It has been called the leftwing alternative to Breitbart – a subversive, humorous and politics-focused new media presence that has attracted a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic.
Chapo Trap House has mostly attracted followers of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, but recently it burst into the mainstream US media when a dispute erupted between the podcast’s provocative, hard-left commentators and the New Republic, a stately institution of polite neoliberalism.
As part of a takedown of the “dirtbag left”, the century-old commentary magazine noted that a phrase used by Chapo’s Brooklyn-based hosts had prompted outrage in some quarters.
In a recent edition, co-host Will Menaker said – not for the first time – that Clintonian liberalism was the architect of its own defeat. “But get this through your fucking head,” he said. “You must bend the knee to us. Not the other way around. You have been proven as failures, and your entire worldview has been discredited.”
The phrase “bend the knee”, a historical gesture of deference, was interpreted by some critics in terms of gender and identity politics – realms into which Chapo hosts often throw grenades.
“Bend the knee gets read as a sexual reference,” the New York magazine and All the Single Ladies author Rebecca Traister wrote in an email quoted by the New Republic. “Not because people think it is literally about sex, but because it conveys a hunger for dominance and submission, which is very quickly heard as gendered and sexual.”
The contretemps, which was picked up by the Washington Post, defined divisions in the American left that have been growing hostile as a new generation seeks to shed old influences.
Menaker and co-hosts Brendan James, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, Virgil Texas and Amber A’Lee Frost all declined requests for comment. But their rollicking message has developed an enthusiastic audience, of supporters they call “grey wolves”. Chapo subscriptions have grown rapidly, now at 16,000 and bringing in $70,000 a month.
The hosts, who are aligned with the Brooklyn arm of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), met on social media, gaining followers with their offbeat humor and views on what is termed “left Twitter”.
That led to a series of podcasts on the popular Street Fight Radio before the launch of Chapo Trap House, named for Sinaloa cartel head Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and the hip-hop term for a drug house.
One DSA member familiar with the thinking of the podcast producers offered the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism as an ideological reference, and said the spat with the New Republic illustrated the resistance of neoliberals to warnings that a hard left turn is necessary to counter the rise of the so-called alt-right and avoid continued electoral defeat.
In one Chapo episode, the podcast’s hosts excoriated The West Wing as an expression of the patronizing self-entitlement of liberals.
“They are very anti-establishment,” said the DSA member of the Chapo hosts, “and believe that neoliberalism as a doctrine has failed, and they want centrist Democrats to acknowledge that it was their failure that destroyed the working class and allowed this atrocity [the Trump presidency] to take place in the White House.”
John Mason, a professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey, said a leftwing “counter-reaction” has been building for a decade.
“It’s the feeling that the new liberal agenda resulted in a whole generation of young Americans being shafted, locked into a gig economy, loaded down with student debt and no access to healthcare,” he said.
“So there’s been a reaction against Democrat politicians of the 90s who tried to make a compromise with corporate capitalism and then defined liberalism around cultural issues of diversity, immigration, women’s rights and so on, while riding along with the shafting of the working class.”
In an interview first drafted for the Harvard Crimson before an appearance at the university in April, Christman criticized Ivy League universities for being “perpetuator[s] of privilege, obviously, but also … perpetuator[s] of the fantasy of meritocracy, which is what justifies the privilege”.
“All of these kids who are so brilliant just happened to be children of people who are in a similar social situation, but they went to Harvard – like Jared Kushner, for example! He’s not just some dickhead son, he’s a dickhead son who went to Harvard. For$3m. It’s basically laundering privilege.”
In a recent edition of the podcast, Jezz In My Pants, Chapo hosts cited the success of Labour leader Corbyn’s social democratic platform in the UK election last month as proof of the potency of “dirtbag” politics.
“It’s the beginnings, or the contours, of something else, like a shaft of light,” said A’Lee Frost. “If you run a real left candidate, the real left will win.”
Corbyn lost, although Labour did deny Theresa May’s governing Conservative party an outright majority.
Though the Chapo Trap House hosts have been lauded by Paste magazine as the “vulgar, brilliant demigods of the new progressive left”, divisions on gender and generational lines are becoming more apparent.
The Democrats' performance as an opposition party? Pathetic
“Who is the most popular politician in the United States right now?” asked Mason. “Bernie Sanders! The ground has shifted and this is really the centre of the Democratic party. The people who have been marginalised, especially after this defeat, are those who belong to the Clinton-Obama wing.”
The far left, Mason said, is articulating itself in new ways. He pointed to a recent meeting of Sanders and Al Gore and the emergence of anti alt-right groups such as Redneck Revolt. Last week, the DSA published an electoral strategy guide; it anticipates strong or record attendance at its convention in Chicago next month.
If Chapo Trap House and its political brethren are the rising stars of Democratic politics, they bring anxiety with them. The battle within the party could echo the fights of the 60s, which pitted the new left against cold war liberalism, contributed to the chaos of the 1968 convention and helped open a divide that ushered in nearly a decade of conservative government.
“The fear is we’re going to do 68 over again and that’s the argument the Clintonists will make,” Mason said. “That a battle within the Democratic party will help elect a conservative militia that will then, despite being a sociological minority, craft the institutions so they can remain a political majority.”
Dani Rodrik: "Another wrong turn came in what the United States didn’t do when it opened its economy with NAFTA, the WTO, and then the entry of China into the WTO. At some point, the United States could have done what Europe did in an earlier stage in this history when Europe became an open economy. That is to erect very generous social insurance and safety nets. The kind of insecurities and anxiety that openness to trade creates can be compensated or neutralized by having extensive social policies, and that’s what Europe managed to do.
Europe is much more open to trade in the United States. Yet to this day, trade remains uncontroversial in Europe. When you look at populism in Europe, it’s not about trade at all. It is about other things, it is about immigrants going to reduce the welfare state."
"And this gets me to my fifth quarrel with Paul Krugman here. As I see it, the most important thing we missed about globalization was how much it required support from stable and continuous full employment."
"Yet over time, those parties, Piketty explains, "gradually become associated with higher education voters," which he describes as creating a system of "multiple-elite" parties where "high-education elites now vote for the 'left,' while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the 'right' (though less and less so)." In other words, both sides of the spectrum became parties of the elite, with no party for less educated folks or the working class.
Piketty argues that this situation "contributes to rising inequality and lack of democratic response to it," as well as the rise of populists like Trump, Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in Britain. "Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low- education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party," he writes."