With the promise of a revived left politics gaining improbable traction on the American scene, it’s high time we took a long unsentimental look in history’s distant mirror, analyze our victories, and conduct some honest post-mortems of previous failures. How can we develop a workable strategy for movement-building and coalition-nurturing in a broader political culture that thrives on the psychology of possessive individualism? How can we bring together a diverse array of agendas and constituencies without obsessing over the disabling complex of small-bore purity tests and deviation-spotting that Sigmund Freud memorably dubbed the “narcissism of small differences”? How can we affirm the messy human quest for pleasure and sardonic wit along the oft-competing mandate for vigilance and ideological rigor? Most of all, how can we transcend the subcultural left, stop acting like power is a dirty word, and go about seizing it in the service of a socialist future for all? Join fearless Baffler dispenser of all-purpose wisdom Amber Frost on this brave new intellectual sojourn—the answers may surprise you! There are psychological factors at play: denial, certainly, which we see in the constant reassurance of the Times’s #resistance readership that this was all a big mistake and that Daddy is coming to save them any day now. But as a good Marxist, I must point out that ideology and its attendant publishing philosophies are largely the product of market forces. Public broadcasting institutions like the BBC can remain dull and informative. FT’s reportage serves a readership that gambles on world events. The New York Times compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated. Just look at the “Trump Bump,” the 66 percent increase in profits the paper enjoyed from exhausting every possible iteration of commentary, speculation, or tirade about The Donald. And even when the economy makes way for the culture, you still always run the risk of ending up with a nogoodnik—however rare they may be in a just (and subsequently more enlightened) economy. (Sorry honey, some men are just duds. There’s nothing to be done for it, but a problem without a solution is not, per se, an insoluble problem—it’s just a fact of life.) As a “big S” Socialist, my reading habits often surprise liberals. I’m a writer, though my biggest audience comes from the listenership of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist comedy podcast. This makes me something of a curiosity among my colleagues at traditional media institutions—staffed largely by liberals—so I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.

What is wrong with the deterioration? I think we have gone through a period when too many children* and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. We move from jealousy to hate, and to the alleged epidemic of racism or even fascism often talked up by the left. Hate speech, we’re told, must be contained. Khachiyan takes a refreshingly liberal line: ‘You should be able to hate and hatred should be protected, as long as it doesn’t spill over into physical violence.’ ‘There’s this idea that we live in a white supremacist country when we fundamentally don’t’, says Khachiyan. She mentions antifa, the self-styled anti-fascist group that, since our conversation, has hit the headlines for beating up a right-leaning journalist in Portland. ‘Antifa have manufactured a threat to have some semblance of an identity’, she says. ‘All these people who say they are anti-fascist don’t know what it means to be persecuted.’ My father was a frustrating, sometimes dangerous person, but I have no anger for him. I’m told he’d often be assailed with the regrets that any self-aware absentee father is bound to experience, and I feel nothing but pity for a sad old man who missed so much. Bret Easton Ellis said there could never be the great Millennial novel – we’ll see. I haven’t read that Sally Rooney book that everybody’s writing about’, Khachiyan says, referring to the Irish author’s breakthrough novel, Normal People, which focuses on a millennial relationship. Frost adds that she read the book ‘with the intent of savaging it’, because ‘all the Guardian feminists like her’, but found ‘there was a lot of good shit in there’. ‘I think the women who like it don’t understand why they do… women today aren’t allowed to want a traditional relationship’, she says. Khachiyan adds: ‘Which is what most people since the dawn of time have wanted… There’s nothing reactionary about wanting a boyfriend!’ Were the American media machine accountable to the public, a more self-reflective, penitent assembly of institutions, or at least capable of shame, the Times might have spent a little effort reconsidering its “house style” ideology. And yet it stays the course. But why?

Frost and Khachiyan have a Marxist understanding of race. ‘We invented race to justify exploitation’, says Frost. ‘Splitting people on the basis of race was used to morally justify slavery… Racial discourse was created after hyper-exploitation.’ But ever since, argues Frost, ‘When we tried to not be racist, we ended up using the same framework’, which today also lives on in identitarian form. ‘All “race” is, is that some people don’t sunburn. That’s the entirety of racial difference.’

It’s a perfect scene: the ruthless capitalist bellowing the reality of the world to a hysterical showbiz crusader who heretofore imagined himself a virtuous evangelist, never once considering his own insignificance in the face of market forces. And when it comes to journalism, committed capitalists are always better materialists than the liberals. And that’s why I read FT. Sure, they’re rooting for the other team, but at least they know the game. By the time our little family’s finances got out of the absolute pits—a state of precarity created in no small part by the enormous amount of student debt my mother would not pay off for many years and the many work hours she spent away from her latchkey daughter—I wasn’t little anymore. And that was the end of that. Walkouts and WalkaboutsI believe my father has failed a total count of five biological children, along with the five different mothers of those children. I could not count the number of children whose mothers he married or moved in with. I know two of my half-siblings, but most were well before my time. One, an older brother, I met for the first time about five years ago. He is a very good person, friendly and kind, but I avoid him because he has my father’s face. A previously unknown half-sister reached out to me recently on social media. I have not responded. I asked how the seeming frigidity of the #MeToo moment, let alone the alleged epidemic of uterus removals, sits alongside modern feminism’s ‘sex positive’ celebration of polyamory, pansexuality and sex workers. ‘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.’ Civility is destructive because it perpetuates falsehoods, while vulgarity can keep us honest.” Amber A’Lee Frost, The Necessity of Political Vulgarity Romantic love and the nuclear family are lovely ideas, but history has clearly shown them to be unreliable economic models. I am empirical evidence of this fact. He could be very charming and funny. He could also be very irresponsible, negligent, abusive, and downright mean. He was not fit for the task of fatherhood, not for me or for any of my biological siblings or step-siblings. Gospel Half-Truths