Bernie Bro Elegy

White male millennial socialists in the age of DEI

x.com

Nathan J. Robinson wants you to know he is nobody’s victim—and with his signature Willy Wonka-esque attire and William Buckley-esque mid-Atlantic accent, he never seemed like one. A 2020 Daily Beast profile of him informed readers that “not all Bernie Bros are angry young men” and described his project as about “making life joyful again.” In any case, this week Robinson saw fit to weigh in on Jacob Savage’s mega-viral Compact essay “The Lost Generation” by informing his followers on X that it “the whole ‘white men are falling behind’ narrative is nonsense.” It was a follow-up to an earlier post in which Robinson declared “white men are doing fine actually” and linked to an article in his magazine, Current Affairs, that claimed to debunk Savage’s earlier article, “The Vanishing White Male Writer.”

Robinson isn’t the only white male millennial socialist eager to debunk Savage. He also retweeted the socialist wonk Matt Bruenig, who responded to Savage’s “The Lost Generation” at length on the website of his think tank, the People’s Policy Project, claiming that census data refuted the assertion that young white men’s status in elite professions had declined in the past decade. Bruenig’s analysis, in turn, provoked extensive debate on X.

Robinson and Bruenig have several things in common. Both are white male millennial socialists who rose to prominence around the time of Bernie Sanders’s first bid for the Democratic nomination. During this period, both used crowdfunding to start independent initiatives—Current Affairs was launched in 2015, People’s Policy Project in 2017—which they continue to run essentially as personal projects. Indeed, Robinson fired five staffers in 2021 to ensure his continued personal control over the magazine. (He wrote in an internal memo at the time: “I think I should be on top of the org chart, with everyone else selected by me and reporting to me.”) Bruenig seemingly funds PPP not as a 501(c)(3) but through his personal Patreon.

Robinson and Bruenig are part of a larger cohort that sprung up in the mid- to late 2010s alongside the electoral rise of Bernie Sanders, many of whose members also started independent media enterprises in that period. The most successful of these are two podcasts, Chapo Trap House and TrueAnon, both of which have been in the top tier of Patreon earners for much of their existence. Beyond a common political orientation, these initiatives share the style and attitude of aggressive irreverence that inspired the derisive “Bernie Bro” moniker. (The aristocratic Robinson avoids the potty-mouthed truculence of the others in this camp, but is known for no-holds-barred attacks on liberal icons like the Clintons, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.)

Another thing these ventures share is an organizational structure—or rather, a lack thereof. The low overhead and parasocial branding of podcasts makes them resistant to any conventional institutionalization. A TV or radio program might change hosts over the years, but podcasts are largely inseparable from the personalities of the podcasters. The People’s Policy Project isn’t a podcast, but it’s funded via a podcast platform. (Bruenig also has a successful podcast with his wife Liz¹.) Current Affairs looks more like a conventional magazine, but as the 2021 blow-up showed, Robinson maintains outsized personal control over the organization, and as anyone who peruses the site knows, his lengthy blog-like screeds regularly grace its pages.

In one sense, the success of these enterprises supports Robinson’s assertion that “white men are doing fine.” People like him, Matt Bruenig, Will Menaker, Matt Christman, and Brace Belden are all evidently thriving—finding audiences and making money. But, in light of Savage’s argument, it does seem notable not only that they are all thriving outside of mainstream legacy institutions, but also that their projects have all avoided institutionalization—an imperative Robinson made explicit when he reasserted his personal ownership over Current Affairs. Because this seems to be how—as brash, assertive, opinionated white males—they avoided becoming casualties of the identitarian pressures that overtook elite professions in the 2010s.

In Bruenig’s case, this isn’t entirely true. In 2016, he was fired from the progressive think tank Demos on the basis of mean tweets he sent to two liberal women, journalist Joan Walsh and Democratic strategist Neera Tanden. It was a small skirmish in the era’s Bernie-Hillary wars, and as with much of that conflict, it was framed in identitarian terms, with Bruenig initially responding to a Walsh article claiming that Bernie supporters were “trying to overturn the will of black, brown, and female voters.” It was a typical line from the Clinton camp in the era: that supporting Sanders was sexist and racist. Bruenig’s vituperative retorts to this argument, which culminated in him calling Tanden a “scumbag,” seemed to get him cast out of Democratic policy circles for good.

Bruenig’s combative online style was famously typical of the cohort under discussion, especially the Chapo Trap House hosts. Although the whimsical Current Affairs may seem like an exception, it was the venue for Chapo co-host (and female Bernie Bro) Amber Frost’s 2016 essay “The Necessity of Political Vulgarity,” which became a manifesto for the nascent “dirtbag left.” The embrace of vulgarity prompted a vast discourse on the alleged “toxicity” of the Bernie Bros, framed by liberals and feminists as angry white men whose commitment to class politics amounted to cover for seething racism and misogyny.

Savage tells the story of how in the 2010s elite institutions—media, entertainment, academia—pursued diversity mandates by squeezing out entry-level white men. Those white males who remained in these realms were expected to assume an attitude roughly opposite to that adopted by Bernie Bros in this period: one of polite, intersectional deference to progressive stack norms, of being a “good ally,” “sitting down and listening,” “doing the work,” and so on. So it isn’t surprising not only that the Bernie Bros remained entirely outside of those institutions while also preventing their own ventures from assuming any sort of institutional form. Were Chapo Trap House to come to resemble, say, NPR in its org chart, its all-white, almost all-male leadership would become a problem. And Robinson was surely right to suspect that if he allowed Current Affairs to move to the more horizontal structure demanded by his employees, his position would’ve been at risk.

In other words, the leading white male millennial socialists would appear to be “doing fine” precisely because they founded independent enterprises that avoided the dynamics that overtook elite left-of-center institutions during the 2010s. One question this raises is why people like Robinson and Bruenig are devoting their efforts to debunking Savage’s criticisms of the legacy institutions they themselves fled (or in Bruenig’s case, was fired from). The simplest answer is coalitional. Even if they seem at odds with the culture of mainstream left-of-center institutions, they are reliant on subscriber bases that are mostly aligned with the politics of those institutions. If they took too forceful of a stance against identitarianism, millennial white male left podcasters would alienate many of their subscribers, especially as Trump takes a sledgehammer to DEI, and before long would find themselves on the perilous “post-left” trajectory described by Oliver Bateman.

At the same time, it seems to me there there is also a disavowal of their own objective situation at work. It is commonplace on the socialist left to argue that small businesses are the most regressive part of the capitalist economy; for Marx, after all the road to socialism was paved by the socialization of production, i.e. the development of more complex, distributed, collective economic structures that slowly undermined the basis of private ownership. So why are so many prominent socialist personalities small businessmen? The answer is that the petty-bourgeois freedom of the owner-operator seems to be the only viable way to be an aggressive, opinionated white man on the left given the nature of its institutional culture. But seizing the commanding heights of the economy would require a vast project of institutional coordination. If your mode of politics can’t even find a way to function within a medium-sized media organization, how likely is that?

When I made some of these points on X, several people replied that what was being excluded wasn’t whiteness or maleness but socialist politics, which mainstream liberalism has always rejected and sought to marginalize. There’s some truth to that, but the question is whether these things are entirely separable. In the 2010s, it became typical for liberal feminists and racialist radicals alike to impugn universalist and materialist politics as really just representing the interests of white men. Maybe in one way, they were right. In a DEI regime that affords preferential status according to demographic characteristics, it is unsurprising that universalism ends up being held up disproportionately by members of a group lacking any such status.

Perhaps socialists should leave aside the question of how bad things really are for white men and ask themselves whether the situation I’ve described is the optimal one for their cause. I suspect the fact that—Mamdani notwithstanding—socialism remains unlikely to break through in nationally in the coming years has a direct relation to the continued institutional marginality of its most popular advocates. After their initial war against the Clintonistas, the dirtbag podcast crew mostly settled into a symbiotic relationship with legacy liberal institutions, often receiving positive write-ups in mainstream outlets. Their unwillingness to attack the identitarian consensus, on display in Robinson’s and Bruenig’s salvos against Savage, keeps this tacit truce intact. Writers like Adolph Reed and Jennifer Pan have long argued that the function of the DEI regime is to neutralize any serious broad-based challenge to the current political and economic order. That socialists remain so reluctant to criticize that regime is evidence of its continued success on that front.

This week in Compact:

• Jacob Savage’s “The Lost Generation” (in case you’ve been hiding under a rock)

• Juan David Rojas on the left’s defeat in Chile

• Ashley Frawley on why therapeutic bureaucracy won’t save young men

• David Bromwich on what right and left get wrong about citizenship

• Mark Krikorian on why intervention abroad leads to migrant influxes

• Daniel McCarthy on Norman Podhoretz

• Norman Matloff on Trump’s cuts to science funding

1. Liz Bruenig is arguably the one mid-2010s “Bernie Bro” to find a comfortable perch in legacy media, but her non-bro qualities were presumably decisive in achieving that. While her politics largely line up with her husband’s, her cheerful Christian mom persona could hardly be more different.