The Chapo Guide to Revolution

by Chapo Trap House

  Obungler’s Omerica

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  Despite (or perhaps because of) his hilarious choice of running mate, John McCain was actually leading the polls until global capitalism totally collapsed, at which point voters decided to pick the constitutional law professor who talked real good instead of the drooling sundowner constantly babbling about bombing Iran.

  Barack Hussein Ahmadinejad bin Laden Obama came into office with a 68 percent to 12 percent approval rating, the biggest Democratic House majority since the early nineties, and, by the middle of 2009, a filibuster-proof Senate majority. Since the financial crisis began, the Dow Jones had shed half its value, unemployment had climbed to a staggering 10 percent and rising, and the global economy had entered a profound recession. Millions of young activists—part of a generation loaded with debt and facing an unforgiving job market—stood ready to take marching orders from the man they helped put in the White House. Republicans were on the back foot, and society was primed for Obama to launch a generational transformation on par with the New Deal.

  The young and ready president threw off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and declared, “Let’s find some fucking consensus!”

  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. Instead of cultivating his massive base of grassroots 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 save the fucking economy. Afraid of being called weak? Compile an extrajudicial kill list and order your fleet of murderbots to bump off an American citizen and his son.

  A funny thing happened on the way to throwing Chelsea Manning into horrendous solitary confinement: despite his deliberate, Rahm-managed gestures intended to show voters that he’s a rational moderate (such as killing Osama bin Laden, the guy literally everyone agreed was bad), Obama was nevertheless attacked as a dog-eating, pork-barrel-spending, troop-murdering, Moon God–worshipping Communist. His cautious approach to governance and respect for the Process were rewarded with a historic loss of not only the House but state legislatures and governors’ mansions across the country. Back from the dead, newly empowered Republicans promptly went about gerrymandering the shit out of the country, crushing labor unions, and passing even more onerous voting restrictions.

  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.

  Thanks to the GOP’s lock on the House, the once-transformative Obama spent his last six years in office as a technocratic dud. He was still capable of some (transient) good deeds: he mandated vital protections for immigrants and LGBT individuals and instituted a moratorium on the deportation of the most telegenic undocumented immigrants via executive order. 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. In the liberal mind, this was okay. Sure, setting a precedent for extrajudicial murder of American citizens is a little wild; committing to drone warfare in a dozen or so countries after running on a peace platform is a touch much; funding Al Qaeda in Syria and Libya is a stretch; and expanding mass surveillance and imprisoning whistleblowers is not, as the kids say, a good look. But there were editorials lightly criticizing the president in the New Republic (purchased in 2012 by a Facebook oligarch whose husband used it as a springboard to buying a congressional seat), so surely this was an improvement over the stifling groupthink of the Bush years. Score one for liberal democracy.

  In any event, making the civil rights of millions contingent on a guarantee from the White House, expanding the imperial presidency, and presiding over a tentacular surveillance state so high-key thicc it would have made Ceauşescu cum made a lot of sense so long as there would always be a Democratic hand at the till. Yes, they lost Congress and over a thousand seats in state legislatures, but thanks to demographic shifts and a booming stock market, Democrats had a 100 percent ironclad lock on the presidency, as evinced by Obama’s convincing back-to-back victories. There was absolutely, categorically, utterly no chance a Republican could ever, ever, ever possibly take control of the White House ever again, insofar as doing so would require winning such solidly Democratic states as Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Florida, all of which would remain in the Democratic column for eternity. Now let’s all take a big sip of coffee at the Javits Center and read the 2016 election results . . .

  Oh No

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  Ah, jeez. Oh boy. Yikes. It seems the human culmination of American liberalism lost to a senile (alleged!) rapist game show host. Welp. Pobody’s nerfect, as the old saying goes.

  Dear reader, we will not be so disingenuous as to say we predicted Donald Trump’s victory. To be perfectly honest, we, too, assumed the Democrats’ obviously patronizing bullshit would outweigh the clear and present danger to everyone’s life. And, in fact, it was not a surge of blood-and-soil nationalism that made everyone look like assholes after they posted their prediction maps but merely the same people who always show up for Republicans doing what they always do against a discouraged, disinterested, and disenfranchised Democratic coalition. Republican voters were offered everything they had ever wanted—a new era of brutality and the repudiation of the symbol of Obama—while Democrats were served up four more years of morally incoherent and procedurally feckless liberalism. It was the logical conclusion, and the facts sure as shit didn’t care about anyone’s feelings.

  The New Paranoid Style

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  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.

  In good times—say, the postwar heyday of American manufacturing—this system gives the approximation of functionality (if you weren’t a black, nonunion worker). But hit a profit squeeze like we did in the 1970s and liberalism will just as quickly dump the working class, press “start” on a bipartisan algorithm to break union power, and ctrl+alt+delete half a century’s worth of wealth redistribution. The predictable result is a disillusioned and depoliticized populace plucking through the wreckage—people who either check out of electoral politics completely or turn toward the siren call of thuggish reaction.

  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. All that can really be expected of a Democratic government at this point is that it won’t appoint another member of Opus Dei to the Supreme Court. Democrats’ lack of vision suggests a historical descent into an also-ran party, one whose best shot at the White House is to stumble through the door after whatever grotesque catastrophe befalls the country thanks to Republican governance. But this party will never—and can never—fundamentally change American politics.

  Many liberals hold out some vestigial loyalty to the Democratic Party because they’re the only thing protecting us from something even worse. But guess what? They’re not even doing that anymore.

  This is where we are now: American liberals have spent their entire lives focusing on norms, rules, and processes. They’ve chortled at the wacky radicals to their left and conducted the science of the possible, operating on what is “realistic,” the only meaningful political value. In so doing, the Carter and Clinton administrations jettisoned a fair share of liberal principles: Yikes, did we shaft unions and sign health care over to insurance companies? Sorry, we were busy “getting things done,” like deregulating the financial sector and ballooning the war on drugs.

  The twenty-first century hasn’t changed libs. Once the infamous third-world Marxist Obama got into office (thanks to a campaign that denounced war, racism, and the superrich), liberals didn’t balk at his betrayals as president. They embraced his realistic positions, like protecting Wall Street after an epochal public looting and massively expanding a War on Terror that will now last 150 years. And then, in 2016, came über-realistic candidate Hillary, who had the best résumé—the most qualified candidate ever!—while mayo boy Bernie Sanders promised things he couldn’t deliver, which were too left-wing to win a general election anyway.

  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.

  And then what did the liberals do? They all went insane, turned away from reality, denied the results of their poisoned politics. They bought every James Bond movie on Amazon, streamed them all at once, jumped into the bathtub, and emerged with epileptic visions of Putin chasing Hillary in an Aston Martin through Mexico City.

  No one has divorced him- or herself from reality more swiftly than the post–2016 election American liberal. The levelheaded purveyors of reason, facts, and data have all become the inmates of the Magic Mountain. The Trump presidency invalidates their entire worldview. They’re humiliated and discredited. They’ve been left wandering the hallways of an institution in a dirty bathrobe, zonked on Haldol and muttering about “active measures” and “dezinformatsiya.”

  Over fifty years after shit-lib par excellence Richard Hofstadter wrote the foundational text of American liberalism, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the essay needs a big fucking footnote: for decades, this country’s liberal thinkers, politicians, and columnists have coasted on the basic truth of Hofstadter’s writing—that American conservatism is a slapstick crew of loopy, bug-eyed, toxic conspiracy theorists, a carnival of souls either grasping for some glorious bygone era or living in a completely alternate universe out of a bad spy novel, with Russians and Communists hiding behind every corner.

  The proudest liberals have now checked into that same asylum. Log on to Twitter or turn on MSNBC or read the New York Times; you’ll get Infowars-level theories about how Trump, Sanders, left-wing podcasts, and even fucking mass shootings are all likely the work of the Kremlin. The libs have gazed into the abyss and punctured the membrane of their psyches. Now they spend their days barking into the void, punching out a Möbius strip of tweets and blog posts, safe inside their own heads, safe from the world that their dull, smug, dead-end politics have wrought. It’s a long way from Roosevelt overseeing a vast new empire of enlightenment. After almost a century of tut-tutting the Left and the Right, the paranoid style has flipped: liberals are the cranks now.

  And to them, we’ll quote once more from the wisdom of No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, delivered in his final moments with a cornered, deluded victim: “You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.”

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  I. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 121.

  II. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 135, and Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2001), 242.

  III. James Carville, quoted in Mike Royko, “Ok, So ‘Trailer Trash’ and ‘Democrat’ Not Always the Same,” South Florida SunSentinel, January 29, 1997.

  IV. Hillary Clinton, It Takes a Village (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 51–55.

  V. Peter Applebome, “Death Penalty; Arkansas Execution Raises Questions on Governor’s Politics,” New York Times, January 25, 1992.

  VI. Chris Weigant, “A New Direction for America?” Huffington Post, June 23, 2006, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/a-new-direction-for-ameri_b_23684.html.

  Taxonomies

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  EPIC-RANT DAD

  Epic-Rant Dad can be found throughout the American suburbs and on the outskirts of major cities, attending his kids’ soccer games on his allotted weekends and filling Facebook with daily Adderall-induced missives about the fate of the Republic. His natural habitat is samba-themed marriage counseling and other fun things couples can do together. Unlike the more traditional, conservative American dad types, Epic-Rant Dad is not identified only by his love of American values and symbols (football, baseball, the Normandy landings, and other sports he wished he could have taken part in) but also by his insistence that liberals such as himself are the true patriots who fought and won the Cold War.

  Once a die-hard Clintonite—watching Bill playing the sax on Arsenio taught him how to be cool—the Epic-Rant Dad has become, in the age of Trump, a patriotic crusader fighting to defend the Republic against the Slavic hordes. He accomplishes this by posting. He replies to Trump’s tweets with “Hey, Cheeto Benito, is this the fake news you’ve been complaining about? #TheLiesAreComingFromInsideTheHouse” and uploads videos of Kirsten Gillibrand’s speeches to PornHub so viewers might jerk off a different organ: their brain. Epic-Rant Dad knows the names of all his teenage daughter’s friends. Epic-Rant Dad brews his own beer on the weekends and names it things like “Fake News Alternative Ale,” “Have You No Shame? Lager,” and “Sir? Sir? Sir? Sir? Pilsner.”

  FIGHTING STYLE: Logic-
based pragmatic brawler

  SEXUAL REPRESSION LEVEL: “Hillary is the most qualified candidate in American history”

  BLUE-COLLAR DEMOCRAT [EXTINCT]

  The Blue-Collar Democrat was a medium- to large-sized flightless mammal discovered on Long Island in the 1930s and declared extinct less than a century later. The Blue-Collar Democrat inhabited both urban and rural areas, consuming a diet rich in meat and starch. Skeletal reconstructions show that it possessed a large body, stubby arms, a small tail, short legs, and a large, poofy hat with a rude saying written on the front. The hairs of the Blue-Collar Democrat were usually gray/black in color, while its most distinctive feature was a placid expression of general contentment.

  Conservation efforts in the 1970s failed, due in large part to President Jimmy Carter’s unwillingness to support key factors of the Blue-Collar’s ecosystem: unions, rising wages, and jobs in general. Some scholars maintain that a certain number of Blue-Collar Democrats did not completely die out but instead evolved into either apathetic nonvoters or paranoid, racist Republicans.

  NATURAL PREDATORS: Industry and finance capital, debt collectors, the Democratic Party

  LIFESTYLE: Family pass to the World’s Fair

  CELEBRITY DUMBASS

  It’s a well-known conservative tactic to attack liberals for hating—or insufficiently loving—the troops. But if those lizard-brained Rethuglicans had a clue, they would realize the American lib is a stalwart supporter of a different kind of soldier: the Celebrity Dumbass. At first glance, they cut a very different figure from the traditional military grunt, lacking the camouflage and jarhead chic. But look closer: Who stands on the front lines every day, eviscerating the forces of evil and tyranny? Who embodies the very best of us? Who fights for the soul of America and defends those who cannot defend themselves? If the conservative’s fantasy of power is lighting up an Iraqi village with depleted uranium shells, the liberal’s vision is an epic mic-drop moment from Meryl Streep or Jared Leto that instructs the president to check his privilege—and his dang toupee.