Correction: a previous version of this article listed Fat Wreck Chords as the original home of Against Me! is Reinventing Axl Rose, when in fact it was No Idea Records.
For absolutely no reason whatsoever, I’m thinking about “Baby, I’m an Anarchist,” the ninth track off Gainesville punk band AGAINST ME!’s debut 2002 album on No Idea Records, Against Me! is Reinventing Axl Rose. The song is indisputably a banger, though time has not exactly been friendly to its legacy or that of its principal credited writer, AGAINST ME! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace. It’s one of those songs where, even if you don’t know all the lyrics or exact chord progression, you could probably still get an entire room full of drunk punks anywhere in the world screaming its chorus with little effort over and over and over: “CAUSE BABY, I’M AN ANARCHIST! AND YOU’RE A SPINELESS LIBERAAAAAAAAAL!” It’s a cultural, and in some ways ideological, touchstone, a marker against which to measure your own level of compromise or recuperation. It’s a song written at a very specific time that still manages to transcend time for me, its lyrics a reminder of what’s at stake and all the ways in which making a deal with the devil, even the “lesser evil” one, can go horrendously wrong.
The first verse is one part history lesson, one part line in the sand, written in the style of a breakup letter:
“Through the best of times, through the worst of times
Through Nixon and through Bush
Do you remember ’36, we went our separate ways
You fought for Stalin, I fought for freedom
You believe in authority, I believe in myself
I’m a Molotov cocktail, you’re Dom Perignon
Baby, what’s that confused look in your eyes?
What I’m trying to say is that:
I burn down buildings, while you sit on a shelf inside of them
You call the cops on the looters and pie throwers
They call it class war
I call it co-conspirators.”
Here we’re saying hey: there’s a historical precedent for the kind of betrayal we expect from you. The Spanish Civil War. COINTELPRO. As we’ll hear shortly in the chorus, the infamous Battle of Seattle, November 30, 1999. If it benefits you, or if you find yourself overly challenged by what we’re doing, you’ll turn on us in an instant. It’s not us, it’s you: You believe in authority. While we’re out here smashing the state you’re in there, enjoying the state’s spoils. Already this is a fundamental disagreement too deep to be able to ignore.
Of course it’s also written in the naive fashion of a lot of street punks in the early 2000s. Of course there’s no internal ideological nuance or even acknowledgement of what anarchism really is. I’m almost positive that if this song came out today you’d have a gaggle of twitter users um-ackshuallying every line in every verse. This is why, even if we ourselves start to feel that well of faux superiority rise up in our stomachs and urge to push the taped-up bridges of our glasses up our nose as we clear our throats to speak, it’s important to remember that sometimes art doesn’t have to be meticulously true-to-life to make its overarching point.
The song goes on: while you’re watching Fourth of July fireworks, I’m burning the flag. While we’re trying to build solidarity, you’re stringing yourself up on the dead whale of electoral politics. You think this system is worth reforming; we think this system needed to be taken out with the trash yesterday. “We’re all hypocrites, but you’re a patriot,” … “No I won’t take your hand and marry the state.”
Because baby, I’m an anarchist, and you’re a spineless liberal
We marched together for the eight-hour day
And held hands in the streets of Seattle
But when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window
You left me all alone; all alone.
It’s hard to live up to the expectations of this song, as simplistic and naive as it is. Laura Jane Grace became a rock star, she sold out, and then she turned her back fully on the politics that brought people to her in the first place. Hell, I haven’t lived up fully to this song since the day I heard it. But that doesn’t negate the song itself. There’s no “checkmate atheists” moment here. Liberals will side with the state nine times out of ten, in any context you care to mention. Climate change? Well no, of course you can’t chain yourself to a construction or logging or drilling vehicle and not expect to be charged with a felony! Nor can you block traffic or throw paint on art exhibits to make your point! It’s too violent of you. Fascism? Of course we have to fight it, but that fight has to take place at the polls, you see! There can’t be any organizing in any other aspect of our life where fascists might burrow. Reproductive freedom? I mean, obviously it’s vitally important and people with uteruses are going to die if action isn’t taken immediately, but don’t you think it’s a bit much to protest outside the house of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh? Don’t our politicians deserve to have normal, quiet private lives?
Of course we want a ceasefire in Palestine; we just don’t want to hear from any Palestinians or make any kind of concessions to Uncommitted voters towards an end to the genocide. That would ruin the vibe of our convention, you see. We have plenty of time to listen to cops and Republican politicians and the desiccated corpse of Bill Clinton, though.
Liberals are often allies of convenience, necessity or desperation. During the Trump years, a lot of us got roped into begrudgingly supporting electoral politics on the local, state and national level as harm reduction, trying to make clear at the same time that in addition to voting, folks should be substantively organizing their communities to be able to form ad-hoc safety nets if things were to really go to shit. Building up mutual aid, undergoing medic training, becoming legal observers, starting bail funds. Liberals took all of that energy – and the energy of the George Floyd Uprising – and turned it into a major win for themselves in 2020 by ousting Donald Trump. Four years and one Cop City war (among many other things) later, they’re trying to do it again because Trump is trying to take power again.
This time, though, things have changed. The Democratic Party platform is deeply conservative, focusing on “law and order” politics like passing a draconian border bill that grants the president the unilateral power to shut the border closed at will and radically changes how the country treats asylum-seekers, or passing a bipartisan bill that would grant state attorneys-general the unilateral power to shut down access to information about, for example, queer history and sexuality information for LGBTQIA+ kids, on the grounds that it might affect their mental health. This is to say nothing about either the current, outgoing administration’s horrendous position on the Gaza genocide, or the Harris/Walz campaign’s nearly-identical one. For months the line from liberals has been “shut up! vote for the Democrats or it’ll be worse for the Palestinians! you’ll end up in the Trump camps! is that what you want?!” This dynamic has only altered slightly since Harris took over the candidacy from Biden.
And as the balloons fell from the rafters at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night, as Kamala Harris promised to be the best late-80s Republican the Democrats have ever elected, as exactly zero Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans, including actual delegates to the DNC and politicians from with the party itself were allowed to speak, this song started playing in my head.