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. But over all the noise, they accused me of being a member of the “Dirtbag Left.” What they took issue with was my method of compiling public data to create a massive superdelegate contact information list so that Sanders supporters could harass party elites, in short I DOX’ed them. This was not random harassment. My goal was a targeted campaign against an undemocratic mechanism where 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 we are now seeing Socialists rise to challenge political institutions demonstrates that I was correct. Going all in for Sanders did not require that I subscribe to lofty illusions about the viability of electoral socialism. I had at the time 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, that he will pick being friends 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 being too vitriolic and ultimately dismissed as a crank. Sander’s won because he relied on the respectability politics of liberal politeness culture.

That history is not incidental but the bridge into this essay’s central claim that the liberal plea for decorum will always block progress. Dirtbag politics is defensible only when it is tied to class power, institutional critique, and material analysis. Without that discipline, anger becomes mere anti-establishment resentment that 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 that constitute the grammar of reactionary thought.

The perversity thesis holds that any attempt to improve society will perversely worsen the very condition it aims to remedy. The jeopardy thesis holds that reform endangers some prior, hard-won accomplishment. The futility thesis holds that attempts at change are futile because underlying structures render them impotent. He traced these three moves to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and demonstrated that they have recurred, with remarkable formal identity, across two centuries of liberal opposition to movements for abolition, labor rights, decolonization, and democratic expansion. The book matters because it reveals the structural function these arguments serve: to relocate causality from the system to its challengers, to translate material contradictions into questions of individual character, and to preserve the existing distribution of power from the inconvenience of structural scrutiny.

These are not arguments in defense of ethics or justice. They are rhetorical tricks designed to foreclose the possibility that structural change is either desirable, safe, or achievable. In comes Alan Elrod’s essay The Dirtbags Won’t Save Us where he performs the same rhetorical ritual as old as Burke. In his Liberal Currents essay Elrod 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.

This 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 sin 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. This is empathy weaponized to protect power, never to extend to those pulverized by it.

Hirschman reveals that the perversity thesis always works by redirecting causal responsibility from the structure to the challenger. The dirtbag’s incivility does not cause authoritarian drift; the capitalist state’s own contradictions do. Liberal democracy does not manage to avoid authoritarianism by being polite. It produces authoritarianism through its ordinary operations: capital accumulation, state violence, and the structural exclusion of the working class from political power. The jeopardy thesis depends on treating liberal democracy as a settled moral good whose value is presupposed rather than demonstrated. But 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. But that counsel of despair is the most insidious of all, because it naturalizes capitalism as an eternal horizon. It tells the immiserated that accommodation is the only realistic posture, that the rage they feel 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 to substitute moral feeling for structural analysis.

Consider Elrod’s 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. Yet this focus on personal ethics obscures the structural terrain upon which such rhetoric is situated. 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 that party offers no material relief and no structural analysis 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 give it a name: not the Jewish people or a shadowy deep state, but the actual class of elites that benefits from her community’s immiseration. Chevalier’s comments are not excused by this analysis, but they are explained by it. 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 directed at the symbols of the colonizing power rather than at a coherent program. The colonized does not begin with a polished critique. They begin with rage at the apparatus that has rendered them disposable.

This does not excuse antisemitism, but it explains why anti-Zionist rhetoric, a legitimate political position, can collapse into antisemitic tropes when the speaker has no analytical framework to distinguish between the state of Israel as a colonial apparatus and Jewish people as a category. The failure is analytical, not moral. And the analytical failure is one that the liberal order has every interest in preserving, because once you grant the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, you must also grant that Israel can be criticized as a colonial project, which is precisely what liberal Zionism cannot permit.

The same analytical failure recurs in Elrod’s treatment of Hasan Piker, whose declaration that he does not care about anyone’s feelings while defending Hezbollah is presented as a failure of empathy. But what Elrod sees as cruelty is actually a refusal of the emotional discipline that the imperial consensus requires of its subjects. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is the political position that the state of Israel, as a settler-colonial project, should not exist in its current form. This is a defensible position with a long history among Jewish thinkers, Palestinian liberation movements, and anti-colonial struggles worldwide.

The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not a neutral mistake. It is a political operation that serves to shield Israel from criticism by treating any attack on the state as an attack on Jewish people. The Holocaust is invoked not to prevent genocide but to justify it. Piker’s rhetoric is crude and his defense of Hezbollah is not a sophisticated anti-imperialist analysis. Hezbollah is not an evil abstraction; it is a material force shaped by decades of Israeli occupation, United States militarism, and regional dispossession, but it is also a sectarian organization with its own authoritarian logic. A disciplined anti-imperialism would oppose Israeli occupation without offering moral cover to Hezbollah. Piker fails this test. But his failure is not the one Elrod identifies. The problem is that Piker’s anti-imperialism is undisciplined—he has lost the ability to distinguish between opposing empire and apologizing for every force that happens to oppose it. Hezbollah functions within its own material context, and its existence is neither condemnable nor laudable; it is simply one of many countervailing forces to U.S. imperialism. Piker’s failure to see that is a failure of analysis, not of empathy. And the liberal response, which treats the cruelty of the rhetoric as the primary problem, ensures that the material critique of imperialism is never heard.

Liberal moralism is not the opposite of imperial sentimentality. It is imperial sentimentality in its most effective form. It allows the liberal to oppose antisemitism in the abstract while supporting the state apparatus that produces the conditions for antisemitism to flourish. It allows the liberal to condemn Piker’s cruelty while ignoring the cruelty of the foreign policy consensus that both major parties uphold. The dirtbag’s sin is not that he is cruel. The sin is that his cruelty is aimless, that it lashes out at individuals rather than at the structures that produce the suffering both he and his targets endure. But the liberal’s sin is worse. The liberal’s cruelty is organized, systematic, and wrapped in the language of empathy and dignity.

Immigration enforcement is not a policy question. It is a class project that makes visible the state’s actual function. The forces driving migration are structural and well-documented: colonial extraction that dispossessed entire continents, structural adjustment programs that dismantled public economies, free-trade agreements that destroyed local agriculture, military interventions that rendered entire regions unlivable, and ecological collapse that displaces millions while the nations responsible for the emissions refuse to absorb the people displaced by them. The liberal response to this structural violence is not to dismantle it. It is to build a moral framework that makes the violence invisible. The detention camps, the family separations, the militarized borders, the systematic denial of asylum claims: these are not failures of the system. They are the system functioning as designed. The moral frame that condemns the cruelties ensures that no one examines the causal chain that links a free-trade agreement in Washington to a child in a cage in Texas. The liberal does not want to follow that chain. If they did, they would have to name capital.

The Democratic Party, whose discipline Elrod implicitly defends, maintains its unity through material mechanisms that deserve direct examination: donor dependence that ties the party to corporate capital, the consultant class that profits from managing working-class discontent without addressing its causes, the revolving door between party administration and corporate boards, and 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 merely 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 that the distribution itself remains unchallenged.

Jimmy Dore is useful here not because he proves that 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 increasingly compatible with right-populist authoritarianism. Campism treats any enemy of the United States as presumptively progressive, or at least as deserving apologetics. That is where anti-imperialism rots. It stops centering workers, civilians, dissidents, unions, ethnic minorities, and ordinary people living under authoritarian states. It begins treating them as inconvenient details in a geopolitical scoreboard.

Rage without class analysis does not stay left. It drifts toward whatever target is most available, and the most 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. Liberalism calls this drift a failure of empathy. It is a failure of organization. The distinction between anti-liberal from the left and anti-liberal from the right is the theoretical heart of this argument. Left anti-liberalism says: liberal democracy is formally equal but materially dominated by capital; its freedoms are real but limited by private property, wage dependence, imperial power, police power, and class rule. The task is to deepen freedom by abolishing the conditions that make formal liberty hollow. Right anti-liberalism says: liberal democracy is weak because it protects the wrong people, restrains authority, weakens hierarchy, and allows decadent or alien forces to corrupt the nation. The danger is that 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. The dirtbag’s audience has a specific social base: younger, often white, often male, often digitally precarious people who are economically insecure but not yet organized in ways that give them class power. Naming this base is not an insult. It is a description of the material constituency that both the left and the right are competing to organize, and the outcome of that competition depends on which side offers a structural account of the suffering that constituency endures.

Elrod’s most revealing contradiction lies in his simultaneous condemnation of dirtbagism and defense of the very system that produces it. He warns that dirtbagism is a potentially fatal threat to any sort of liberal democratic future for a country already undergoing authoritarian drift. But the authoritarian drift is not an aberration from liberal democracy. It is its logical culmination. Capitalism, driven by its inherent contradictions, tends toward concentration of wealth, immiseration of the many, and the erosion of democratic forms when those forms threaten accumulation. Fascism, authoritarianism, and strongman politics are features that emerge when the system’s 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 their rhetoric and analysis, at least grasps one thing that the liberal moralist refuses to acknowledge: that politics is a terrain of irreconcilable antagonism, not a seminar in mutual understanding. The dirtbag’s error is not the recognition of antagonism but the direction in which it is aimed. Rather than directing hostility upward, toward the capitalist class, the state, and the material structures of domination, the dirtbag aims it sideways and downward, at disabled senators, at marginalized identities, at anyone who can be made into a target for performative cruelty. This misdirection is not accidental. It is the product of a left that has been systematically deprived of a class analysis and channeled into the dead end of cultural grievance.

The liberal establishment, which Elrod implicitly serves, has every interest in this misdirection. A left that mocks Susan Collins’s tremor is a left that will never organize to expropriate the pharmaceutical companies that profit from her condition. A left that traffics in antisemitic conspiracism is a left that will never confront the financial system that immiserates it. The dirtbag is the left that capitalism has on offer when class struggle is taken off the table.

The dirtbag left is worth defending because it violated liberalism’s most sacred rule: that 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. The dirtbag’s contempt for elite decorum, the refusal to extend civility toward institutions that produce misery, the insistence that working people and left media have the right to sound angry rather than professionally managed: these are defensible political practices precisely because they refuse the emotional discipline that power requires of its subjects.

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 power and becomes the vulnerable: the disabled person mocked for a symptom, the immigrant scapegoated for structural displacement, the Jewish person blamed for an intuition about opaque institutions that is better directed at the class actually responsible. That is the line, and it is drawn not by politeness but by class analysis: who owns, who works, who profits, and who rules. The dirtbag will not save us. The liberal will not save us. Only the organized class power that can abolish the conditions producing both the dirtbag’s rage and the liberal’s empathy can do that.

Building working-class institutions that can seize the means of production and break the state’s monopoly on legitimate force is not a proposal that depends on liberal permission. It depends on whether the working class can organize itself into a force that capital cannot accommodate. The question is whether that force can survive the violence that the ruling class will deploy against it, because every previous attempt has been met with exactly that violence, from the Paris Commune to the labor uprisings of the twentieth century to every anti-colonial struggle crushed by imperial armies. The organizational question is the question the liberal never asks and the dirtbag cannot answer.

The working class has been systematically disorganized: unions busted, parties absorbed, media captured, mutual aid absorbed 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. The task is not to make the left polite. Politeness is the manners of a class that wants exploitation discussed in a register that does not discomfort it. The task is to make rage disciplined, collective, and aimed—straight at the throat of capital.