By David Futrelle
So what does it mean that two of the most prominent young alleged leftists are winning high praise from the performatively heterodox reactionary site Spiked?
Today Spiked published a puff piece interview with skidmarxists Amber A’Lee Frost and Anna Khachiyan, the former an irregular co-host of Crappo Chap House Chapo Trap House; the latter the co-host of the gleefully “edgy” Red Scare podcast. And it’s as bad as one might expect.
The problem isn’t just that these two — and the rest of the skidmarxist gang — are getting a big wet kiss from Spiked, but that they are happy to go along with the whole embarrassing spectacle.
Indeed, as if to prove her edgelord (edgelady?) bona fides up front, Khachiyan greets Spiked interviewer Fraser Myers with her version of the endlessly repeated alt-right joke “I identify as an attack helicopter.”
Among the most refreshing things about Frost and Khachiyan is that their politics are resolutely not woke. ‘You can tell people that I’m trans’, says Khachiyan, with characteristic irreverence, as Frost, Khachiyan and myself sit down to talk at Eastwood in the Lower East Side. ‘I’m not trans, but you can say that just for fun.’
Great. At a time when trans people face a huge and organized campaign of hate from the right and from transphobic pseudo-feminists, let’s just start off the interview with a half-assed transphobic joke.
Sounding more than a little like the faux-leftist version of the Honey Badger Brigade — the mostly female gang of antifeminists associated with hate site A Voice for Men — the two quickly throw feminism under the bus, with Frost dismissing it as little more than a female power trip fueled by whining. “[I]t’s, ‘Men are rude to me and they explain things to me,'” she tells Myers. Later she complains that, because of feminism, young “women today aren’t allowed to want a traditional relationship.”
As for #MeToo and sex positive feminists’ focus on sexual consent, well, the nicest thing the two can say about these things is that they’re nerdy.
“It’s because these people would rather negotiate sex than actually have it… They don’t want to take responsibility,” says Khachiyan. ‘That’s why nerds love this stuff’, says Frost. ‘It’s huge in Silicon Valley. They like games and rules. These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags.”
What a sensible and reasonable reaction to … the idea that people shouldn’t be forced into sex.
And somehow this all relates. in their minds, with an inability to commit to relationships.
Khachiyan says ‘a lot of these people are tyrannical narcissists’. ‘They are noncommittal, incapable of tolerating conflict or taking consequences. So they would rather have a system like polyamory where you kick that can down the road.’ Frost adds that many millennials ‘think they can eliminate jealousy… But sometimes you’re going to have bad sex, sometimes you’re going to be jealous. It’s not the end of the world.’
The two pretend that their hostility towards feminism is based on their own much purer support of the working class.
‘I fundamentally think they are disgusted and horrified by working-class people’, says Khachiyan. ‘Real women don’t live up to the liberal-feminist pieties’, adds Frost. ‘And I think that’s very threatening for the uptight, white, overeducated, liberal women to be confronted with’, replies Khachiyan.
Meanwhile, Frost is part of a podcast that takes in more than $1.5 million annually from its Patreon and that is basically the Platonic ideal of Brooklyn hipsterism.
As for liberals trying to fight the literal fascist in the White House, Khachiyan trashes them as “nerds” — no, really — and dismisses their criticisms as little more than snobbery.
The problem with liberals, she says, is that “they can’t differentiate between their political critiques of Trump and their aesthetic critiques of him.” … It is not so much Trump’s policies that anger the liberals, but his brashness, his demeanour.
Never mind Trump’s racism. Never mind the literal children suffering and dying in concentration camps at the border. Never mind the rollback of basic rights for women and LGBTQ people. Liberals just don’t like his hair, or the way the guy talks.
The two are equally dismissive of Antifa, with Khachiyan declaring that
All these people who say they are anti-fascist don’t know what it means to be persecuted.
Myers ends the post with a paean to the two and their “dirtbag leftism.” (Er, I may be a little biased here but I believe that the correct term is “skidmarxists.”)
Voices like these, challenging woke orthodoxy and standing up for traditional left values, are needed now more than ever. Here’s to the dirtbags.
When you’re getting that sort of praise from reactionary publications like Spiked, how much of a leftist can you really be?
The answer is none. None leftist.
It would be one thing if these two were just some aberration, just two weird reactionary mutant frogs in an otherwise healthy leftist gene pool. But there are a lot of other skidmarxists out there — from Twitter bomb-thrower Aimee Terese to “independent journalist” and regular Tucker Carlson guest Michael Tracey. They’ve even got their own subreddit, r/StupIDpol, with more than 13 thousand subscribers.
So we’re going to be dealing with this bullshit for some time. What joy.
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So, other than claiming they are leftists/marxists, how exactly do they fit that label?
This seems to mirror a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a White woman who allegedly voted for Bernie Sanders:
– She was against minimum wage,
– She didn’t believe racism was a big deal (in fact she occassionally used racist slurs),
– She was against feminism,
– She was against regulation,
– She was against socialism and social democracy
So what kind of mental disconnect had her voting for Sanders? Did she even, or do these people just claim they did?
Imagine being such a pick-me ass as this bunch collectively are.
Going by the above and your link to the previous thing about “skidmarxists”, they come off as this year’s chill sisters; Frost, in particular, seems keen on being the #1 Bernie Bro, even as his poll numbers are slipping. Look for more hot takes from Frost about how the left abandoned her, followed by a brief flirtation with the alt-right.
Nice Spinal Tap reference!
Also, these people are against everything the left stands for, and are therefore not leftists/liberals themselves by definition. The sooner we stop referring to them as such, the sooner they’ll scurry to the alt-right where they belong.
@Diego Duarte, presumably they would be classified as economic leftists. I assume they support raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, affordable health and child care, and so on.
To me, one extremely salient difference between someone like Michael Tracey and Bernie Sanders is that Sanders is laser-focused on his economic platform. (He’s certainly often criticized by liberals and feminists, sometimes excessively in my opinion, for giving short shrift to issues involving gender, race, etc.) Which is to say that while he’s liberal on such issues, it’s obvious that they simply don’t animate him.
People like Tracey and Terese are in one sense actually the opposite: while they might legitimately support a leftist economic platform, they seem much more interested in talking endlessly about the “culture war,” with respect to which they are more right-wing.
On what day did God create Frost and Khachiyan, and couldn’t he have rested that day as well?
(I suppose it would be a CP violation to wish that these two would get a job as Spinal Tap’s drummer, so I won’t wish that. Really.)
I wish Khachiyan would identify as an original joke
I should note that I actually think that this combination – essentially, economic liberalism and moderate social conservatism – is an extremely underserved constituency. While this is obviously an oversimplification, to the extent that “Trumpism” is anything beyond a racist cult of personality, I basically think it’s that.
“Liberals can’t distinguish between their political critiques of Trump and their aesthetic critiques of him.”
Why can’t you hate both? I don’t see the problem.
I’m a regular listener to Chapo Trap House. Amber A’Lee Frost has regularly had the shittiest takes, and even got an infamous euroskeptic on the show at one point.
You’re spot on for most of it. I’ll take exception to the one bit about liberals. “Liberal” is not a synonym for “leftist”. Democrats have been willing to conflate the two as it suits them, and Republicans regularly paint both with a wide brush, but a “liberal” in the US would be right wing in Europe.
When one talks about liberals like the bit you quoted, we’re not talking about folks like you who are legit against the terrible stuff going down. We’re talking about people who will futilely reach across the aisle to a Republican who will bite the hand every time. We’re talking about people who are willing to politely listen to a nazi if they wear a nice suit and speak calmly. We’re talking about people who decry antifa as being “too violent”, saying they’re no different from the nazis. We’re talking about people who are perfectly fine with innocent people dying, as long as it’s across the ocean somewhere where they don’t have to see it. Just look at any Democrat who supported or voted for the Iraq war.
Not excusing Amber or the skidmarxists in general, far from it. There’s just some nuance here that’s easy to miss.
It seems that these two women are, simply put, very old school members of the political left. They seem to relate to the views and beliefs of the so called old-left before the advant of the Civic Right movement like the second wave feminism and the anti-segregation movement. They don’t appear to be very much cosmopolitan or downright marxist-leninists or maoists. What this means is that they are basically firm believers in the fact that there is such a thing as “all boat rises” economic policy and that inequalities between race and gender can disapear thanks to the application of economical policies that favors the redistribution of wealth toward the working class and to some extand the middle class. Of course, the fact they spend their time criticising the concept of racial and sexual equality indicates a certain desire, either to be edgy, cool and a bit contrarian, or a social conservatism that betrays a wish to brush asside problems of racism and sexism, especially if htey are structural for these basically spell out that there is no such thing as a “all boat rises” economic policy.
Exactly. In fact, the non-dynamic duo are dishonest in their comment about this, because I don’t see a single person critical of Trump who says, for example, that his immigration policy is bad BECAUSE his hair is bad and his hands are tiny, but that’s the implication they give with their dishonest BS.
And, as experience has shown me many, many times, shitty people are never shitty in just ONE area of their lives.
Aaron,
I would argue that you can not be leftist on economic issues while being conservative on social issues. Economic and social justice issues are not separate things. They are intertwined. I’m not sure how one would even accomplish economic justice while pursuing a white supremacist and anti-feminist agenda.
Doomcup,
If people want to criticize centrists, they should say centrist. The word liberal has always been used interchangeably with progressives or leftists in the US. Referring to centrists as liberals is needlessly confusing.
Few things piss me off as much as reactionaries who think they’re left-wing. I don’t care how much you allegedly hate capitalism, you aren’t left-wing if you have active contempt for feminism and/or minority rights. Strasserists are fascists too.
Few things piss me off as much as reactionaries who think they’re left-wing. I don’t care how much you allegedly hate capitalism, you can’t be left-wing and hold active contempt for things like feminism and minority rights. Strasserists are Nazis too.
(Apologies if this double-posts)
@weirwoodtreehugger – I don’t feel like “liberal” and “leftist” are quite used interchangeably in the US. “Liberal” tends to denote not quite centrism, but a kind of establishment center-leftism: Obama is a liberal, for example.
Independently but relatedly, “liberal” also seems to be associated with the “New” Left – closely identified with social issues and maybe climate activism to a limited degree – while “leftism” is associated with Marxists who basically take capitalism itself as their primary nemesis. I tend to think this is because there is a perception that the New Left is more easily placated or accommodated by the existing sociopolitical system, which makes them inherently more moderate.
(Whether that is true or not is, of course, arguable.)
weirwoodtreehugger:
True, a lot of it is laid on the centrists’ lap. There is another reason that those on the left criticize liberals, though, and why the two just can’t be used as a synonym.
Words have meanings. Saying a liberal and a leftist are the same thing is like saying there’s no difference between the Jacobins and the Girondins. It’s like saying there’s no difference between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
The key difference between liberals and leftists is this: liberals think that the system is fine, but the wrong people are in charge, while leftists think the system itself is what’s wrong.
(This took me a while to write, so I only finished this in time to see Aaron had said the stuff before me. Thanks, Aaron!)
ColeYote:
I can tell you one group of left wingers who are perfectly happy to hold contempt for feminism and minority rights: tankies. AKA Stalin apologists and apologists for soviet style Marxism-Leninism in general.
Tankies are the worst. The rest of the left *hates* tankies.
@doomcup said pretty much what I was thinking. I’m also a semi-regular Chapo listener and its the same podcast that had an amaaaazing interview with Natalie Wynn (AKA Contrapoints) on the show. They also do a lot of collabs with Sam Seder and his crew, who are very engaged with everything feminist and social justice. The Michael Brooks podcast in particular offers it an international perspective, his focus on Brazil and the imprisonment of Lula da Silva of particular note (Bolsonaro has been particularly bad for the indigenous and LGBT of Brazil), and has hosted Chapo’s Matt Christman and Felix Biederman in the past.
But to draw a bit more of a distinction with how @doomcup defined “liberal,” it’s a phenomenon I really have seen on places like Wonkette and on the Bob Cesca Show (a podcast I’ve listened to religiously since 2011), a phenomenon that Amber Frost describes as:
What this kind of liberal wants more than anything is a return to a quote-unquote “normalcy” (Bob Cesca straight up says this practically every show) and with their understanding of the Democratic coalition, they think that a woman or a person of colour will deliver that Obama-era normalcy by defeating Trump. They’ll post memes about how much they miss Obama, forgetting how much his failures (eagerness for a grand bargain, draconian immigration measures, drones) got us into this mess. “Normalcy” won’t cut it, not when we’re up against the edge of a climate precipice.
That said, where Amber Frost and Anna Khachiyan drop the ball is in thinking that all of these various cultural concerns are somehow the realm of a bunch of urbane, elitist liberals and Silicon Valley types just because they’re splashed all over obnoxious think pieces in media outlets they despise. Which however true does not invalidate their import, nor can one get past it in lieu of some competing “class-first” idea of socialism. As WWTH said, the two are entwined. If you think they’re competing, you’re doing the work of the bad guys, especially if you’re going to Spiked to do it.
@Diego Duarte
A lot of Bernie supporters simply hated Hillary Clinton for one reason or another. Without Clinton in the race, that contingent for Bernie went elsewhere.
Obligatory link in response to the “attack helicopter” “joke”
@Cat Mara
Life of Bria is great
@doomcup
Bizarrely, I’ve run into more and more MLs that aren’t full Stalin apologists that self-identify as tankies, I guess to reclaim it? At any rate, they posted some shit with tankie in it, and jumped down my throat when I pointed out tankie is perjorative. They are pro-feminist and lgbtq+ rights, so I have no clue anymore. I have seen a bunch of the classic tankies as well tho
Only socialists tend to draw a distinction between liberal and leftist in the US though. I’m making an argument about common word usage, not technical correctness. When the vast majority of USians hear the word “liberal” they don’t think center or center-left.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how constantly having sneering contempt for “liberals” is ever going to advance any kind of progressive agenda. It leads too easily to the idea that anyone who isn’t exactly like you is pretty much worthless and that leads to this drift to the alt right we’re seeing with the supposed left lately.
And the explanation of the difference between liberal and leftist came off as super condescending. I was pretty clearly talking about how the words are perceived in the US. I’ve been politically involved for about two decades now. I know understand political terms. I also understand how the general public views terms.
These skidmarxists mostly remind me of Nazbols more than anything else. Though as someone already mentioned, Strasserism seems to be an apt description as well.