Review: “The Chapo Guide to Revolution,” The Twilight of the Failson
I can’t believe that it took me almost three years to read “The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason.” I have been a listener of Chapo Trap House since its first episode, skipping only the rare episode when they have someone on I dislike from online or they share a terrible opinion about film or television. The hosts (Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman) are more or less my generational contemporaries.
When Chapo Trap House first premiered, I, like the hosts, was well-educated and underemployed, working for less than $15 an hour as a writers’ assistant on a television show despite being in my late 20s. I was eagerly following the Bernie Sanders campaign, which resonated with me as I was dealing with student loans and unforeseen medical debt. And so began the most significant parasocial relationship of my podcast listening life. While I have become friends with two other podcasters in real life, The Trillbillies Tom Sexton and Well RED’s Drew Morgan, my relationship with the Chapos remains one mediated through my airpods.
I doubt anyone will read this who isn’t familiar with the Trap House, but just in case, Chapo rose up alongside Jacobin Magazine as the early media vanguard of the New New Left. The podcast has been there through the rise of Bernie, DSA, AOC, The Squad, Bernie’s second primary loss, on through to today, chronicling every major event in the socialist ecosystem that has emerged since Bernie Sanders introduced America to Medicare for All.
The average Chapo listener is probably very much like myself. Politically awakened by the Iraq War and Occupy Wall Street, beaten down by the 2009 recession, rejuvenated by the Bernie Sanders campaign, and now a card-carrying socialist.
It is no secret that the Chapo boys have found success. Their robust Patreon numbers are fodder for endless internet envy and speculation. And I too am in a better place than I was when I started listening to them. I have finally accumulated some of the signifers of “adulthood” that I was denied for about a decade after college. I am now a union member of the Writers Guild, having staffed on a television show, and pre-pandemic, was earning a decent paycheck.
Like Chapo, I am no longer a “Young Turk,” (the expression, not the progressive media entity) and while I continue railing against the system, a generation has emerged behind me who has inherited the same terrible circumstances that I waded through in my twenties. And they get to do it on a planet that is a degree or two hotter.
Millenials’ time as the standard-bearers of activist youth culture are finally over. Our young adulthood was artificially extended by the debt-ridden echoes of Reaganomics, and so the media has treated my generation as “kids” into our thirties. The Boomers who held us down economically for so long are finally retiring. And while we have very little wealth and have enjoyed far less than the generations before us, we are still better off than the generation after us. It is their turn to be young and angry.
So, while reading “The Chapo Guide to Revolution,” I reflected on what our generation has achieved with its socialist revolution, or at least socialist realignment. DSA has over 100,000 members. Americans use the word socialism outside of Fox News propaganda. Unions are cool again. The Squad has six members going on seven (Go Nina Turner). You can find socialists on school boards and city councils across America.
However, we have failed to produce any of the systemic legislative changes championed by Bernie Sanders. Despite what I view as foul play by the media, the fact remains that Joe Biden wiped the floor with the primary field and he represents the sort of establishment liberalism that Chapo host Will Menaker famously told to “bend the knee.” Had every other Democratic candidate besides Elizabeth Warren not dropped out of the race right before Super Tuesday, perhaps a Sanders-Biden race would have gone differently, but politics is about power and we don’t got it.
Change doesn’t happen overnight and the last five years have made that painfully clear. We have bodies. We are a part of the “discourse.” We are even represented in major paper op-ed pages. But do we have “power?”
We have a little.
So what do millennial socialists do now? I think Chapo has figured it out. In the last year or so, I have heard something new from the hosts. Humility. It is not that they were arrogant before, but their house style was marked by an ironic brashness befitting those who punch up. Realizing that they too now have a little bit of power, they have had the grace to see that punching down or sideways isn’t a good look. And it certainly doesn’t help you win.
Their guest roster has leaned towards younger writers and podcasters. In a recent episode with zoomer podcast Pod About List, the guys joked that they were inviting the young wolves into their pack lest they get eaten. But in all jokes, there is a grain of truth.
I feel the same way. My wife and I were co-founders of DSA-LA’s Hollywood Labor subcommittee. When the group roared back to new life during the pandemic, we realized the best thing we could do is step aside and let a new generation of underpaid, overworked younger people take the lead. I can’t imagine when I’ll be able to afford a house, but that doesn’t mean people want to hear about the struggles of a guy who lives in a two-bedroom apartment when they are in a studio.
The hosts of Chapo have been accused of generational warfare against Boomers and Xers, to which they would likely say “They started it.” I’m not here to debate the truth of this, but I can say that we can make the choice not to pass along the sins of our fathers to the next generation of failsons.
Listening to Chapo now, you can hear their eagerness to shine the spotlight elsewhere. The entire point of a mass movement is to build the “mass” part. I feel similarly. As I enter the professional institutions I feel I should have entered five or even ten years ago, I look behind me and I see people banging at the door. Just like I was. Until very recently. And as I seek to change those institutions from the inside (I often joke that they let me into the lobby and I can now hear the party in the dining room), I am glad to see that there are more and more people who hope to unlock the door permanently or maybe even remove it from its hinges.
How long will Chapo Trap House continue? I have no idea. But it is a nice feeling to think that I will be listening to the bitter end, even as me describing the show to younger generations starts to sound like a guy a generation ahead of me talking about what was so funny about Janeane Garofalo or how much the WTO protests really meant if you were there man.
Long live Chapo. Here’s to whatever comes next.