by Robby Soave
McElwee maintains spreadsheets tracking how well each of his tweets about abolishing ICE performed on the social media site, and has reached out to Democratic staffers to garner support for the movement.
“[Now] there are normie motherfucking progressives that want to abolish ICE,” McElwee told BuzzFeed, in language characteristic of DSA radicals—note the disparagement of “normie,” as in normal, mainstream liberals.20
Characteristic of the infighting that often plagues lefty social movements, some on the left are offended by any attempt to make some kind of common cause with “normies.” Brendan James, a former producer and cohost of the popular socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, criticized McElwee as “a college-educated white man showing up at the 11th hour, tweeting, and taking credit for other people’s work.”
“This is about a political moment,” James told BuzzFeed, “and if you’re on the left, you want to watch out for careerists and climbers, because their work usually helps dilute radical ideas and prime them for establishment Democrats.” And nothing could be worse than that.
It’s undeniable that democratic socialism, as exemplified by the DSA, is enjoying something of a moment. Zillennials have only distant memories of the Cold War and thus do not view socialism as some kind of existential military threat to the United States. While their predecessors on the New Left were in some cases sympathetic to the Soviets, Zillennial socialists are ready to let the past die—and, ideally, capitalism along with it.
Much has been made of polls that suggest millennials have a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.21 Of course, if socialism is defined in Ocasio-Cortez’s terms as simply “economic dignity,” then it’s easy to see why it’s so popular. A lot of young people want economic dignity; this does not mean they necessarily believe government should nationalize industries, confiscate the means of production, and deport the bourgeoisie to Siberia. And conservative pundits and politicians did tremendous work during the Obama years to distort the definition of socialism; in arguing that everything Obama did was insidiously socialist, they have only themselves to blame for the fact that young people associate standard Democratic economic policies with socialism.
Fragile Finances
If young people are skeptical of capitalism and increasingly taken with utopian-sounding solutions that involve collective, democratic action to reduce income inequality, it probably also has something to do with their relatively fragile financial circumstances. The selfie generation’s second wave finished college during the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis, and the picture isn’t a pretty one. The cost of obtaining a degree—a piece of paper essentially treated as a minimum requirement for surviving in the modern world—has skyrocketed over the last twenty years, and yet jobs and financial security for graduates are more elusive than ever.
“The average college student takes out tens of thousands of dollars in loans from the government to go to school—tenacious debt it will likely take a decade or more to pay off, and on which default isn’t a practical option,” wrote Malcolm Harris, a leftist writer and fellow twenty-nine-year-old, in his 2017 book on our generation’s dire economic straits, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. “But with higher rates of enrollment, it’s not enough to just attend college, especially given the costs; a degree has become a prerequisite, not a golden ticket. Meanwhile, the university has turned into a veritable industrial complex, complete with ever-expanding real estate holdings, hospitals, corporate partnerships, and sports teams that are professional in every sense of the word—except that the players work for free.”
Harris writes from a leftist perspective, which means he tends to blame the deficiencies of modern life on the capitalist system. Whether the Great Recession was caused by an absence of government intervention into the economy or an abundance of it is a topic that would take an entire book to address. But explicit government policy seems the most likely culprit in the specific case of higher education’s cost disease, at the very least.
In fact, the government subsidizes student loans, offering low interest rates to students who must borrow to attend college. Since the government pays the upfront cost on behalf of the student, universities have every incentive to jack up the price: Uncle Sam can pay it, and students aren’t expected to square their debts until some distant point in the postgraduate future. The government always collects in the end: student loan debt, unlike other kinds of debt, cannot be discharged through the bankruptcy process. Some debtors can have their loans forgiven under the Education Department’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, but this requires graduates to work for the government or a nonprofit such as the Peace Corps while continuing to make monthly loan repayments for at least ten straight years.22
“Students are absolutely fucked right now,” George Ciccariello-Maher, the former Drexel University professor, told me. “Millennials are coming out of college with huge amounts of debt, with no access to real jobs … the baby boomers who are mocking millennials had absolute access to jobs and buying homes and all of these privileges that students today are not going to have.”
Considerable evidence suggests that federal efforts to make college more affordable have backfired in the long term. Graduates now hold nearly $1.5 trillion in collective student loan debt. The average graduate of the class of 2016 owes $37,000. A July 2015 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found “that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent.”23 A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Economics of Education Program found an even more pronounced correlation between subsidized loans and tuition rates. Between 1987 and 2010, “expanded student loan borrowing limits [were] the largest driving force for the increase in tuition,” according to the authors’ findings.24 These studies would appear to confirm suspicions first raised by William Bennett, secretary of education during the latter years of the Reagan administration, that “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions.” This idea, dubbed the “Bennett hypothesis,” grows more plausible with each passing year.
It would be one thing if students were taking on more and more debt in pursuit of guaranteed, high-paying jobs. But employment prospects for recent graduates are less certain than ever, and even those who do find jobs aren’t necessarily in great shape. Underemployment—the condition of working a job for which the employee is overqualified—is a huge problem for millennial job-seekers. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York puts the underemployment rate for recent graduates at 43.7 percent. While that’s only 5 percent higher than it was at the turn of the century, it’s actually much worse considering that graduates paid a lot more for their education in 2017 than they did in 2000. Ohio University economist Richard Vedder noted that underemployed graduates “sometimes resort to taking jobs as Uber drivers or baristas,” and added, “With some inexpensive vocational training, they could easily get jobs that pay much better.”25
What students study matters a great deal, of course. According to Vedder, electrical engineering majors earn twice as much as psychology majors. And that’s just one example. A recent graduate who majored in business was expected to be making $48,000 on average just after college, while a graduate who majored in social work or the arts could only expect a starting income of $31,000, according to research conducted at Georgetown University in 2015.26 (The data cover the 2009–12 Great Recession period; job prospects for everybody have recovered somewhat since then.) Graduate school discrepancies were in some ways even starker: a worker with a liberal arts graduate degree was making $52,000, whereas a mathematics graduate degree holder was making $79,000.
Millennials who studied math, engineering, or computer science were more likely to get jobs, and high-paying ones at that. On the other hand, millennials who studied humanities, psych
ology, or art were hardly better off than people who had skipped college altogether and instead gotten a job right after high school. In fact, they were arguably worse off, since they had mountains of debt with which to contend; the people with only a high school diploma avoided this fate. Social science majors had higher unemployment rates than experienced high school graduates.
You will have probably noticed that the majors with the most soul-crushingly bad financial prospects are the ones that activists tend to pursue, like sociology, the humanities, art, psychology, and the explicitly identity-based subjects such as gender studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, queer theory, et cetera. It’s no wonder so many of these students are stressed out, feeling a little fragile, or triggered by what critics would call “real life.” Real life is about to hit them where it really hurts: their wallets.
Maybe that’s why so many young people—and not just the card-carrying activist types—were excited about Sanders’s proposed revisions to federal education policy: make college free, allow student loan debtors to refinance, and reduce the government’s ability to profit off its loan program. Activists have gone further: debt forgiveness en masse was a major goal of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, which arose in response to the economic crisis. Not content to wait for reform, some activists pledged to cease making repayments on their loans entirely. The Occupy Wall Street movement fizzled, but young activists remain dedicated to overthrowing a financial system that led to their impoverishment while the rich got richer. From their point of view, that’s capitalism.
Late Capitalism and Weird Twitter
Social media is an essential component of Zillennial activism of all kinds—arguably, the essential component, since most organizing and information gathering are done on Twitter and Facebook.
“Facebook is a big thing,” Haik told me. “I feel like a lot of organizing started over Facebook.”
“I get a lot of my information by following a lot of different sources on Twitter and then reading from there,” Jacqueline, the Evergreen College activist, told me. “I know that’s a really millennial answer.”
And if you’re looking for explicitly Marxist, socialist, communist, and anti-capitalist activism, Twitter is the place to look. A thriving community of incredibly crude and militantly extreme anti-capitalists exists on the social media site. You may know them by the red roses (or in some cases hammers and sickles) in their handles.
“I’m a trans woman,” wrote one such Twitter user, who describes herself as a queer anti-imperialist proletarian feminist and Maoist. “I #ResistCapitalism because private property and capital are the basis of my exploitation and my oppression.”27
Marxist Twitter users affectionately tweet images of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara accompanied by one of his quotes, “True revolutionaries are guided by feelings of love.”28 (Guevara, a particularly murderous member of Fidel Castro’s inner circle, also once said that people must possess “a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine.”)29 One such Twitter user, Lamont Lilly, an activist affiliated with the Workers World Party, linked to a speech he gave encouraging Black Lives Matter to be more explicitly Marxist.30
Members of this community, branded “weird Twitter” by media reporters who follow it, often tweet statements that seem semi-satirical, like “#fullcommunism” or “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” (that one was Ciccariello-Maher himself, actually).31 The lingo can be difficult to follow. “Brocialists,” a portmanteau of “bro” and “socialists,” refers to leftist guys who are stereotypically masculine and interested in guy stuff—sports, working out, girls, and so on—but also think the workers should seize the means of production. “Tankies” are leftists who defend Stalin and Mao. In regular parlance, “corn cob” is a derogatory term for a gay man. But on weird Twitter, to get “corn-cobbed” is to lose an argument so badly you that you “slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob.”32 (You just had to be there for that one.)
Frost, the leftist writer and participant in the Chapo Trap House podcast who was involved in the dispute with the DSA’s Disability Working Group, coined the term “dirtbag left” to describe this movement—a movement that isn’t interested in civility or politeness toward its critics. For the dirtbag left, we are living through a time period known to earlier Marxists as late capitalism: the end stage of capitalism, which occurs just before the glorious communist revolution. Zillennial lefties see every excess of modern consumerist culture as evidence of late capitalism: like a pair of jeans smeared with fake mud selling for $425 at Nordstrom, or a basic economy section of an airplane that boards after absolutely everybody else—even the pets.33 “Now, [late capitalism] is everywhere, in thousands of social-media posts and listicles aimed at Millennials and news stories about modern malaise,” wrote the Atlantic’s Annie Lowery in a 2017 article.34 For leftists who see evidence of late capitalism all around them, it’s like being convinced the rapture is just around the corner.
Unsurprisingly, the dirtbag left reserves many of their harshest criticisms for neoliberalism, a kind of centrist, market-friendly liberalism that thinks capitalism should be regulated, not destroyed. In embracing market forces (albeit more selectively than classical liberals or libertarians), neoliberals haven’t just sold out their own kind—they have sold their very souls. (Think Judas Iscariot rather than Benedict Arnold.) The dirtbag left is not a cohort that particularly cares for Hillary or Bill Clinton; Clintonian triangulation is often held up as the apotheosis of neoliberalism. In fact, leftists feel almost vindicated by Hillary’s defeat. Bernie bros think Hillary cheated their man out of the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination, ultimately snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, since they believe Sanders would have ultimately defeated Trump where Hillary could not. (Thus the title of this chapter; I admit it seems perfectly plausible to me that Sanders would have indeed beaten Trump.)
International leaders such as French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau are despised by many lefties as well, despite Trudeau’s popularity with feminists. “Stop pretending these global leaders are woke baes!” demanded a writer for Vice.35 (“Bae” is slang for “important friend,” beloved by the Zillennials who eagerly appropriated it from black culture.)
The Democratic Party is at best a hugely flawed vehicle for promoting good policy, according to many leftists. But there’s hope it can gradually be pushed in a more hard-left direction: thus the efforts of the DSA.
Bill Ayers, the education theorist and radical activist known for his involvement in the Weather Underground during the 1960s and ’70s, told me that before Trump won the election, he had already planned to travel to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration—in order to protest Hillary Clinton, the presumed next president of the United States.
“I was going to Washington to be part of a peace demonstration against Hillary Clinton,” Ayers told me in an interview. “She would have had her neoliberal, pro–Wall Street, pro-war agenda, and we would have been protesting peacefully, happily over in our corner with our picket signs.”
In addition to ending global capitalism, the anti-capitalists have a lengthy policy wish list. They want institutions of higher education to divest their endowments of holdings in companies that run private prisons (privatization and prisons both being bad things) and Israeli companies (leftists stand uniformly with Palestinians against Israel). They want a higher minimum wage and, as previously discussed, student loan debt forgiveness. They want single-payer health care, subsidized birth control, and more welfare spending. And they want to pay for it by implementing a more progressive tax system under which the wealthy shell out more money.
Trump is an enemy of the people, and an enemy of leftists, too. But anti-capitalists are not especially obsessed with attacking Trump—probably because Trump isn’t actually a very
doctrinaire Republican when it comes to economic freedom. As discussed previously, there is even a sense in which Trump and the hard-core Marxists are competing for the same voters: blue-collar workers who are concerned about diminishing organized labor protections, jobs disappearing overseas, and being on the losing side of international competition. Leftists think Trump is an insincere friend to the common man, but at least the president purports to hate globalism and free trade as much as they do. The plain old Republican economic agenda—tax cuts, deregulation, and so on—is far more loathsome.
Even so, Trump’s 2016 victory didn’t represent as much of a departure from typical Republicanism as many on the left were hoping. Laila, the twenty-six-year-old Muslim activist, told me she was very worried about the new administration getting rid of mandatory birth control coverage—something that did indeed come to pass in October 2017.36 (Employers with a faith-based objection to offering birth control may now receive a waiver.)
“Women’s birth control might be taken away,” Laila told me. “Once that becomes a topic that is widely known, shit’s going to hit the fan when it comes to the women in the U.S. Because you can’t give people a taste of what they could have, and what they’re having, and then suddenly say, ‘Hey, actually, blah, blah, blah, budget, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, money,’ or whatever, and then try and roll it back.”
If there’s one issue where leftists are definitively, positively closer to die-hard Trump supporters, it’s Russia. Leftist writers and activists frequently lampoon the mainstream and liberal media’s obsession with the idea that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, thus making him president. It may be that Marxists have good memories; the last time powerful American institutions were talking seriously about the problem of Russian meddling in U.S. democracy was the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, which targeted alleged communist sympathizers and leftists. Leftists are also friendlier to Russia in general than many more moderate liberals and neoliberals. For neoliberals, Russia is an oppressive enemy. But for leftists, there is no greater force for geopolitical evil than the United States—a warmongering, imperialist, Israel-backing, capitalist-promoting Great Satan. As the activists at the Inauguration Day protests proclaimed (via their signs), “Trump is the symptom, capitalism is the disease, socialism is the cure.”
