introduction

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

—KARL MARX, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

If she says she can do it, she can do it.

She don’t make false claims.

—DAVID BOWIE, “QUEEN BITCH”

Call me Amber.

I know, opening my self-important little book of essays with a nod to a masterpiece is brass-neck, pretentious, try-hard, self-indulgent, cringe, etc., but aren’t we all sometimes? And anyway, all those pretty little horses bolted the moment I signed a book contract for a “memoir,” so I’m having fun with it, and I encourage you to do the same whenever possible.

I want this book to be informative and useful, but I also want it to be entertaining, well written, and a pleasurable read—not an obligation. My story is easy enough to ignore; I’m not standing on your front lawn blasting the audiobook through a boom box. No one is making you read it (I hope), least of all me (and if someone voluntarily slogs through an entire book they don’t like or don’t care about, that’s on them). So if you’re reading this, I have to (at least) assume it’s because you want to know what I saw and what I have to say about it.

My credentials were often acquired by happenstance: right place, right time. I started out in Indiana, working on Planned Parenthood and anti–Tea Party activism, and I started a chapter of a then-obscure organization, now fairly well-known as Democratic Socialists of America. From there I moved to New York. I was on the ground for Occupy Wall Street, and I worked for the Working Families Party before being hired as one of DSA’s four employees at the time. I wrote about arts and culture and eventually left politics in Jacobin and other outlets, before jumping into the first Bernie campaign and taking a job cohosting the podcast Chapo Trap House with Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, and Virgil Texas, just in time for the second Bernie campaign. Not a bad résumé when you’re trying to justify (to others or yourself) writing a book about socialism in the here and now. Unfortunately, I frequently take on too many labor-intensive projects at once, which often leads to panic, guilt, and eventually a state of obsessive work-ethic-induced self-loathing so severe that I eventually just go catatonic and stare at a wall for a week. It’s a similar irony to opening a food delivery app, seeing six hundred options, and becoming so overwhelmed that you lose your appetite. This was difficult to start writing, and even more difficult to finish.

So in preparation for this book of essays on my experiences with socialist politics before and after the two campaigns of Bernie Sanders, I decided to get a shrink. But not just any shrink. I sought and acquired a shrink who specializes in a technique called cognitive behavioral therapy, a hyper-managerial approach to mental health based on eliminating negative thought and behavior “patterns” and supplanting them with “healthier” ones; the idea is that the subject can create new habits to live a more functional and productive life regardless of any underlying suffering (which they are now better able to endure with stoic resilience, thanks to CBT). It’s not that the approach actually discourages the subject from looking inward, but it allows her to function without looking too deeply. This was ideal for me lest the void gaze back, and it become a whole thing where I might have had to put “real” work on hold in order to “work on myself,” which is what I came to CBT to avoid doing in the first place. I call it “psychoanalysis for Protestants,” and it might not be as healthy as a deep dive, but it’s way less of a hassle.

My therapist was a right-wing Orthodox Jew who openly abhorred Bernie Sanders; he was exactly what I needed. I never actually asked him whether he googled me and found my writing or my podcast, but at some point I had to assume. He never mentioned the election per se, but he had a tendency to suddenly and without provocation speak glowingly of people like Dennis Prager, the virulently anticommunist Jewish talk-radio host who went from never-Trump conservative to The Donald’s biggest cheerleader. My shrink managed to regularly work Dennis Prager quotes into our sessions. I found this funny, and somewhat charming. Mostly it gave me some distance.

He was always telling me that I should go to church, get married, and have children, so that I’d have a sense of my value as a human being beyond politics and work, those being the two abstractions that motivated my every major decision (and which, for me, existed independently of one another only as a distinction without a difference). I also found this funny, and somewhat charming. Like most people, he was a little right and a little wrong. I like most people. And I liked him.

He once asked in earnest if I had ever considered the possibility that I was unconsciously overextending myself to the point of exhaustion because that’s the only kind of rest I felt I deserved; it’s an explanation that flattered my sense of duty, but the reality is just that I have the memory of a goldfish, and I compulsively repeat the same cycle of overwork to the point of collapse without even noticing until it’s too late. (Unless, of course, I write things down.)

He also once asked if I had considered the possibility that perhaps I chase quixotic political ambitions because I know that no matter how hard and smart I work, they will most likely never come to fruition in my lifetime. This may seem counterintuitive, but he has correctly identified a certain type of person who runs rampant on “the left.” For these Sisyphean radicals, politics offers an identity as a beloved archetype—the righteous underdog, the beautiful loser, the brilliant outsider, etc. They find a perverse sense of security in the job that they will never complete; if it was ever finished, who would they even be anymore? Again, my therapist didn’t quite get me right. While it’s true that I don’t feel I exist if I’m not working, I’ve always preferred working on almost anything other than politics.

Generally speaking, I like writing about politics, and I like podcasting about politics. In the right company, I even enjoy talking about politics. But actually doing politics—campaigns, protests, activism, organizing … what a fucking drag. I’ve done all those things, and since I’m a lifer, I know I will again, but they will always be a chore for me. It’s just not my idea of fun. But I don’t do it for fun.

Neither do I do it for a sense of identity, belonging, or camaraderie (I had friends before I had politics, and I would keep an eye on anyone in your organization who didn’t), and I certainly don’t do it for the warm fuzzies (gross). I do it because I want socialism, and socialism for me is simply a chore that needs to be done. It’s like Dorothy’s old chestnut, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Much of my exasperation with “doing politics” is that socialism is something I wish was already done, so I could get back to reading the short stories of Deborah Eisenberg, convincing my friends to rent a picturesque woodland cabin in bumblefuck California one more time, trying to diagnose my dogs’ skin allergies, learning to play the Appalachian dulcimer, etc. Socialists become irrelevant to the masses when they forget that “the work” is intended as a means to an end; the goal isn’t to “be a socialist” (whatever that means). The goal is to change the world so that we can live under socialism (or at least as much socialism as we can manage under the circumstances).

Socialism was only ever a means to an end for me; I first threw myself into politics out of frustration with an economy that sabotaged the talents, desires, and ambitions of so many people I knew and loved. 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. I want a socialism that runs mostly on autopilot, so people can spend most of their short time on this earth focusing on what they’d rather be doing if you gave them the time and the money and the freedom.

I explained this to my therapist, but I’m not sure if he believed me. Nonetheless, we shared an amity. He was always funny, friendly, and sympathetic without being condescending or going easy on me. He has been indispensable in writing this book (along with some occasional chemical help from my prescribing psychiatrist, a left-wing, secular Jew who listens to a podcast called Cum Town and goes to a CrossFit gym).

I sought out both of them because I was starting to panic. I felt deeply compelled to write my own account of the unlikely rise of a post-2008 wave of social democratic politics, and I was becoming overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility I felt to it; my involvement with Occupy Wall Street, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Bernie Sanders campaign finally felt whole enough to form a complete picture, if I could just get it right. Not only did I feel a duty to posterity but, on a personal level, I also desperately needed for people to understand what actually happened, at least as I saw it.

So I secured the only therapist in my insurance network who practiced within thirty miles of my apartment and specialized in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a diagnosis that I don’t really believe in but cannot deny describes me. The following lists are the qualities outlined in Mastering Your Adult ADHD: A Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment Program, Client Workbook (Treatments That Work) that have been given free rein to dictate the literary style of this book:

Symptoms of Poor Attention


Copyright © 2023 by Amber A’Lee Frost