Teen Vogue, a magazine and an arm of the Resistance which mainly targets the young women of generations Y and Z, has changed a lot since it debuted during my ‘tween years. Then, being Conde Nast’s higher-fashion answer to Seventeen, it mostly seemed to run stories about livening up a “blah” outfit with a waist-cinching belt. (One I particularly remember from circa 2006 promoted quirky cross-seasonal layering which I promptly attempted—wearing a turtleneck under a strapless gingham dress—and still regret.)
Young girls today, or so Teen Vogue’s more recent editorial pivot toward left-leaning politics suggests, are deeper and more certain of their politics than I was at their age. They’re interested in more than high-risk style tips. Which is why the now online-only magazine publishes stories about the Standing Rock protests, why we should be just as worried about Mike Pence, and how to protest President Trump with your nail polish. And, last week, a story on the underpinnings of anarchism, which is more than just a punk rock posture. Or so the author Kim Kelly, herself a member of New York’s Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, argues.
Her premise that punk-rock frontmen—guys today’s tweens and teens would have to Google anywa—undermined a legitimate ideology with their appropriation of Anarchy! hinges on a relentlessly fashionable (and, like most fashions, basically stupid) conflation of capitalism with oppression. “The anarchist argument is that the state is not neutral, it is inherently hierarchical, it is inherently an institution of domination; therefore, anarchists oppose the state as much as they oppose capitalism,” Kelly explains.
But in explaining how her anti-Trump #Resistance era brand of anarchism is more than a late 1970s anachronism, Kelly barely glosses the fact that at the height of its geopolitical prominence anarchism was frankly and unreservedly evil. Today’s mass terrorists owe more, in terms of tactical influence at least, to the turn of the century anarchists who killed William McKinley, the president of France and dynamited London’s House of Commons—among dozens of other coups—than any other forebear in warcraft.
Anarchy’s sanitized reclamation by the woke resistance, tone-deaf as it seems today, is nothing new. Anarchist and “Antifa” violence persists, but the anti-capitalists on campuses who believe the game is rigged against them aren’t its typical perpetrators. Marxist-anarchists tend to thrive, their ideology uncorrupted, at places like the college I went to where their ideas seem vaguely sexy—especially if they’re professors visiting from abroad who take smoke breaks with students halfway through lectures. The scholar quoted at length in Kelly’s article is actually a lecturer at my old school. It’s a place that by virtue of its past, present, and probable future—if the old boys’ board of trustees has anything to say about it, and they will—has a special of way of convincing collegians just how reliably the system always wins. It’s a place with a special way of making continental Marxist-anarchists, however phony they’ll seem five years hence, look immeasurably cool in contrast to everyone else.
An official with the American embassy in Greece, which leads Europe in anarchist activities, recently explained to me the struggling nation’s laissez-faire acceptance of an intractable anarchist presence—by way of answering an observation about the incredible proliferation of graffiti in Athens. It’s often not “street art,” and not trying to be, but straightforwardly anti-American anarchist graffiti. And it’s not confined to what you might call the punk-rock parts of town. It’s everywhere.
Seeing the classical birthplace of democracy so marred by anarchist scrawl is a lot like reading Teen Vogue’s defense of anarchy’s ideological legitimacy. Not because Teen Vogue is such civilizational lodestar. But, as proofs of where we are on global society’s steep slope toward decadence, they’re sliding neck and neck.
There’s something oddly reassuring about the manner of our decay, though. Because, while not exactly a “screed,” as another critic recently called it, the anarchism-is-for-everyone story was ahistorical, politically naive, and showed its author and target audience for un-self-aware fashion slaves—which is only another way of saying that the Teen Vogue of 12 years ago lives on after all.
