Did Zohran Kill Dimes Square?
An investigation
Please pre-order my new novel, Colossus. It’s about a rich and powerful Midwestern pastor with a dark secret. Here’s what the great writer Matthew Specktor has to say about it: “Ross Barkan’s Colossus begins firmly inside the troubled pastoral sublime of John Updike and Richard Ford, but it’s a feint—or a partial feint. What Barkan has in mind is something far more expansive: a broad interrogation of the American psyche in its myriad conflicting parts. The result is masterful, as thrillingly devious—and as brilliantly controlled—as Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.”
Two recent pieces of breaking news, for very different reasons, drew my attention. One is obvious enough: the election of Zohran Mamdani, my old campaign manager, as mayor of New York City. The other, more niche: Dasha Nekrasova, the actress and Red Scare podcast co-host, was dropped from her talent agency, Gersh. Nekrasova was punished for hosting and acting chummy with Nick Fuentes, the young far-right activist. Given that Nekrasova, a one-time Bernie Sanders supporter who swerved rightward in the 2020s, has hammed it up with Alec Jones and been at the center of controversies before, it was somewhat surprising that only now she’d be dumped. Was Fuentes, a white nationalist and anti-Semite, just a bridge too far for Gersh? Probably. Her acting career, also, seemed to be stalling out—she is best known for her role in Succession—and perhaps, like any other corporate player, Gersh felt the Dasha juice simply wasn’t worth the squeeze.
Nekrasova was at the forefront of an artistic scene, Dimes Square, that seems definitively done. Dimes Square, as a literal place—a Manhattan microneighborhood between Chinatown and the Lower East Side—is still humming, with all its usual haunts, from Metrograph to Clandestino, jammed in the evenings. But the cultural artifacts of Dimes, and what it came to represent, are already confined to history. Taking root in 2020, in the first year of the pandemic, the Manhattan-centric Dimes Square took its name from the neighborhood and coalesced, chiefly, as a reaction to various left-liberal pieties. In the late 2010s and 2020, social justice or woke politics were ascendant, even hegemonic, and those within Dimes Square—primarily affluent young writers, artists, models, and various hangers-on—existed as a kind of red resistance. Dimes Square figures partied in violation of pandemic era lockdown protocols. They formed a print-only newspaper, The Drunken Canal. Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump only catalyzed Dimes Square because the counterculture, at least temporarily, belonged to conservatives—or at least those willing to defy the liberal establishment. Matthew Gasda, a playwright who has been contemptuous of the woke left, shot to local fame as the author of the play Dimes Square in 2022. Red Scare, racing away from its Bernie roots, backed Trump. Sovereign House, an event space in Dimes Square, hosted many readings and parties, a number of them MAGA-inflected. Curtis Yarvin, the tech millionaire and avowed right-wing monarchist, floated about. The Mars Review of Books, founded by Noah Kumin, sprung up as a heterodox counterweight to publications like the New York Review of Books and N+1. The patron saint of Dimes Square club music, The Dare, got a major label record deal.
I was on the periphery of all of this. I published in Mars Review, read at Sovereign House, hung out with Gasda, appeared on Kaitlin Phillip’s Montez Press Radio show—this being the unofficial Dimes Square broadcaster—and spied Yarvin at Kumin’s book party. I had a few drinks at Clandestino. My politics were then, as they are now, decisively of the left, but I never felt uncomfortable hovering in right-coded spaces. Some of that I attribute to growing up in a southern Brooklyn neighborhood with many Republicans. Some of that was also the aftermath of the pandemic; I wanted to enjoy the nightlife, mix about with other artists, and find any sort of literary scene I could actually participate in. That’s what drew me; there had been, in the 2010s, no success for me on the literary front beyond a novel I published that very few people read. I was not invited to readings, I hardly knew any novelists, and my attempts to publish other short stories, book reviews, and novels usually ended in failure. Whatever literary Brooklyn was, I had no role in it.
I don’t disdain Dimes Square. In part, that’s because I always sensed its days would be numbered, especially if Trump returned to power. In truth, very few of the scene participants were genuine MAGA die-hards or actual fascists. For most of them, the political mood was just that—a mood, a current, a vibe. They had wearied of the self-seriousness of college-educated liberal elites. This weariness, though, wasn’t enough to sustain a political movement, let alone one that was artistic. There was an election night watch party at Sovereign House last November that I did not attend, and I heard there was much celebration. Little did they know, they were cheering on their own obsolescence. Trump was the Man now. He was the establishment. Liberal woke would give way to right-wing woke. The old left-wing speech policing would devolve into something far more insidious: the full-frontal assault on free speech from the United States government.
Suddenly, MAGA was no longer cool. It was Stephen Miller’s Luthorian dome, J.D. Vance’s logorrheic X screeds, and Trump’s 38 percent approval rating. It was trying, and failing, to make an actual martyr out of Charlie Kirk. But Trump, alone, did not strike the Dimes deathblow. Had the New York City mayoral race proceeded differently, the downtown reactionaries might have had a chance.
They were, ultimately, no match for Zohran Mamdani.