How I Became a Subaru Socialist

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 2srcsrc8 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 2srcsrc4 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 2srcsrc8 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 2srcsrc8 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.