How I Became a Subaru Socialist
During the past few weeks, I’ve heard from a lot of readers who have theories about Subaru Socialists, the term I used, in a recent column, to refer to middle-class, college-educated, liberal millennials. Some of the critics of this cohort blame colleges for pushing left-wing politics and engendering an excess of concern for struggling people; more sympathetic readers credit the work of community organizing and activism for generating those very same things. Reading these reactions has pushed me to consider a subset of the Subaru Socialists: professionals in their thirties and forties who are now basically doing fine financially, and may even belong to the upper middle class. It used to be a cliché that youthful idealism eventually gives way to fiscal conservatism (and to thinking way more than you ever expected you would about your taxes). How did this group veer away from that once seemingly inevitable trajectory?
A little self-reflection might be in order. Like many of my Subaru Socialist ilk, I went into debt for an arguably useless graduate degree—a Master of Fine Arts in fiction, from Columbia. After finishing that degree, I spent several years getting rejected by pretty much every publishing house and magazine there is. When the Great Recession happened, I was twenty-eight, and I lost my job as a private-school teacher, leading to an extended stay on unemployment. All of this felt bad, but I didn’t really channel it into the politics of the left until Bernie Sanders began showing up on campaign stages, in 2015. By then, I had paid off my student loans, had bought a home, and was making enough money as a writer that I no longer needed to feverishly check my account balances or worry too much about buying a plane ticket or new car parts.
As I have thought more about others like me—comfortable people in their forties who are nonetheless frustrated enough with capitalism and the Democratic establishment to vote for seemingly any insurgent candidate in sight—I’ve wondered why I started thinking seriously about universal health care, wealth redistribution, and the expansion of the public sector at the precise moment that I didn’t really need them anymore. An obvious answer would be that it’s hard to think very much about politics when you’re struggling to get your bank account consistently above five hundred dollars. But I find that unconvincing—even when things were bad, I wasn’t entirely immiserated, and I still read the news. I also can’t plead ignorance: I had a Marxist phase in college and spent my early twenties talking solemnly about revolutions and the proletariat. But those convictions were abstract, if sincere, and I suppose they stayed that way until Sanders came along.
What—or, rather, who—bridged my youthful communism and the softer populist politics of my thirties and forties? Barack Obama. I remember the excitement I felt after Obama’s victory in 2008 not as one recalls a moment in history that locks you into a time and a generation but more as something that happened to me, personally, like hitting a buzzer beater in a basketball game or going on a first date. Until the full reality of the financial crash and its aftermath set in, Obama and his great hope of multiethnic progress put my youthful questions about wealth inequality and the crimes of Wall Street at bay. I believed, as so many of us did, that we would all just float up to an era of prosperity and racial harmony. By the time Sanders came around, that vague hope had curdled into resentment. I wanted nothing to do with anti-racist, neoliberal corporate politics—during this time I took to stringing such terms together—even if I understood that they were probably good for me and my career, perhaps more so than tax policies that favored the upper middle class.
I should note that I do not think that Obama’s Presidency was a great failure; nor do I believe that Obama sold out the millions of acolytes who, upon seeing him take the stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and deliver his “skinny kid with a funny name” speech, treated him like a saint. But his handling of the financial crash ultimately forced many of us to acknowledge that the floaty dream was over and that he had not delivered. An alternative was needed, one that felt bound both to a personality and to an idea. We didn’t know exactly who that alternative might be—even as Sanders gained momentum following his shocking win in the Michigan primary—but we knew, right away, who it was not: Hillary Clinton.
Subaru Socialism grew, in part, out of the 2008 crash, the subsequent disappointment in Obama, and a rejection of Clinton and her entitled, uninviting run at the Presidency. But why did it take the shape it did? Why the socialist bent? Couldn’t these same factors have led to a more centrist politics focussed on the repudiation of Donald Trump and on a celebration of free markets that could lift up new immigrants into a strong middle class?
There are multiple reasons. One is the cultural and political celebrity of Sanders. Also, our politics sometimes lags behind our economic reality. The first Sanders campaign made me realize that I did get kinda screwed on my student loans, and that things maybe shouldn’t have been so hard. I felt retrospective anger toward Columbia for offering a program that charged people fifty thousand dollars a year, guaranteed absolutely nothing in return, and seemed unconcerned with the debt that many of its students were piling up. Friends of mine from that program never recovered financially. I also came to appreciate the safety net provided by California’s unemployment benefits, which allowed me to figure out what I could do next—the 2008 crash didn’t doom me to eviction and starting over at my parents’ house (even if I eventually ended up there for a short time).
More than any of this, though, I felt inspired by Sanders’s universalist message, and by his refusal to participate in the factional, identity-based battles that I had long suspected served only as a kind of promotional package for the careers of politicians, academics, and corporate employees. This was part of the disappointment with Obama, too—the realization that even if more “people of color” moved up the corporate and political ladders, we would simply end up with a slightly more diverse ruling class.
Sometimes, politics takes root not at the point of misery, but years later, when the agita has passed and someone can explain why it had to be that way. It took me a few years to fully get on board with the left. The hope that Obama inspired in me died a bit more slowly than one might expect, in no small part because I am a minority and therefore especially attached to the idea of a prosperous, post-racial America. When I had children, though, I found myself moving further toward broad, fuzzy support for anything semi-socialist. My wife and I could afford child care, but we could also see just how little would have to change to make that impossible. And during the first Trump Presidency it became quite obvious to me that, although I had somehow become more successful as a writer than I ever could have imagined during my days of unemployment and rejection, the job was shakier and less stable than it would have been not that long before.
You could say the same about many jobs, particularly those in fields where you’re likely to find a lot of Subaru Socialists: academia, the arts, the entertainment industry, even advertising. All of these fields tend to require quite a bit of school and have far less stability than they once did. And people in these fields have done much to shape the thinking of their peers. Will Menaker, one of the hosts of the influential leftist podcast “Chapo Trap House,” is the son of Daniel Menaker, a longtime fiction editor at this magazine who later became the executive editor-in-chief of Random House. Will made a go of it in his father’s industry before becoming one of the most biting and incisive voices of the so-called Bernie Bro movement. His experience is particular and, as he freely admits, extremely privileged, but it’s also exemplary, to some degree. I listened to almost every episode of “Chapo Trap House” when it first launched, and I recall feeling both put off by Menaker’s culturally élite, private-school background and somewhat connected to him—because he and I were more or less seeing the same thing.
Menaker told me that he and his co-hosts did not set out to embody the anger of the downwardly mobile, middle-class youth, though it did ultimately shake out that way. This makes sense; no podcast or live stream—at least no very good one—started out with such an explicit political goal. But their show, like talk-radio shows of the past, provided a relatable, consistent voice that allowed listeners to see themselves a bit more clearly. One of the key dynamics of the Bernie Bro movement was that, although it talked about the working class, it also showed the previously privileged classes how to proletarianize themselves, in part by asking a simple question: If it sucks for us, how bad must it be for everyone else?
You could look at all this and conclude that Subaru Socialists such as myself are vain, unserious, and fully unsympathetic. After all, nobody made me go to an expensive graduate program—at Columbia, of all places—and it may even seem ungrateful to study at one of the most prestigious institutions on the planet and then get mad when it doesn’t yield what it seemed to promise (especially in my case, since it basically did). Nobody is entitled to work their dream job. But along with more personal disappointments came the realization that the industry I was hoping to enter might never get any healthier, and that this was true in those other fields as well, and many others besides. That forced me to think about my daughter and what protections she would need if, God forbid, she decided to try to become a writer like her father. Would she have health care? Could she ever afford to buy a home? How much wealth would be captured by the tech oligarchy, and how far would she be—despite growing up privileged by any standard—from earning some of that money? How close would she be to ending up in much worse shape than her parents?
Those are my politics of self-interest, and the reasons that the left keeps making sense to me, even as I burrow comfortably into the upper middle class. The children of the Subaru Socialists will almost certainly have it worse than their parents. No matter what sort of privileged and perhaps contradictory path you took to reach that conclusion, once you see it, you can’t look away. ♦