reprehensible (never mind that the facts of the case are not really on his side): 

Israel is the actual terrorist. Hezbollah would not exist if Israel had not invaded and occupied Lebanon. Right now it is the only force in Lebanon that is actually fighting back against the alien invaders that are illegally blowing up villages. I don't care about your fucking feelings. I care about the truth. The truth is Hezbollah in Lebanon right now is not only fighting a just war, they're fighting a moral one. Israel's actions in Lebanon are war crimes. Facts don't care about your fucking feelings

Yet feelings have always been important in politics. Facts may be the best guides for policy, but it’s feelings that bind political communities together. In this case, it’s feelings that there are no justifications for Hezbollah’s crimes, much less a case that its oppressive, murderous regime is somehow “moral.” Hezbollah spent the 1980s and 1990s carrying out terrorist attacks from car bombings to hijackings before becoming a key political and state-like force in the region. Hezbollah supported the Assad dictatorship in Syria—a regime that infamously used chemical weapons against its own people. Hezbollah eventually provided on-the-ground military assistance for the regime during the civil war in Syria. More recently, Hezbollah has been accused of firing unguided missiles into Israeli residential areas in direct contravention of international law. And Hezbollah remains a key vector for global antisemitism. 

Piker presents what he’s saying as authentic, as harsh but true. But it isn’t. He’s abandoning any kind of moral reasoning for the sake of twisting a knife, and an antisemitic one at that. The justification is that Israel is bad, but this is nonsensical in the context of running cover for an entity as wicked as Hezbollah. It’s the sort of thing that pushes tankie and tankie-adjacent leftists, like Hasan himself, to do apologia for Xi’s China and Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. Who cares about their victims? Who cares if my words seem to endorse deeper hatreds if the people I am upsetting are my enemies?

And it’s the same sort of logic that lets even normie liberals feel ok making homophobic jokes about Lindsey Graham. At its most vicious, it becomes an end to itself, untethered from anything other than the ritual of abusing people who aren’t on your team. 

We can and should skewer public officials and entire states for their villainies and their absurdities. That’s a necessary part of doing politics, especially opposition politics in a moment fraught with illiberalism. Further, Democrats can and must play hardball politics in the face of GOP malfeasance. They should attack Republicans freely on the campaign trail and be mercilessly combative in Congress. 

But avoiding dirtbagism does require that we retain our sense of the shared, fundamental humanity that’s always at play. I don’t want Democrats to persecute Republicans when they regain power. I want the steady, necessary application of justice. Yes, that means I think firings, investigations, and even imprisonment will be warranted. But it shouldn’t be done with glee. And it must be done with the purpose of building our liberal democratic society anew. 

In the interim, I see no path out of our present crisis offered by the exultation of callousness. It isn’t only that cruelty is wrong in and of itself. Empathy is an essential building block of liberal democratic life. The entire enterprise rests not only on the individual dignity of our fellow citizens but on the notion that they are beings with rich interiority, capable of good and evil, and deserving of the chance to become their best selves. Dirtbagism suggests that we can behave cruelly without being cruel. We can’t. It also suggests that our enemy’s sins can render them outside our obligations to one another. They can’t. 

These are ancient impulses. There’s nothing modern or savvy in our performance of savagery toward one another. And there is nothing new about the desire to humiliate our opponents. Rather than the stale, stuffy thing that many dirtbag leftists see, liberal democracy is cutting-edge. It’s a moral and social provocation against millennia of human inequality and violence, a daring experiment in individual dignity and mutual cooperation. To borrow a line from James Gunn’s Superman, maybe that’s the real punk rock. 

Featured image is The Irritating Gentleman, by Berthold Woltze