The hosts of the American leftwing podcast Chapo Trap House are facing the first hurdle in their European tour: organised labour. They have arrived in Amsterdam to decompress a little, only to find that Dutch transport workers are going on strike. Tomorrow’s train to Berlin, where they will be playing the first date of their tour – which takes in London, Glasgow, Manchester and Dublin – might be cancelled. In the hotel lobby, they discuss alternatives: should they hire a car and drive to Germany? Virgil Texas thinks that sounds like a fun idea. Will Menaker isn’t sure. “We should get this on the record now,” he says. “We’re 100% in favour of labour power and strikes. Unless this train strike inconveniences us. Then we’re going 100% reactionary.” Texas interrupts: “Sarcasm does not read well in print.”
It’s a typical Chapo Trap House skit – the dynamics of class struggle laced with playful irony and an analysis of how medium shapes message. In fact, our interview, during which Texas, Menaker and Matt Christman burn through half a packet of Gauloises cigarettes, sink beers and hammer the table to emphasise their points, sounds rather like a living, breathing episode of the show itself.
Since it was first broadcast in 2016, Chapo Trap House – its name is taken from the Mexican cartel leader and the US slang for a drug den – has become one of the most celebrated and talked about podcasts on the political left. Texas puts the figure of people who listen to the free episode they release every week at just over 200,000, while almost 30,000 get access to a second weekly show by paying a few dollars. (The makers receive $132,000 a month from fans, making it the highest-earning project on the crowdfunding platform Patreon.)
The show has inspired several copycats and even a moniker for their audience: the Dirtbag Left, a coterie of underemployed and overly online millennials who were radicalised by the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, have no time for the pieties of traditional political discourse, and place cautious hope in the movement to put the socialist senator Bernie Sanders in the White House.
An episode usually features an hour of relatively free-form, unpolished conversation. The team, who are in their 20s and 30s, might savage the Democratic party establishment, conduct a “reading series” for which they narrate and annotate the most risible newspaper opinion pieces published that week; or, when in a more serious mood, interview leftist politicians and organisers. The show’s worldview is best encapsulated in their 2018 book The Chapo Guide to Revolution, a polemical splicing of essays and cartoons that take the cultural temperature of the US – that “deluded and decadent empire in terminal decline”. Caught between the death-drive of Trumpism and an ineffectual, elitist Democratic opposition, Chapo offers alternatives that are both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious. “Is it any wonder that liberalism has become a dirty word,” they write, “and that the task of bringing socialism has fallen to goofies like us?”
The podcast’s success speaks to the absence of a genuinely socialist (let alone funny) presence in American culture, one that recognises both the Democrats and Republicans as bidding for the capitalist class. But the show has a significant fanbase in Ireland and the UK too – a second London show was added after the first sold out. “We always wonder,” says Christman, “what these people get from us talking about these American pundits.”
But Chapo’s recurring villains – columnists who haughtily dismiss the millennial revival of socialism, Obama-era politicos who think of bipartisan compromise as the highest value – do have their transatlantic equivalents. In the UK, they take the form of New Labour-era centrists who go apoplectic at the sight of Jeremy Corbyn. Menaker gets particularly worked up by the Liberal Democrat adviser who boasted that their side in the coalition government convinced the Tories to agree to a plastic-bag tax in return for deeper sanctions against benefit claimants. “The fact that you’d be proud of that is revolting to me,” Menaker says.
The trio plan to read a few columns from UK newspapers during the tour. “I am continually astounded by Britain’s political and media culture,” says Menaker. “Honestly, it makes ours look healthy.” Christman agrees, adding that he only really “wants to make fun of that Toby Young”. Christman first encountered the Spectator writer as a celebrity judge on the US TV show Top Chef, where he apparently “sucked ass”.
The situations in Britain and America have both triggered a crisis in political satire. Trump and Brexit have produced events that are beyond parody: the petit-bourgeois pomposities of Alan Partridge now find expression in the most influential politician in Britain, Nigel Farage; Michael Howard’s 2017 talking up of a potential war with Spain over Gibraltar could have featured on Chris Morris’s news-spoof The Day Today.
In this landscape, the hosts find the traditional forms of satire – sketch shows and news parodies – toothless. “The writers’ rooms on those shows are made up of people who largely went to prestigious colleges,” Christman explains. “They have an investment in [existing] institutions. And that bleeds into their analysis of the situation. You have to be alienated from it to really make fun of it.”
He cites a recent skit on Saturday Night Live, featuring Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump singing a version of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. The sketch features Robert De Niro as a heroic Robert Mueller – the former FBI director who became a liberal pin-up as many expected his report to secure Trump’s impeachment. “This is two months after the Mueller report came out and said we’re not going to recommend any charges against Trump, and nothing happened.”
The central distinction, Christman explains, between the liberal approach to Trump and Brexit, and Chapo’s, is that the former is obsessed with them as singular events – aberrations that are going to “go away soon” either through impeachment or a second referendum – while the Chapo team see them as “symptomatic of a broader collapse of legitimacy”.
“I’m just a comedian,” Jon Stewart, the arch-satirist of the George W Bush years, would tell interviewers when asked about his influence on the real world. Does Chapo Trap House have the same response? They have received many testimonials from listeners who credit the show with “reordering the way they think” about politics. “I can’t tell you the amount of times we’ve gotten a heartfelt email from someone who says your show helped me make sense of things,” Texas says. “They say, ‘Now I’m talking to my co-workers about starting a union.” But when I ask if they consider their podcast to be a form of activism, there is a chorus of noes. “There are people who’ve had their minds changed by us,” says Christman. “But how many more, even if they won’t admit it to themselves, are listening to us as a substitute [for genuine political activism]?”
The podcast – which is also co-hosted by Felix Biederman and Amber Frost, who are joining these three in Berlin – does nonetheless receive some scorn. Though the cultural expression of a multiracial and diverse movement, it is mainly white and male. The hosts have been accused of sexism by others on the left: during one scandal, they came under fire for making a joke about Bill Cosby, in response to which they apologised and made a donation to a rape and sexual assault centre. And Chapo’s attempt to reconstruct a heroic story of American socialism runs the risk of overlooking the racist, patriarchal elements of US labour history. It’s a concern they swiftly dispatch. “Unionised white people are the least racist white people in the working class,” says Christman, “and it’s especially meaningless now because the working class is made up of minorities anyway.” The labour movement has, adds Texas, “been one of the primary drivers of integration in the United States”.
What about the worry that an adherence to irony can be corrosive? “Irony, for me, is a sword and a shield for defending yourself from the world and attacking the people that you think are risible,” says Menaker. “But like comedy itself, there’s nothing inherently good or moral about irony. And there are many obnoxious and awful people who use it. It’s a matter of the human being who’s doing it.”
If Chapo has a long-term strategy, it’s to clear the overgrowth of liberal complacency so that something new can grow. But Texas warns against taking the podcast too seriously. The show’s charm derives from its slacker-like insouciance. Take the name – it’s something Menaker “happened to say” at the end of the first episode and it just stuck. “If we’d sat down and thought of a name,” says Christman, “it would probably have been something awful, like Politics Guyz.”
“I’m heartened by the popularity of the show,” Menaker says. “But at the end of the day, I don’t know what I’m doing. Recording two podcasts a week is taxing enough. I don’t know how to build socialism in America. We’re not a political movement. And if that’s shirking responsibility, then I have to say: that comes to me naturally.”
• Chapo Trap House are at Òran Mór, Glasgow, on 3 June; at Islington Assembly Hall, London, on 5 June. Then touring.
