Bernie Sanders, Chapo Trap House, and socialism’s “chore to be done”: A review of Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag
Michael McClelland
Platypus Review 182 | December 2025 – January 2026
Amber A’Lee Frost, Dirtbag: Essays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2023).
“THIS BOOK IS ABOUT failure and defeat.” It seems whether writer, activist, and podcast host Amber A’Lee Frost’s new memoir, Dirtbag, will stir lively curiosity or morbid fascination will depend on the reader. Those prone to wisecracks will revel in the deluges of “shade” dripping from each page; it has Chapo Trap House, the irreverent Left podcast the author co-hosts, written all over it. Like Chapo — Patreon’s most popular podcast until 2020 and which remains in the platform’s top 101 — Frost’s rise to prominence coincided with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, with Frost endorsing Sanders on the podcast and in the pages of Jacobin.
Described in the publisher’s blurb as “the complete story of the victories and failures of millennial socialism, as told by the writer who witnessed it all firsthand,” Dirtbag, published in late 2023, is one of the Millennial Left’s few book-length treatments. Frost is a proponent of the proverbial “ordinary American,” and her book complements the Chapo brand by skewering pundits and activists alike who deflect from, undermine, or scoff at every organizer’s call to “meet workers where they’re at.” Frost’s pro-worker stance, as she explains, solidified early on via her activism in Working Families Party (WFP), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and other groups during the 2000s and 2010s;2 decades when upsurges in progressive activism reflected deeper crises within the Democratic Party and mainstream politics generally. Dirtbag attempts to deal with these crises via an on-the-ground account. “I wrote this book,” Frost writes, “because I was there.”
One chapter in Dirtbag, for instance, is devoted to Occupy Wall Street. Frost, who attended the protests at Zuccotti Park, acknowledges the movement’s initial verve. However, she notes that despite discontents still boiling from the 2008 Global Financial Crash, the movement was sapped by attention-seeking anarchists pushing for interminable processes-for-processes’-sake (like, for instance, daily meetings called “general assemblies,” in which emerging spokespersons, called “figureheads” instead of “leaders,” tended to be ejected as quickly as they came to fill their seats). Frost’s dismal assessment of Occupy sets the tone for her retelling of other generation-defining eruptions on the Millennial Left, some of which are mentioned only in passing on account of their perceived impotence. The anti-Iraq War movement had little effect, she notes, since the U.S. invasion “surged on regardless of popular will.” Nor do events at the Millennial Left’s crescendo — BLM, Trump’s election, COVID-19, etc. — receive many references.
Most surprising, however, is the absence of Bernie Sanders in Dirtbag. Given Frost’s association with DSA and Jacobin, one would expect a book-length postmortem on Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Sanders’s significance for the Millennial Left is assumed but rarely discussed — other than in one chapter, a reprint of Frost’s 2019 article for The Baffler praising Sanders, titled “It’s Bernie, Bitch.”3 Little sustained discussion occurs with respect to Frost’s experiences during the campaign period, such as her canvassing for Sanders in Iowa and touring to the Democratic primary cities with Chapo, and there are even fewer words on its gloomy aftermath (which coincided with two Chapo co-hosts, Virgil Texas and Matt Christman, going off the radar for different reasons and in different ways). Instead, at the climax of the book, after the 2020 caucuses, Frost simply truncates events as follows: “We flew home, and I was as happy and exhausted as I’ve ever been. Then more people got sick. Then Bernie conceded to Biden. Then we stayed inside.” Presumably, Frost wants to let the point hang in the air for her readers. That, or she is hesitating; an indication that she can no longer expect her readers to believe in a dead metaphor like Sanders. Assuming it was “Bernie, bitch,” one might ask what exactly “it” was, and where it has gone.
The absence of Bernie Sanders
So far, wherever Sanders’s image has stood in for dashed hopes, it has been in an incomplete, ill-fitting way. Just as 1990s Vietnam and Civil Rights movies regurgitated a pre-packaged memory of the New Left, younger Leftists — many of whom were not even pubescent in 2016 — inherit only a flattened picture of the Millennial Left, reduced to Sanders and Trump. But there was also Corbyn and Momentum, Syriza, Podemos, Chile’s estallido social,4 Australia’s Victorian Socialists, the election of Elke Kahr as the “communist” mayor of Graz, Austria, and countless other developments that shaped a generation’s political self-understanding. In writing her book, Frost faced an opportunity to correct mistaken accounts, dealing with the 2010s in a way that confronts the era’s missed opportunities instead of memory-holing them. If the forces driving the Millennial Left seemed too obvious to state at the time, they will not remain so for long: the window for an innocent account, untouched by the catchphrases, ready-made answers, and thought-terminating clichés that come with time, is closing.
The autobiographical form provides an apt avenue for reckoning. “Bernie Sanders,” Frost writes, “was the biggest opportunity of my lifetime so far, and he may remain so until the end. . . . As a socialist, he was an outsider, but his politics were inclusive yet populist, and his campaigns did not resent, fear, patronize, or hold contempt for squares, normies, or whatever you call them, which is why he had the edge, with a diverse and largely un-edgy electorate.”
Frost saw Sanders’s undoing in real time, mere weeks after she joined her Chapo co-hosts on stage in his honor in early 2020. They had been on tour, witnessing Bernie’s unprecedented successes ahead of his opponents in the Democratic Party primaries; they celebrated with a passionate rendition of “Solidarity Forever” at the end of each show. Yet, it became clear during the Nevada caucus that despite Sanders’s popularity, he would not gain the nomination — he was, in Frost’s words, to be “repeatedly sabotaged by the resentful and devious right wing of his own party.”5 Unfortunately, this summary proves to be the fullest extent of her reckoning with Sanders, concluding that although he made “some ‘stupid mistakes’” — a reference to Hunter S. Thompson’s postmortem of George McGovern’s loss in the 1972 election6 — “he didn’t betray us or royally fuck up as a result of his own hubris. Bernie was defeated.”
Considering this appraisal, and recalling Frost’s disclaimer that her book chronicles “failure and defeat,” the reader might question the very distinction. When Frost calls the Sanders campaign a defeat, she separates it from failure, and failure from defeat, presupposing a dichotomy that guides her recollections and gives the reader a framework for judging them.“Failure,” Frost reasoned on Chapo soon after Sanders’s loss, “implies there was something you could have done.”7 Frost’s reasoning is that the difference between failure and defeat is agency: in failure, the agent, like a general watching over the battlefield, fails to take strategic responsibility, while defeat has more to do with external forces beyond one’s awareness or control.
It is questionable whether this conception of politics is attached to a philosophy, or merely serves as a rhetorical and polemical convenience for the writer. Either way, it is based on a curious melding of virtue ethics and pragmatism that Frost expresses with stoical pride. Premised on winning, it is a fighter’s mentality, and no wonder Frost seems to have picked it up from the picket line. This is where organizers locate their great white whale: the “natural leaders” who take up the megaphone and finally personify the collective, attaining to their status as a nucleus of willpower in the workplace or community. Although there can fall from the sky no deus ex machina to transform what Frost calls “defeat” into victory, strong protagonists like these can turn hardship into an occasion for reflection, preventing one mistake from leading to another. In Dirtbag, Frost exalts the character of Starbuck in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851): “A sober and sensible man, he believes that the ship is set for failure, but he is bound by honor and duty to proceed as if they are not.”
This sentiment echoes the words of encouragement that Frost gave to a live audience — all Sanders supporters — during a Chapo tour stop in Iowa City for the 2020 caucuses: “What [socialists are] trying to do is build an institution. . . Some days you’re going to be like, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this at all.’” Continuing, she compared the “institution” of socialism to the building of a holy temple, aligning her cause with that of an ancient religion: “[You’re] just going to keep going in case [you’re] wrong . . . And it’s going to take 300 years to build, and you’re only going to live to be 45, and you’re never going to see it finish. It doesn’t matter. It didn’t start with you. It won’t end with you. You just do it. And you just hope that your part of it is important. And that has to be enough.”8
Only upon accepting the terms of this fighter’s gambit can one see that the problem lies in the entire paradigm. Frost proceeds from the faulty premise that Sanders and DSA were not already, from the very beginning, products of failure. Frost’s quibbling with the definition of failure itself, likewise, functions as proof of this disavowal; it is an attempt at bargaining with history’s already-settled accounts. That is, whether she calls it “failure” or “defeat,” the question of whether Sanders could have won the 2020 election is a red herring. The real loss lay in his successes. Whereas, today, Jacobin celebrates the likes of Sanders and Mamdani having brought the word “socialism” back into the mainstream as a victory, this has only been the final act in the term’s long hollowing out so it can be identified only with the advance guard of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the term has come to represent for the Millennial generation’s progressive Democrats what the “grassroots” had for others before them, from George McGovern’s supporters, to Jimmy Carter’s, to Gary Hart’s, to Howard Dean’s, then finally to Obama’s.
So, ahistorically framing the Sanders campaign as having been betrayed by the “resentful and devious right wing” of the Party is a prideful disavowal. It is like the boastful child who denies being conned out of his lunch money, insisting only that his generosity had been taken advantage of. Such is the logic of opportunism: when total loss can be broken down and itemized, it appears less as total loss and more as a banal list of expenditures. In this way, Frost’s self-branding as a critic of the “new social movements” and the “professional managerial class” is ironic, since her identification with the working class, intended as a corrective, cannot escape the capitalist political paradigm these emerged from. However genuine a symptom her politics might be, her interests cannot stand apart from that of a campaign manager, with all the clichés of bases to be mobilized, policies to be championed, and optics to be handled.
If Sanders’s losses were a “defeat” for social democracy and not proof of a deeper, historical absence, the recent “communist” turn among younger Leftists (i.e., toward neo-Maoism, neo-Stalinism and other, more eclectic flavors), reflects an unwillingness among adherents to share Frost’s view that the difference matters. As far as today’s younger neo-communists, schooled not on Chapo but Hasan Piker’s streams, Infrared, Jackson Hinkle, and Grayzone are concerned — whose anger at Sanders’s defense of Israel’s “right to defend itself”9 boiled over into attempts to push Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to say the word “genocide” — Sanders remains the same career politician whose party loyalty obliged him to endorse the very establishment figures he ran against in 2016 and 2020.10 Similarly, although the Democrats’ progressive faction in Congress alongside Sanders — the “Squad” — has grown in number and influence since 2018, some of its members have softened their “radical” branding, with Ocasio-Cortez endorsing Biden and Harris, and wavering with respect to supporting pro-worker legislation.11 As for Zohran Mamdani’s recent mayoral win in New York City, even Frost’s own peers are peeling away from DSA front lines, with Will Menaker voicing little optimism other than that the election offered him cathartic relief for a change.12
The last few years have yielded appraisals of the Millennial Left that are more full-throated than Frost’s. Benjamin Studebaker, in The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy (2023),acknowledges his generation’s inability to build a legacy of broad and lasting social reform.13 He attributes activists’ inability to connect with working-class voters to “the cultural tastes of professionals,” reinforced by “new terms [activists] can use to remind themselves and others that they went to college.” Jacobin commentator Steve Fraser, meanwhile, offers the critique that the Millennial Left’s real defeat lay in its perpetual reinscription of efforts to “tweak,” not transform capitalism.14 Platypus’s Chris Cutrone goes further, arguing in The Death of the Millennial Left (2023) that the 2010s saw the latest phase in a century-long forgetting of independent class politics,15 emblematic of the crisis at once afflicting and reconstituting capitalist society as a whole.16
Frost might be aware of these appraisals, defending her generation’s efforts by contending that it all depends on how one defines “politics.” For Frost, an advocate of the everyman and his bread-and-butter issues, democratic socialism is more about democracy than socialist politics: “What I want — what I have always wanted — is nothing more or less than a relatively democratic workers’ state that runs smoothly and fairly, one where enough injustice has been resolved that for the average person, ‘politics’ may be relegated to a minorly inconvenient aspect of civic responsibility, like taking out the trash.” Early on in Dirtbag, she recalls growing up in a small town hollowed out by factory job cuts, where, at home, she was taught that “everyone deserves decent things [and] that fair is fair,” absorbing her mother’s conviction that “opposition to such basic morality and ethics is irrational and/or ignorant.” This moral universe shapes her memoir and anchors her refrain that building socialism is simply a “chore that needs to be done.”
But “fair is fair” presupposes unfairness. Equal right, as Marx argues in his “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875), only exists on the basis of inequality.17 Thus, democracy — the political response to unequal right — flowers on the soil of capitalism. Frost gets it backwards, mistaking effects for causes in treating adequate distribution — i.e., of resources and rights — as society’s fundamental need, and capitalism as its obstacle. This is why Frost’s emphasis on “a relatively democratic workers’ state,” along with the “chores” needed to build it, represents not a demand for “socialism,” as she calls it, but the state under a new guise — to wit, capitalism by other means. As a critic of socialism, Marx would see Frost’s “chore to be done” as an aptly symptomatic expression of her politics — a romantic and insufficient response to the forward-marching problem that is capitalism.
However much Frost likes to invoke Eugene Debs — as Mamdani did in his November 2025 victory speech — her version of “socialism” does not agree with the terms that were widely recognized in the historical international Marxist movement for socialism. For the radicals of the Second International, no image could have appeared more absurd than that of a “socialist state.” Incomprehensible to them was the notion that the state, being the most sophisticated expression of society’s self-domination, could serve as the precondition for freedom, except negatively through its abolition via the dictatorship of the proletariat. Or, as Marx scribbled incredulously in the Gotha critique: “Free state — what is this?”18 A “free state” is a contradiction in terms.
The absence of Chapo Trap House
Beyond Sanders, DSA, and Jacobin readers will likely wonder why Chapo Trap House, the brand which largely gave Frost her standing as a commentator, hardly appears in Dirtbag. Chapo could not have gained such popularity in 2016 were it not for a seemingly intractable political status quo shaping the consciousness of American Millennials. In the preceding period that was characterized by bank bailouts, “forever wars,” and congressional deadlocks, young people could not help but feel resigned to political dysfunction as the grim and inevitable state of affairs. During the Obama years, the “drone president’s” erstwhile supporters became increasingly disaffected, directing their ire not only at Democratic Party politicians but all who hedged in lockstep. Consequently, not only did CNN and MSNBC continue to hemorrhage their youth audience to podcasts, but progressive comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert also began to read as relics of the Bush–Obama era. All the while, new independent media outlets who continued to express support for establishment Democrats, like Pod Save America and Vox, earned the scorn of politically literate Millennials. Many audience members defected, forming the fanbase of podcasts like Trillbilly Worker’s Party, Street Fight Radio, and the kingpin, Chapo.19 Indeed, Chapo’s outsider status would mirror Sanders’s background as an independent, and as the podcast folded into his base of support, it became a product of, and a party to, his successes. The explosive laughter and tinny audio of early episodes captured a ramshackle, iconoclastic élan — it was, in subcultural terms, “punk.”
Among Democrat-aligned media, Chapo raised hackles. The “Bernie bro” phenomenon, as it was termed, prompted liberal pundits to claw for any means to discredit the podcast and its listeners’ refusal to play by the rules of political discourse. During Sanders’s 2020 campaign, The New York Times and Vox published hit pieces20 targeting Chapo’s listenership for their shock humor and below-the-belt antics — which included flooding the replies of Twitter threads posted by Democratic candidates with emojis mocking Bernie rivals Elizabeth Warren (the “snake”) and Pete Buttigieg (the “rat”). Months later, Chapo’ssubreddit was banned for alleged terms-of service violations, cementing a quasi-outlaw self-identification among listeners. In other words, establishment critiques of Chapo only galvanized support for the podcast — just like how Democrats’ attempts to sabotage Sanders only rallied his hardcore supporters.
An unusual and formidable collection of Jacobin-devouring minds, the podcast became the Hydra of the Millennial Left: Matt Christman, the hardcore historian; Virgil Texas, the “policy wonk”; Felix Biederman, the podcast’s Jonathan Swift figure; and Will Menaker, the shrewd editor’s son. Frost, for her part, embodied the activist who, in her impassioned diatribes, synthesized the righteous fury of the group. Rejecting triumphalism, which, in Dirtbag, Frost calls a “psychosis,” and pessimism (“childish” and “lazy because there’s no fucking excuse”), Frost’s contribution can be summarized via her conviction that even when one is convinced one is going to lose a fight, one ought to “fucking do it anyway.”
This bullishness was as intimate to Chapo’s style as it is in Frost’s writing. As the co-hosts saw it, critics bristled at Chapo’s vulgarity because it punctured the cocoon of decorum protecting establishment media’s claim to legitimacy. This, of course, was the entire point and appeal of Chapo: the “fucks” and “shits” were not decorative trim, but rivets holding together the whole. “My point of view,” Will Menaker said, “is that liberalism presents a certain set of manners that make a society closer to being a more polite, decent society. But at the end of the day these can’t challenge power or change the essential meaninglessness at the heart of everything we feel and do.”21 (Indicative of this sentiment is an old Chapo flourish in which hosts would flabbergastedly address an imagined congressman as “sir!” — these dignitaries, the hosts implied, were no sirs.) Frost has described it more pointedly: “Civility is destructive because it perpetuates falsehoods, while vulgarity can keep us honest. . . . Vulgarity is the language of the people, and so it should be among the grammars of the left, just as it has been historically, to wield righteously against the corrupt and the powerful.”22
Ironically, Frost’s quasi-prefigurative rhetoric almost sounds like what, in a former era, belonged among anarchists at Occupy. Conventional morality, from the dirtbags’ point of view, has always functioned as cover for the ruling class’s interests, obstructing whatever spontaneously-arising co-operative morality might exist in their absence. Irreverence implies refusing the authority of some object of reverence; as Chapo saw it, the elites on both sides of the political aisle owed their salaries to keeping such cant on life support. All the sensible observer needed to do, the co-hosts intimated, was cut through the gordian knot — or, in layman’s terms, the bullshit.
So, if the term “Bernie bro” offered establishment media a ready-made deflection from independent voices like Chapo’s, the term’s complement, “dirtbag,” had even more appeal for those on the receiving end of the barbs. Chapo’s roaring choruses of laughter — issuing from, in the case of one episode, Will Menaker gleefully sharing news of Nancy Pelosi’s “90,000-year-old” husband receiving a DUI — defied a stubborn political reality presumed to be safeguarded by demonic “respectability.” Leftists could exhale along with Chapo. It was safe to heckle.
It was not, however, new. It was an after-image; an unconscious inheritance from the Gen-X subculturalism Chapo’s co-hosts had been raised on. Tellingly, their influences included The Howard Stern Show, Opie and Anthony, and the “golden age” of The Simpsons; all brands that had appealed to an emerging audience whose ability to remain conscious of current affairs became a substitute for politics. Downstream from that perennial punk reflex of defying the “sell-outs,”, the legacy of Gen-X has been to keep Millennials thrashing against the New Left counter-culture as though caught in a night terror. Yet, by criticizing the counter-culture, they have only sanctified it. (As Menaker — the son of New York Times and New Yorker editors — once admitted in an interview, “scratch the surface of a cynic and you’ll find a romantic at heart.”23) As had once been the case in the New Left era, and remained true for Generation X, the fiercest Democratic Party “outsiders” in the Millennial Left have not stood against doctrines per se; only their updating to keep pace with reality. And although Chapo should not be conflated with the progressive politicians they champion, it should not be dismissed that they, along with DSA and Jacobin, led the ground invasion in favor of this overhaul.
There was, therefore, little that distinguished Chapo’s “politics” beyond a cultivated style, and little that distinguished its style other than the posture those “politics” permitted. Hence why the “Bernie bro” epithet stuck: even the Chapo hosts will admit, like anyone who traversed an inner-city arts scene in the early 2010s, how few university-educated bohemians actually identified with socialism until it became edgy to do so. The moment seemed to spew out turtlenecked blowhards onto every street corner who, having traded Pitchfork and Vice for Jacobin, were suddenly overheard at parties holding forth about universal healthcare, “liveable cities,” and the Green New Deal. That their avatar was an archly deadpan septuagenarian like Sanders was, in itself, delicious.
Chapo’s co-hosts deserve some defense against being reduced to this archetype. Hipsterish as the podcast appeared, its ironic sensibility was less an affectation than a genuine symptom of generational fatigue. Here was a very peculiar set of ragged thirty-somethings — Frost had her rural midwestern upbringing, Menaker his lifelong exposure to the trappings of legacy media via his parents, and Christman a debilitating condition in his teenage years that sent him into a world of books. Their identification with Sanders, meanwhile, should be taken at face value: like him, these hotheaded outsiders caused an ignition when faced with the fumes of injustice; a feeling that Dirtbag, in its totality, invites. Indeed, in reaching its final chapter, one might entirely forget Chapo’s absence. The essence of the podcast is, after all, in Frost, who embodies the paradoxical admixture of Sanders’s passion and the internet-addled sensibilities of her co-hosts. Her boisterousness is Chapo personified — a middle-ground between Will Menaker, who would often introduce an episode with a lump in his throat, condemning Washington’s latest offense on human dignity, and resident goofball Felix Biederman, who would follow up with a joke about cum.
To maintain this balance, Frost’s righteous indignation is in perpetual wobble mode, allowing her to speak at one moment like Jimmy Stewart’s character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),who brings naïve idealism and righteous fury to a Senate floor rigged against him; at the next, she turns and winks at the camera Frank Underwood-style.24 While these two qualities are core to Chapo’s style and define the appeal of the show, they also betray the show’s conditions of possibility: a showcase of the Left’s inability to do anything but yell at the TV. In this way, what appears new about Chapo is actually old. Its lack of inhibition is all Mad Magazine and Lester Bangs, its hyperfactoidalism that of Manufacturing Consent (1988) and Oliver Stone. In all, it distills 50 years of the “Left’s” existence during which it has been nothing without the Democrats, and so has needed the Democrats to remind itself why it exists.
If George McGovern, evoked at the start of Dirtbag, stands in for Bernie Sanders, Frost fashions herself after Hunter S. Thompson, the woozy, bleary-eyed intellectual for whom no adversary in a bar fight can be socked squarely in the jaw until viewed up close. As obvious as certain parallels appear — i.e., Thompson was “new journalism,” whereas Chapo is “new media”; Thompson found himself reporting on an insurgent presidential candidate, and so did Frost— the rhyme of Thompson’s moment in 1972 with Frost's in 2020 makes intuitive sense precisely because of that which Frost disavows: the historical repetition of failure.
This recalls an implicit philosophy of history shared among the Chapo hosts.Matt Christman, for instance, has expressed pessimism about the meaning of the present, claiming that whereas previous periods of upheaval contained “hinge points” — instances where contingent events allowed for decisive action in shaping world history — the current phase of capitalism “has essentially overridden the traditional prerogatives of human agency.”25 This agrees with one of Frost’s presuppositions; that politics is fundamentally shaped by objective “material conditions.” For her, it really is the “economy, stupid.”26 Insofar as agency exists, as she imagines it — recalling, for instance, her Alinsky-esque27 invocation of socialism as an eternal struggle between the haves and the have-nots — its use is not a moral question, but a pragmatic matter of weathering greater forces. By attempting to become aware of one’s conditions, one can, at least, avoid being scammed. The concern is pragmatic: instead of politics, there are policies. Instead of hair-splitting sects, there are candidates who “get things done.” And instead of critics, there are “accessible,” witty writers.
Thus, no matter how Frost’s book attempts to overlook the failed causes with which she is associated — and which made her a micro-celebrity on the Left — traces of their politics cling to the writing itself, which is stylistically preoccupied with means over ends. Frost’s hasty generalizations, stacked as they are upon cherry-picked evidence and ad hominems, are only satisfying in the same way as an overstimulated teenager is drawn to Hunter S. Thompson not for his commentary but his drug stories. Whatever her intention, the book’s strained attempts at cultural criticism frequently come off as cultural conservatism, quite neatly encapsulating the Left’s ongoing retreat into the Right.
A chore to be done
Bernie Sanders is the reason anyone picks up Frost’s book today. Had Sanders won the presidency in 2020, she would have been able to say that her podcast played a part. So, for her to freeze the image of the Sanders campaign in its birth, without also remembering its death, does not preserve her claim to relevance, as she intends, but nullifies it. History has no meaning if it is presumed to have passed. And here is the Millennial Left’s legacy, living in an empty present, unable to recall what the future looked like for the past. Yet, perhaps this is Dirtbag’s most revealing truth. Frost leaves unspoken her ambivalence regarding her generation’s limited horizons. If her avoidances are disingenuous, her book amounts to a genuine artefact of a moment built out of missed reckonings. However fitting her metaphor of Moby-Dick’s Starbuck, stoically sailing on against all odds in a raging sea, it is a lonely, solipsistic vision to live by. She could have, instead, heeded her own words: “To wash your hands of your responsibility to be older and wiser is to send [young people] into war alone, unprepared, without even warning them about the one thing you’re most familiar with: failure.” |P
1 See “Chapo Trap House,” Graphtreon, <https://graphtreon.com/creator/chapotraphouse>.
2 Frost’s tenure as an activist began in Indiana in the 2000s. She went on to participate in activism for Planned Parenthood, WFP, and DSA, also attending strike solidarity actions, anti-eviction demonstrations, anti-Tea Party events, and tabling Young Democratic Socialists events.
3 Amber A’Lee Frost, “It’s Bernie, Bitch,” The Baffler (January 11, 2019), <https://thebaffler.com/all-tomorrows-parties/its-bernie-bitch-frost>. The Baffler has since retracted the article, leaving an editor’s note: “We have removed the January 11, 2019, column by Amber Frost from our website after determining that it does not meet The Baffler’s guidelines for coverage and commentary concerning political candidates. The essay is an expression of Ms. Frost’s personal views. While The Baffler supports a robust discussion about political issues and candidates, as a nonprofit organization it does not support or oppose any individual candidate or potential candidate for political office. We are sorry for any inconvenience to our readers.”
4 [Spanish] Social outburst. This was a series of massive protests in Chile in 2019–21.
5 In particular, Frost refers to allegations of Pete Buttigieg’s campaign staff flipping results in Iowa in 2020; the simultaneous withdrawal of all the other Democratic candidates except Warren right before Super Tuesday; allegations of bigotry against Sanders, his staffers, and his supporters; and underrepresentation of Sanders’s successes in mainstream reporting. See Carol E. Lee, Kristen Welkner, Josh Lederman, and Amanda Golden, “Looking for Obama’s hidden hand in candidates coalescing around Biden,” NBC News (March 2, 2020), <https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/looking-obama-s-hidden-hand-candidate-coalescing-around-biden-n1147471>; Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff, “The Bernie Blackout Is Real, and These Screenshots Prove It,” Truthout (January 30, 2020), <https://truthout.org/articles/the-bernie-blackout-is-real-and-these-screenshots-prove-it/>, and “Bernie Blackout,” Vice Versa (2020). It is outside the scope of this review to address the nuances of these claims individually, but it nonetheless remains worthy of consideration to balance these with the countervailing argument that by 2020, Bernie Sanders, despite his anti-establishment rhetoric, maintained cooperative relationships with key Democratic figures like Joe Biden and Barack Obama, diminishing his perceived threat to establishment interests, unlike the visceral opposition Donald Trump faced from GOP stalwarts during the 2016 primaries. For a more sustained reflection, see Angela Nagle and Michael Tracey, “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: The Collapse of the Sanders Campaign and the ‘Fusionist’ Left,” American Affairs 4, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 118–44, <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/first-as-tragedy-then-as-farce/>.
6 Hunter S. Thompson, “September,” in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2022), 389.
7 “Memento Bernie,” Chapo Trap House (April 13, 2020), <https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/410-memento-bernie-41320>.
8 “Live from Iowa City: Solidarity Forever,” Chapo Trap House (February 3, 2020), <https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/390-live-from-iowa-city-solidarity-forever-2320>.
9 JTA and Times of Israel Staff, “In an unusual twist, AIPAC praises Bernie Sanders over Israel-Hamas ceasefire stance,” Times of Israel (November 7, 2023), <https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-unusual-twist-aipac-praises-bernie-sanders-over-israel-hamas-ceasefire-stance/>; Sanders did later attempt to block U.S. arms sales to Israel, but maintained his support of Israel’s right to self-defense. See Clare Foran, “Senate defeats effort led by Bernie Sanders to block planned US arms sales to Israel,” CNN (November 20, 2024), <https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/20/politics/senate-vote-arms-sales-to-israel/index.html>.
10 More recently, in 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris, only stepping up to accuse the Democrats of having “abandoned working class people” upon the occasion of her defeat — but no sooner. Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders), X (November 6, 2024), <https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1854271157135941698>: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
11 See Freddie deBoer, “AOC Is Just A Regular Old Democrat Now,” New York Magazine (July 25, 2023); and Valerie Richardson, “Woke no more? Speculation swirls over AOC’s missing ‘she/her’ pronouns,” The Washington Times (November 15, 2024), <https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/nov/15/woke-speculation-swirls-aoc-missing-pronouns/>.
12 “Zohran Mamdani Is The Next Mayor Of NYC,” Chapo Trap House (November 6, 2025), <https://youtu.be/sWiMlYQcJFY>.
13 Benjamin Studebaker, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
14 Steve Fraser, “The End of the Future,” Jacobin (March 2, 2024), <https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-politics-future-history-capitalism-progress>.
15 Chris Cutrone, The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006–2022 (Sublation, 2023).
16 For other recent appraisals of the Millennial Left, see Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), and Arthur Boriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession (London: Verso, 2023).
17 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 530–31. See also V.I. Lenin, “The Economic Basis of the Withering away of the State,” in State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 76: “Every right is an application of the same measure to different people who, in fact, are not the same and are not equal to one another.”
18 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” 537.
19 Helping all this was what Matt Christman described as the “delegitimization” of the mainstream media following the Bush and Obama years, creating a market for what he called “counterhegemonic” media such as Chapo and Jacobin. See “Matt Christman discusses History on New Books in History Podcast: Hinge Points Lost Episode”, Hinge Points (November 2021), <https://youtu.be/D1BVf4tjAjo>. Hinge Points is a mini-series from Chapo Trap House.
20 Nellie Bowles, The Pied Pipers of the Dirtbag Left Want to Lead Everyone to Bernie Sanders,” The New York Times (February 29, 2020); and Zack Beauchamp, “The raging controversy over ‘Bernie Bros’and the so-called dirtbag left, explained,” Vox (March 9, 2020), <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/9/21168312/bernie-bros-bernie-sanders-chapo-trap-house-dirtbag-left>.
21 Alex Pappademas, “Can Chapo Trap House Go Hollywood?,” GQ (November 17, 2022), <https://www.gq.com/story/chapo-trap-house-hollywood-interview>.
22 Amber A’Lee Frost, “The Necessity of Political Vulgarity,” Current Affairs (August 25, 2016), <https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2016/08/the-necessity-of-political-vulgarity>.
23 Pappademas, “Can Chapo Trap House.”
24 From the show House of Cards (2013–18).
25 “The McGloughstein Group feat. Daniel Bessner,” Chapo Trap House (November 2, 2021), <https://youtu.be/FWP8fghmIvA>.
26 A phrase coined by James Carville when he was advising Bill Clinton in his U.S. Presidential campaign in 1992.
27 Saul Alinsky was an American activist and political theorist known for his unique approach to community organizing popularized in his book Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971).
