She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight years old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father, who “could no longer endure” (he wrote in his goodbye note) sharing want with us. Another recent favourite author among Guardian feminists is Kristen Roupenian, whose short story, ‘Cat Person’, went viral. The story is about a young woman who realises – slightly too late in the day – that the sexual encounter she is about to embark on is not what she wants. When the man finally realises he has been rejected, he lashes out. ‘ Guardian feminists liked it because it “proved” men are trash because the man called her a whore at the end’, says Khachiyan. ‘Actually what it showed is that men can be sad and pathetic’, adds Frost. 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 Walkabouts 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! The day before, I asked my mom if she had ever had an abortion and she said no, that she knew a baby was right for her the same way I knew that it wasn’t right for me right now. She did ask if my decision was about money—I had none—and I said I would still want the abortion if I won the lottery tomorrow. She nodded understandingly and didn’t say anything else.

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. If you want to socially engineer a loving and responsible masculinity, men themselves must become thoroughly optional. 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.

The benefit of societies

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. 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 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.’ 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. While there are plenty of woke types queuing up to ‘call out’ Frost, Khachiyan and their collaborators – even accusing them of being Nazis – let’s hope the dirtbag left can resist being ‘cancelled’ altogether. Voices like these, challenging woke orthodoxy and standing up for traditional left values, are needed now more than ever. Here’s to the dirtbags.

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.’ Compared to the Times, the reporting is usually more in-depth; the reporters generally have more expertise; the coverage is more comprehensive both geographically and substantively; even the op-eds are better (likely because they are far fewer, and they’re not used to pad the paper with “content”—confessionals, puff pieces, listicles—rather than reporting). Most refreshing, the FT does not lose itself in the mire of myopic American culture wars, which very rarely breach the surface of material politics and/or economics. When it does run soft news, it’s higher quality (Rana Foroohar’s “Lunch with the FT” with Rebecca Solnit, for example, transcends the genre of fawning celebrity profile into an understated but scathing critique). Chapo Trap House 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. If you want your small town to get some ink in the Times, you should do something that would infuriate Sarah Lawrence students. The narrative isn’t itself so interesting’, she argues, but it shows ‘the willful failure of the Democratic Party. Again and again, they fall on their face. There’s some kind of Freudian, masochistic thing they have where they get off on publicly humiliating themselves.’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. Alex Deane and Matthew Porter, as co-chairs of the Young Democratic Socialists share a vote on the NPC. [3] 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.’