On Being a Dirtbag

The dirtbag left emerged not from moral decay but from the material conditions that liberal discourse systematically obscures.

I am a dirtbag. This is not a confession but a classification imposed by the professional liberal consensus that emerged during the 2016 Sanders campaign. In 2016 I created the Superdelegate Hit List and organized the Won’t Vote Hillary campaign. Liberal publications were outraged, decrying my actions as violence, shouting that I was a sexist, accusing me of being a Russian agent, a Nazi, or a secret Republican operative. Over all the noise, they accused me of being a member of the “Dirtbag Left.” What they objected to was my method. I compiled public data into a massive superdelegate contact list so that Sanders supporters could pressure party elites. In short, I doxed them. This was not random harassment. It was a targeted campaign against an undemocratic mechanism whereby superdelegates could and often did vote independently of primary outcomes.

It was a simpler time, when Sanders had not yet been fully absorbed into the disciplining logic of Democratic Party unity and the fascist machinery of the Trump administration had yet to crawl from the gutters. But the writing was on the wall, and I made a wager, not that Sanders could save us, but that his campaign would open class antagonism inside a dead liberal consensus. The fact that socialists are now rising to challenge political institutions demonstrates that I was correct. Going all in for Sanders did not require me to subscribe to lofty illusions about the viability of electoral socialism. I had already read Murray Bookchin’s warning to the left about Sanders in 1986. In it he described Sanders as a bread-and-butter socialist whose obsession with realpolitik subordinates his socialist program to the practical administration of the state, a man who will choose friendship with his opposition over pushing for real reform. This caused a heated divide within the left circles of Burlington, Vermont, where Bookchin was ostracized as too vitriolic and ultimately dismissed as a crank. Sanders won because he relied on the respectability politics of liberal politeness culture.

That history is not incidental. It bridges into this essay’s central claim, which is that the liberal plea for decorum will always block progress. Dirtbag politics is defensible only when tied to class power, institutional critique, and material analysis. Without that discipline, anger becomes anti-establishment resentment, and resentment becomes vulnerable to reactionary politics.

The conceptual instrument that sharpens this thesis belongs to Albert O. Hirschman, the economic historian and political theorist whose 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction remains the most precise dissection of how progressive challenges get neutralized through language. Hirschman identified three recurrent rhetorical structures in the grammar of reactionary thought. The perversity thesis holds that any attempt to improve society will perversely worsen the condition it aims to remedy. The jeopardy thesis holds that reform endangers some prior, hard-won accomplishment. The futility thesis holds that change is futile because underlying structures render it impotent. He traced all three to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and showed that they recur, with remarkable formal identity, across two centuries of liberal opposition to abolition, labor rights, decolonization, and democratic expansion. Their function is always to relocate causality from the system to its challengers, to translate material contradictions into questions of character, and to preserve the existing distribution of power from structural scrutiny.

Hirschman’s theses are a grammar, not a machine. They describe how opposition is talked into irrelevance, but the coercion behind the talk lies elsewhere, in the state’s organs and in the property relations the talk protects. To treat decorum as the enemy and stop there is to mistake the grammar for the machine. The machine runs on eviction, arrest, debt, and the withholding of the means of life, and the grammar matters because it naturalizes that machine.

The machinery is on display in Alan Elrod’s essay The Dirtbags Won’t Save Us, which catalogs the crudities of those who rebel against the existing order and frames their rebellion as a failure of sentiment rather than a response to material conditions. His remedy is a return to empathy, dignity, and the steady moral compass of liberal democracy. The framework operates in a profound material vacuum. It treats cruelty and dehumanization as failures of individual sentiment rather than as functional necessities of the capitalist state and the class interests it protects. The dirtbag’s harshness is not a departure from liberal ideals but a distorted reflection of the state’s own organized violence, which Elrod cannot see because moralistic idealism is the ideological form through which that violence is legitimized. Liberal empathy is not the opposite of state brutality. It is the emotional infrastructure of class rule, a velvet glove stretched over an iron fist. When the state cages children at the border, empathy demands we comprehend the guard’s difficult job. When police sweep homeless encampments, empathy asks us to appreciate the officer’s burden. Whether Elrod intends any of this is beside the point. The infrastructure functions regardless of the sincerity of its carriers.

The state this empathy protects is not an abstraction. It is a set of organs. The police force clears the encampment. The criminal court converts poverty into custodial time. The fiscal and monetary apparatus rescues creditors before tenants. The immigration machinery turns structural displacement into a category of punishment. These organs do not fail occasionally. They are the normal operation of a state whose first commitment is the security of property, and the moral frame that condemns the dirtbag’s crudity is the same frame that keeps them safe from examination as a whole.

Read through Hirschman, Elrod’s essay is the three theses run back to back. The perversity thesis blames the dirtbag’s incivility for authoritarian drift, when the drift is produced by capital accumulation, state violence, and the structural exclusion of the working class from political power. Liberal democracy does not avoid authoritarianism by being polite. It produces authoritarianism through its ordinary operations. The jeopardy thesis treats liberal democracy as a settled moral good whose value is presupposed rather than demonstrated, when the accomplishment was never universal. It was the property of a class that built its freedom on enslaved labor, dispossessed nations, and colonial extraction. To defend it is to defend the social order that liberal democracy stabilizes, which is the order of capital. The futility thesis whispers that the underlying structures are immovable, that the dirtbag’s rage will change nothing. That counsel of despair is the most insidious of the three, because it naturalizes capitalism as an eternal horizon. It tells the immiserated that accommodation is the only realistic posture, that their rage is a personal failing rather than a rational response to systemic violence. The liberal call for empathy is, in material terms, a call to ignore the actual mechanisms of power and substitute moral feeling for structural analysis.

Elrod’s two exhibits test this framework, and both collapse under the weight of the conditions he refuses to name. Consider his treatment of Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed candidate who won her primary for New York’s 13th congressional district. Elrod catalogs her past comments, pro-Russian sympathies, Covid misinformation, attacks on white women in interracial marriages, and a repost claiming “Israel doesn’t exist,” then frames the issue as one of individual moral failure. What that framing obscures is the structural terrain the rhetoric sits on. Chevalier emerged from a landscape shaped by deindustrialization, austerity, and media propaganda. The Democratic Party, whose ballot line she now seeks, has spent decades telling working-class communities that their material interests are secondary to the cultural project of a diverse, professional-class coalition. When a party offers no material relief and no structural account of why communities like hers were abandoned, conspiracism fills the vacuum.

Antisemitic tropes about hidden power are not random pathologies. They are the deformed form of a real intuition that power operates through opaque, unaccountable institutions. The answer is not to condemn the intuition but to name it. The name is not the Jewish people or a shadowy deep state. It is the actual class of elites that profits from her community’s immiseration. Chevalier’s comments need no excuse and gain nothing from one. What matters is locating where they come from, because that is the question that points toward an answer. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, argues that the colonized subject is produced by a system that denies their humanity, and that the first act of resistance is often inarticulate, contradictory, and aimed at symbols of the colonizing power rather than at a coherent program. That is not a dispensation. It is a diagnosis of where the rage begins, and therefore of where the work of redirecting it must begin. Explanation locates but does not adjudicate. It shows where a trajectory starts, not where it lands, and a fascist and a comrade can begin from the same immiseration. The difference is the institution that catches them.

Here the analytical distinction matters more than any moral verdict. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. It is the position that the state of Israel, as a settler-colonial project, should not exist in its current form, and it runs through Jewish opposition to the Jewish state as much as through the Palestinian national movement that survived its dispossession. The conflation of the two is not a neutral mistake. It is a political operation that shields Israel from criticism by treating any attack on the state as an attack on Jewish people, and the Holocaust is invoked not to prevent genocide but to justify it. None of that makes the collapse rare. It happens repeatedly, and Chevalier’s repost is the collapse in practice. A defensible anti-colonial position degenerates into antisemitic form when nothing exists to keep the state of Israel and Jewish people conceptually distinct. The recurrence is not proof that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same. It is the argument for building the organizational framework that keeps them separate. The liberal order has every interest in keeping the distinction blurred, because once the difference is granted, Israel can be criticized as a colonial project, which liberal Zionism cannot permit.

Hasan Piker is Elrod’s second exhibit, and the failure is the same in structure but different in content. Elrod reads his declaration that he does not care about anyone’s feelings while defending Hezbollah as an empathy failure. The cruelty is real but misdiagnosed. It is a refusal of the emotional discipline the imperial consensus requires of its subjects, not a lapse in feeling. Piker’s problem is not the anti-Zionist position just defended. It is that his anti-imperialism is undisciplined. Hezbollah is not an evil abstraction. It is a material force shaped by decades of Israeli occupation, United States militarism, and regional dispossession, and it is also a sectarian organization with its own authoritarian logic. A disciplined anti-imperialism opposes Israeli occupation without offering moral cover to Hezbollah. Piker fails that test because he has lost the ability to distinguish opposing empire from apologizing for every force that happens to oppose it. The liberal response, which treats the cruelty of the rhetoric as the primary problem, ensures that the material critique of imperialism is never heard.

Elrod and the dirtbag are best judged by the same standard, effect rather than motive. The dirtbag’s problem is not the intensity of his anger but its direction. It lands on individuals instead of on the structures that produce the suffering both he and his targets endure, and every downward strike divides the only force that could confront those structures. The liberal’s effect is different in kind. It is organized, systematic, and wrapped in the language of empathy and dignity. One cruelty fragments. The other administers. Liberal moralism is imperial sentimentality in its most effective form, because it lets the liberal condemn Piker’s cruelty while ignoring the cruelty of the foreign-policy consensus both major parties uphold, and lets the liberal oppose antisemitism in the abstract while supporting the apparatus that produces the conditions for it to flourish.

The state function named in passing so far becomes fully visible in immigration enforcement, which is not a policy question but a class project. The forces driving migration are structural and well-documented. Colonial extraction dispossessed entire continents. Structural adjustment programs dismantled public economies. Free-trade agreements destroyed local agriculture. Military interventions rendered whole regions unlivable. Ecological collapse displaces millions while the nations responsible for the emissions refuse to absorb the displaced. The liberal response is not to dismantle this violence but to build a moral framework that makes it invisible. The detention camps, the family separations, the militarized borders, the systematic denial of asylum are not failures of the system. They are the system functioning as designed. The moral frame that condemns the cruelties ensures that no one follows the causal chain from a free-trade agreement in Washington to a child in a cage in Texas. The liberal does not want to follow that chain, because following it means naming capital.

The Democratic Party, whose discipline Elrod implicitly defends, maintains its unity through donor dependence that ties the party to corporate capital, through a consultant class that profits from managing working-class discontent without addressing its causes, through a revolving door between party administration and corporate boards, and through the party’s structural role in ensuring that popular anger never crystallizes into class-independent organization. The Sanders-era fights about “identity versus class” were not cultural disputes. They were fights over whether the Democratic Party would address material conditions or merely diversify the class that administers them. The liberal professional class deploys anti-racist and feminist rhetoric as a form of class management, offering representation within the existing distribution of power while ensuring the distribution itself remains unchallenged.

The distinction between left and right anti-liberalism decides where rage lands, and Jimmy Dore is the clearest record of what happens when it lands wrong. Dore is useful not because he proves the dirtbag left was always reactionary, but because he shows what happens when dirtbag rage loses its class discipline. In its better moments, his politics attacked Democratic cowardice from the left, especially around Medicare for All and congressional leverage. But the longer that posture hardened into total anti-establishment suspicion, the less it remained anchored in class power. The enemy stopped being capital as a social relation and became the establishment as an all-purpose demon. From there the drift is predictable. Anti-imperialism becomes campism, media criticism becomes conspiracism, and anti-liberalism becomes compatible with right-populist authoritarianism. Campism treats any enemy of the United States as presumptively progressive, or at least as deserving apologetics, and that is where anti-imperialism rots. It stops centering workers, civilians, dissidents, unions, ethnic minorities, and ordinary people living under authoritarian states, and starts treating them as inconvenient details on a geopolitical scoreboard.

Rage without class analysis does not stay left. It drifts toward whatever target is most available, and the available targets are never the capitalist class. They are immigrants, racialized people, queer people, disabled people, anyone near the bottom who can be made to stand in for the system that immiserates everyone below the professional class. Liberal moralism calls this a failure of empathy. It is a failure of organization. Left anti-liberalism says that liberal democracy is formally equal but materially dominated by capital, its freedoms real but limited by private property, wage dependence, imperial power, police power, and class rule, and that the task is to deepen freedom by abolishing the conditions that make formal liberty hollow. Right anti-liberalism says that liberal democracy is weak because it protects the wrong people, restrains authority, weakens hierarchy, and lets decadent or alien forces corrupt the nation. Undisciplined dirtbagism can slide from the first into the second, because both share contempt for liberal institutions. The difference is the class content. A Marxist critique attacks liberalism because it protects capital. A reactionary critique attacks liberalism because it restrains domination.

Class analysis says capital does not need a secret cabal to dominate society. It dominates through property, markets, debt, labor discipline, lobbying, courts, police, media ownership, and the state. Conspiracism says find the hidden villains and expose the secret plot. The first points toward organization. The second points toward paranoia. Class analysis is not a fixed doctrine carried intact into every dispute. It is a habit rebuilt in each conflict, because the categories of ownership, work, and rule are themselves contested in the struggles that use them. What remains constant is the question of who owns, who works, who profits, and who rules. The dirtbag’s audience is a specific social base, younger and often white and male and digitally precarious, economically insecure but not yet organized in ways that give them class power. Naming that base is not an insult. It describes the constituency both left and right are competing to organize, and the outcome depends on which side offers a structural account of the suffering it endures.

This is the contradiction at the center of Elrod’s essay. He condemns dirtbagism while defending the system that produces it, warning that dirtbagism threatens any liberal democratic future for a country already undergoing authoritarian drift. But the drift is not an aberration from liberal democracy. It is its logical culmination. Capitalism, driven by its internal contradictions, tends toward concentration of wealth, immiseration of the many, and the erosion of democratic forms when those forms threaten accumulation. Fascism and strongman politics emerge when those contradictions become too severe to manage through normal parliamentary means. Trump is not an alien imposition on American democracy. He is its grotesque but coherent expression, the political form of a ruling class that has abandoned any pretense of serving the general interest. To fight him with appeals to empathy and liberal dignity is to fight a forest fire with a water pistol while ignoring the arsonist who owns the land.

The dirtbag, for all the valid criticisms of his rhetoric and analysis, grasps one thing the liberal moralist refuses to acknowledge, that politics is a terrain of irreconcilable antagonism, not a seminar in mutual understanding. His error is not the recognition of antagonism but its direction. Rather than aiming hostility upward, at the capitalist class, the state, and the structures of domination, the dirtbag aims it sideways and downward, at disabled senators, at marginalized identities, at anyone who can be made a target for performative cruelty. The misdirection is not accidental. It is the product of a left systematically deprived of class analysis and channeled into cultural grievance, and the liberal establishment Elrod implicitly serves has every interest in it. A left that mocks Susan Collins’s tremor will never organize to expropriate the pharmaceutical companies that profit from her condition. A left that traffics in antisemitic conspiracism will never confront the financial system that immiserates it. The dirtbag is the left capitalism has on offer when class struggle is taken off the table.

The dirtbag left is still worth defending, because it violated liberalism’s most sacred rule. No matter how organized the exploitation, how systematic the humiliation, how total the abandonment, everyone involved must discuss it in language that does not disturb the people responsible. Politeness is not a neutral standard of discourse. It is a class demand that suffering be presented in a register acceptable to the class that produces it, and the class that makes the demand never performs it. The people who perform it never reap its protections, and women, queer people, and racialized people pay more for refusing it than a white man does. That asymmetry is why the refusal has to be collective. The dirtbag’s contempt for elite decorum, the refusal to extend civility toward institutions that produce misery, the insistence that working people have the right to sound angry rather than professionally managed. These are defensible practices because they refuse the emotional discipline power requires of its subjects, not because incivility is good in itself. But contempt is not analysis. Rage is not strategy. Vulgarity, by itself, is not class politics. The dirtbag’s usefulness ends the moment the target ceases to be a mechanism and becomes the vulnerable. The disabled person is mocked for a symptom. The immigrant is scapegoated for structural displacement. The Jewish person is blamed for an intuition about opaque institutions that belongs to the class actually responsible. The line is drawn not by politeness but by direction, by who the rage organizes and who it disperses, posed again in each conflict and answered by the people inside it. The dirtbag will not save us. The liberal will not save us. Only organized class power that can abolish the conditions producing both the dirtbag’s rage and the liberal’s empathy can do that.

The expropriation of landlords, lenders, employers, and the state organs that mediate daily reproduction does not depend on liberal permission. The seizure of the means of production is not a single event but the cumulative work of making capital’s claims unenforceable and the state’s coercion unusable. It depends on whether the working class can organize itself into a force capital cannot accommodate, and whether that force survives the violence the ruling class deploys against it. Every previous attempt has met that violence, from the Paris Commune to the labor uprisings of the twentieth century to the anti-colonial struggles crushed by imperial armies. That organizational question is the one the liberal never asks and the dirtbag cannot answer.

This essay is also the story of its author, and the end of that story is the argument. The doxing that earned me the name was never aimed at a person. It was aimed at an office, the superdelegate seat that let party functionaries override primary results, and the names on the list mattered only because they held that office. There was always a mechanism where a scapegoat might otherwise have appeared, which is why I never drifted into reaction. It was not virtue. It was that rage routed through class stays aimed, and rage without a mechanism hunts for a smaller target.

The working class has been systematically disorganized, with unions busted, parties absorbed, media captured, and mutual aid folded into the nonprofit-industrial complex. Rebuilding class power requires tenant unions, rank-and-file labor caucuses, community defense networks, and material mutual-aid projects that prefigure non-capitalist social relations. Politeness is the manners of a class that wants exploitation discussed without discomfort. The dirtbag is defensible only while the rage stays routed through those institutions, and it stays routed only where the institution precedes the anger. The task is to make rage disciplined, collective, and aimed at the points where extraction and coercion are administered. The lease raises the rent. The loan compounds the debt. The court enforces the eviction. The schedule sets the shift. The border strips the migrant of legal existence. The police clear the encampment. These are the surfaces where capital touches bodies. These are where it can be stopped.