Quo Vadis, Dirtbag Leftist?

“Anti-woke” and totalitarian, today’s Socialists are the avant-garde of a pathetically dumb elite

Arguably one of the more authoritarian streams within the liberal leftist paradigm is dirtbag leftism. Precisely because dirtbag leftists think of themselves as particularly edgy and immune to woke virtue signalling, and arguably evolve as the smarter, more sensible, and somewhat still class-conscious interlocutor vis-à-vis woke-broke “racism is the greatest danger to society” wingnuts (not a high bar, admittedly), they embody a cocksure pseudo self-dependency that makes them all the more appear more “rational” and, with Critical Theory-pseudo credentials, also more “reasonable” (maybe even quite detrimental to their initial “vulgar approach to politics”). But while it is funny that the dirtbag leftist’s reverence for Adorno and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory would not be mutual, it is based on a misunderstanding. For it is the dirtbag leftists that were the most vocal defenders of the infringement of civil rights and the surrender of bodily integrity during the Covid-19 mass vaccination campaign, ready to dismiss bourgeois freedoms as “bourgeois” tout court, instead of a milestone in the history of human self-emancipation.

In short, a dirtbag leftist is someone who prides himself on AOC bashing, but also remains entirely uncritical of the rule of “experts” like Fauci. The Anti-Woke to Zero Covid pipeline is real, my friends.

My personal encounters with dirtbags have been painful since Covid-19 became the current thing, not least because the dirtbag has the attention span of a tadpole. If we agree on one thing, we immediately disagree on the next. The usual, done-for leftist from the academic milieu who thinks gender critical theorists should hang from trees or lampposts is not our friend. And it is true that the dirtbag acknowledges the obvious contradictions in the left clickbait world, such as the denunciation of gender essentialism while embracing “gender identity”, or the alleged “fights against the state and institutional power”, while leftists report anyone who may have ‘disrespected’ the latest linguistic convention to Mom and Dad from Head of Department (something that especially the bedwetters from Antifa love doing). The dirtbag will mock and sneer at these convulsions like your next rational human being.

But he will also magnificently fail at recognising his own glaring self-contradictions. A typical dirtbag critique of the Black Lives Matter movement would focus on its irrational co-optation by European leftists. He’d acknowledge that conditions of “racism” and police violence in the US could not be simply transferred to a city like Helsinki or Berlin. But he would also say that racism is a problem, that Helsinki and Berlin police in fact commit to racial profiling. The dirtbag would always support open borders (“No nation, no state!”), and throw tantrums against organisations like Frontex or the ICE. But he will also ask the state to completely shut down its borders on the alleged threat of “health-risk migration”.[1] And their problem with the unfair treatment of nurses during the pandemic would not so much be with the violation of their bodily integrity, i.e., forced vaccinations in the health sector (that led to hundreds of thousands of resignations in the US alone), but with the refusal to pay them higher wages.

The dirtbag leftist sees contradictions in the whole woke scenario but can’t see the wood for the trees when it comes to his own. Particularly interesting to me is the baffling brain block when it comes to political-medial priming of the public about the next target of social hate. The dirtbag’s utter surprise at the hatred Russians faced at the beginning of the war with Ukraine can only be explained by their utter cluelessness about the discrimination directed towards the “unvaccinated” that made the disenfranchisement of Russians possible in the first place. Or else, it may be explained by the dirtbag’s support of it.

For Zero Covid dirtbaggers get worked up about anti-Russian discrimination and exclusion from social life, but the minute you remind them they were not half as indignant when the “unvaxxed” were excluded from social life and unvaccinated parents weren’t allowed to see their kids in hospital just three months ago, they tell you (and have indeed told me so in person): “But there were at least medical reasons for it!”

(At least the average dirtbag doesn’t flatter himself too much when he says that “Vaccinations are great. Without one, I may be dead!” You must be a particularly dumb kind of narcissist to think that the things politicians, lobbyists, and pharmaceutical companies hatch together is about saving your life).

Ultimately, the dirtbag leftist is a pro-worker Social Democrat who hasn’t been briefed about the latest economic, political, and social development towards biopolitical totalitarianism. In his world, it’s still 2019. The pace of accumulation is “inherently crisis-ridden”, but he cannot explain why, how, or when. Despite the latest state of wealth transfer from the bottom to the top taking place through the development of the pharmaceutical market at an unprecedented scale (and 480 billion dollars for Pfizer in 2021 alone), boosting accumulation by adding the pharma sector to tech and media, he pharisaically shrugs his shoulders. He is simply not that interested. Or some culture war issue has caught his attention yet again (“Lol, another girl boss is now in charge of a left-wing party”), which he could market and milk more easily on Instagram stories, for he never really reads a book.

Yet, if you succeed in holding his gaze, he will tell you that, after all, small shop owners or hairdressers may lose their income through lockdowns, but these are certainly petit bourgeois problems. And you slowly realise that not the pedestrian left liberal with Democratic credentials and a “In This House We Believe”-sign on the front porch is the bearer of most unabashed working-class hatred, but the dirtbag leftist with his pro-worker Jacobin/DSA style “concern” for the working POC.

Several commentators, notably Paul Embery in “Despised – Why the Modern Left hates the Working Class” (2021) have time and again drawn attention to general leftist disdain for workers. Already in 1937, George Orwell has intelligently identified the particularly socialist enemy of the working class in the middle class “public schooler” so typical of his own “lower-upper-middle class” upbringing: “The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class.”[2] With unsurprising consequences: “In perfect sincerity, [the Socialist] will point out to you a dozen ways in which he is worse off than the working man. In his eyes, the workers are not a submerged race of slaves, they are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf him and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.”[3] An apt description of the Jacobin coverage of the Canadian truckers’ protest. But that is not all: the dirtbag’s ideology, despite his own insistence on “class”, is drawn right from the mothballs of philistinism. As what is probably the most apt description of the dirtbag leftist today, let us hear Orwell in 1937:

“He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or…a secret teetotaller often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting…one sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ or ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”[4]

Orwell made this experience at a Socialist summer camp in Letchworth in the 1930s, the ideological predecessor to any DSA convention today. The only difference is that while the prospectus for the Letchworth camp in the 30s asked the covenants “whether one’s diet is ordinary or vegetarian”, attendees of DSA meetings today must provide their pronouns. What unites both and shows us how little has changed in the “Socialist” mindset, is their unabashed paternalism towards the less educated: “If a real working man, a minor dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry, and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses.”[5] The first time I read this, I instantly saw Meagan Day in that role. Can’t get it off my mind since.

Working-class protest in in the concrete forms in which it erupted during lockdown, whether truckers, health care workers, or small shop assistants, were viewed as “small owner-operator” protest, or at least as petite bourgeois enough to be deemed right-wing and sneered at. So much for Socialist “solidarity” with concrete forms of struggle that are not in the image of the DSA fantasy of the Starbucks and Amazon unionised worker. “Why don’t you build unions” is the dirtbag leftist’s paternalism in action. Worker protest must look and feel like the DSA member imagines it to be. Always the creeping underdog, never the powerful majority. If there is no lost cause-flavour to a worker protest, it isn’t laudable.

The dirtbag, in unison with the go-to liberal of someone like Matthew Yglesias therefore has no problem to ask us to reduce our carbon footprint, for “it couldn’t hurt to take care of the planet”, i.e., reduce one’s living standards for the benefit of the rich. It couldn’t hurt to disenfranchise yourself a bit more, for the planet, for POC workers, for the ominous ‘vulnerable groups.’ It was announced recently that some public swimming pools in Switzerland will no longer heat their pool water. The kids will just have to suffer a bit for climate justice, don’t they. And if it hurts Putin, we have done our fair share to “protect the vulnerable”.

If nothing else, the Democratic Socialist, at heart fighting all ‘bigotry’, has successfully contributed to shaping ruling class ideology. His “fight against fascism” can now be used as a token for pushing whatever elite agenda comes around. In that sense, the identification of the “fight against fascism” with the “fight against Covid” has been a major focus of the current regime, and a sustainable political project on top of it all. The conflation of “social” and medical hygiene allowed for the “right people” to be in power, an antifascist league of working-class enemies, with DSA types holding the ideological torch. With extra benefits: where the working class is identified with conspiracy theorists, bad eaters with bad accents with no love for the left, one’s own position of power is sanctioned with extra authority, even if there is no material benefit involved.

Even the church now poses in the red and black colours of the Antifa and tells you it is the “Antifa Church”:

And yet, the dirtbag can’t quite admit he has done great avant-garde work for elite ideology and now belongs to the power spectrum. Defying reality, he will always tell you he is the underdog. 

The bottom line, then, is not that the dirtbag is cynical or indifferent to the plight of normal people under the abominations of the Covid regime. The problem with the dirtbagger is that, despite his Minima Moralia aphorism-bearing mug in the kitchen sink, he is simply a bit daft. Because of the beam in his eye that is the greatest civilisational rupture in modern history – the Covidian restructuring of global society - his rebellion against neoliberalism remains essentially conformist.

The Dirtbag Leftist is perfectly arguing within the framework of the disenfranchisement and dehumanisation of the civil subject that the Covid response advanced in the past two years. He doesn’t know it, but he does it. And you cannot argue with dumb - you can only pity them.

Cover boy: The Pet Shop Boys’s Neil Tennant (video still for “What have I done to deserve this”, 1987)

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[1] Void of any scientific rationale. Australia, New Zealand and China and Japan had some of the most severe border policies in the world. They equally had Delta, Omicron, and all the rest of it.

[2] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1937/1986), p. 167.

[3] Ibid. p. 128.

[4] Ibid., p. 167-8.

[5] Ibid., p. 169.