I recently shared a beer in a Brooklyn dive bar with alum David Klion (@DavidKlion), a rising left-wing journalist and Twitter commentator who  earned a masters in Soviet history from UChicago in 2009.

In his writing and on Twitter, Klion argues for court-packing, universal health care, a jobs guarantee, basic income, #AbolishICE – the sorts of positions centrists dismiss as naive or self-defeating, and that are viewed by today’s left as not only morally imperative but also good electoral strategy (technocratic twiddling, they reason, is unlikely to get out the vote).

Klion runs in the informal circles of the ‘dirtbag left,’ a subculture that pits itself against smarmy Beltway insiders and We-Go-High civility politics. And he basically fits the bill: he’s a former ‘lib’ disillusioned with Democrats’ insistence on submitting to norms and incrementalism.

Yet, if the left has two reactions to the smug cant of Beltway pundits – caustic humor that implicitly communicates radical demands, and what Chapo Trap House host Will Menaker has called the “quaver-voiced earnestness” of Chris Hedges types (sober, direct, imploring) – Klion falls somewhere between the two, even errs on the side of the latter.

Mainstream commentators have been able to capture the vulgarity of the dirtbag left. What struck me was Klion’s earnestness.

In contrast with some in his circle whose political vision is generated by what they (often correctly) deplore, Klion’s radicalism seems to derive as much from his capacity for imagination as from his abundant contempt. His hate might be pure, but so is his hope.

We talked about his time at UChicago, his analysis of Russia scandals, and the future of the left.

UChicago in one shot: a brutalist archive of human knowledge, a pretentious gothic campus, a visual metaphor for late capitalist financial bubbles, and a monument to the atom bomb pic.twitter.com/KF0tltAD8U

— David Klion