A Gripe (or Two)
When Critics Get It Wrong
I know I’m supposed to be on vacation, but I wanted to quickly reply to a recent review that I feel actually made some errors of fact, rather than just proffering interpretations I don’t agree with. On the whole I really enjoyed and appreciated Aaron Timms’s spirited review of When the Clock Broke in The New Republic, but a couple parts really puzzled me. The first is a small thing—barely worth mentioning, really—but Timms writes:
Ganz writes about the right’s trolls and brawlers with an unusual perceptiveness. Though politically he’s the opposite of his subjects, there’s a certain affinity between them in matters of style. Ganz, a self-taught historian who began writing about the far right in the early years of the Trump presidency and operates a lively political Substack called Unpopular Front, is perhaps best known as a briny eminence of the discourse, the online debate about politics and culture that unfolds every day on Twitter. If you type Ganz’s username and the word “fuck” into the search bar on Twitter, you gain instant access to a scroll of profanity and verbal belligerence of biblically entertaining proportions. It’s not hard to understand why such an abrasive writer might have been drawn to the story of pugilists like Buchanan and Gotti, who grew up scuffling in the streets and kept the fight going into middle age.
First of all, what counts as a “self-taught” historian? I don’t have an advanced degree in history, but I do have a bachelors degree in history—with honors I might add—from the University of Michigan. I definitely drew on the experience of writing an honors thesis in history while writing my book, so to some degree I was trained. (Did I mention that I graduated with honors?) It’s not really a big deal, but I’m not exactly some kind of eccentric autodidact over here. As for the abrasiveness stuff, sure, okay, but this reminds me of one of my favorite Eddie Murphy bits: he recounts how tourists who don’t speak very much English and miss the jokes would come up to him and go, “Eddie Murphy! Fuck You! I know you! I see you on television! You are the ‘fuck you’ man, right?” Anyway…
More substantively, this part bothered me:
What we see less of, beyond one brief and brilliant excursus on the intellectual history of Clintonian centrism, is the maneuvering of the liberals who went on to occupy the White House for 16 of the 24 years between 1992 and the election of Trump. The political elites responsible for the economic program that sowed today’s misfortunes are mostly absent from Ganz’s account, whose dutiful paragraphs on deindustrialization, free trade, and job losses never really identify the political agents behind the country’s drift into stalled productivity and chronic inequality. Financialization, the rise of shareholder capitalism, globalization’s boom-bust cycle of hot money and sudden stops, the ungodly policy marriage of austerity for wage earners with abundance for asset owners: On these equally important drivers of the country’s post-Reagan economic and social malaise, When the Clock Broke has little to say.
Well, the book is not really about those liberals or the political elites that were responsible for the policies in question here, but it is just plain wrong to say I have little to say about the economic factors at play or who was responsible for them. I don’t know what makes paragraph merely “dutiful” rather than actually invested in the question, but the introduction begins with the economic picture: it’s the foundation of the book, which has a broadly materialist approach to history. I did a good deal of research to get detailed facts and figures on the economic transformation of the Reagan era. The book begins with a pretty lengthy consideration of the structure of employment, wages, and capitalist competition for a reason. I wasn’t just phoning it in because I felt like I had to mention it. If you check the notes, you’ll see I favor the Keynesian-Marxian economist James R. Crotty’s interpretation of the 1980s as a period of “fratricidal competition,” because it fit best with my empirical observations: it was a period of superficial prosperity but underlying intense fragmentation and chaos. Here is a rough diagram of the ultimately pretty simple overarching argument: economic disintegration —> political disintegration —> “morbid symptoms” / politics of national despair. Throughout the book, I return again and again to how the economy affected the political situation: For instance, I detail inner workings of the savings and loan crisis and its political dimensions. As for not highlighting the people responsible for the economic policies, again, it’s not what the book is about, nor is it even entirely true: I put the blame on the Reagan administration and the Democrats that went along with it, and to some degree, the Carter administration. If I don’t detail the nitty-gritty of that policy regime’s origins it’s because it’s not the subject of the book. There are many very fine books about the neoliberal turn, but this is not meant to be one of them: it’s about the fruits of the neoliberal turn.
Timms goes on to write:
These are, perhaps, churlish criticisms. There’s a limit to what a single book can do, even one as vividly drawn as this. But When the Clock Broke gives us no real guide to why Trump succeeded where the far-right strivers of the early 1990s failed. Nor does it help us understand the evident electoral limitations of Trumpism, the enduring appeal of liberal stability and “business as usual.”
I wouldn’t say “churlish” so much as “not carefully considered.” It does implicitly give a guide why Trump succeeded: he represented a kind of synthesis of the far right bluster of Buchanan, the folksy I-can-fix-it populism of Perot, the gangster charisma of Gotti, and the entertainment factor of the “shock jock” talk show host. He somehow managed to put the whole package together. I don’t think you need a book to tell you why there are limitations of Trumpism: it’s ugly, and as they are saying these days, weird.
While I’ve got you here, I also had some issues with Tristan Hughes’s review in Jacobin. (This was the first of two reviews Jacobin published of When the Clock Broke.) I should say Hughes wrote me a very nice note saying how much he enjoyed the book—he said it was “obviously excellent”, thank you, Tristan—and how he was looking forward to an exchange about it, so I was sort of dumbfounded when I read the actual review:
Within the arena of electoral politics, treating Buchanan as Trumpism 1.0 is misleading, despite their similar rhetoric around trade and immigration. Buchanan and co. espoused a specific variety of segregationist white supremacy when it was becoming anachronistic. This model of brazen racial chauvinism failed in the 1990s, and similar efforts have struggled more recently.
The contemporary Trump coalition represents a more nimble and mainstream form of racial and class domination — one that’s adapted to the post–civil rights era.
The book doesn’t really treat Buchanan as Trumpism 1.0. There are many other figures in the book, including Ross Perot, who Hughes almost totally ignores in his review. He certainly didn’t lean into the racial chauvinism in the same way that Buchanan or Duke did. This is a bit unscientific, but if you search within the book “Buchanan” appears on 76 pages, and Perot on 94 pages. Also, I may have an old school conception of politics, but I don’t think a primary challenger effectively sinking an incumbent is exactly a “failure” of a certain type of politics. Traditionally, political scientists and historians look at that kind of thing and say, “something was up.” I wanted to help figure out what.
Was Buchanan simply a “neo-segregationist” or did he offer a more complicated form of white supremacy? Well, he certainly didn’t run explicitly on, “We’re gonna do segregation again.” He synthesized other themes and appeals, particularly in the North, where he had some notable success—more so than in the Deep South. In fact, his appeal was more “anti-woke” perhaps: he decided to run when the Civil Rights Act of 1992 was signed by Bush, calling it an unfair system of quotas for minorities. He used Jim Crow and Confederate nostalgia, but this was very self-conscious mythmaking. Even David Duke had to hide his Nazi past to some degree and pay lip service to egalitarian notions. And sure, Buchananite blood and soil-ism might fail and be a politically irrational choice, but that doesn’t prevent them from trying: Look at the selection of JD Vance, who gave a literal blood and soil speech and said “America First” more than once!
Hughes writes:
There are direct successors to Buchanan and co., notably the alt-right. But they, like Buchanan in the 1990s, ping-pong between marginality and outsize influence. The alt-right got a lot of media attention, but it was sued into oblivion. It’s tempting to conflate Trumpism and the alt-right — as well as other extreme groups — but the alt-right never had any direct connection to the Trump administration.
I don’t know if that’s even factually true on the most basic level. Remember Steve Bannon? The reason why we don’t talk about the alt-right anymore is because its a superfluous notion: there’s no alternative, they are the right. The alt-right’s preoccupations with race, with nationalism, with authoritarian solutions to “national decadence” are have totally suffused the Republican party, especially on the level of its young staffer class. They all read Sam Francis, BAP, and other shit like that. They all trade racist memes. They all hang out in group chats with Groypers and other denizens of the extremes. The alt-right has melded with the GOP, just as Trump has taken it over. Of course it has to be put in a lower key for the public, but it’s just barely watered down.
Hughes catches that I made a reference to Fritz Stern’s Politics of Cultural Despair, writing:
Ganz’s invocation of the politics of national despair is a reference to Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair, a book about German conservative intellectuals such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. These intellectuals made sweeping proclamations about the contemporary world’s decadence and sought a conservative revolution, as one put it, in favor of “not freedom but communal bonds.” These authoritarian ideas were part of a broader culture that shaped Nazi ideology.
Weimar comparisons aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. They were at the heart of the bitter “fascism debate” about whether the current right was a precursor to something more extreme, which took place in articles in this publication and others. Ganz was a notable participant. There are groups in When the Clock Broke that closely replicate Stern’s politics of cultural despair, especially the paleoconservatives. They themselves read Weimar’s conservative revolutionaries and sought cultural rejuvenation through popular revolt. In the case of Francis, he was self-consciously fascist.
Well, I wasn’t making a Weimar comparison nor has it ever been my favored point of comparison. And surely Hughes knows that of the three figures in Stern’s book, only one, Moeller van den Bruck, lived into the Weimar era and he died relatively early in it. They formed part of the pre-history of Nazi ideas.
Finally, Hughes says:
The more modest interpretation of Buchanan-style populism’s significance is that it was one model of authoritarianism that failed in the 1990s and probably can’t be resuscitated. As Ganz points out, we’re still trying to explain how “the loss of faith in the old order has registered as intensified anti-egalitarianism rather than a renewed egalitarianism.” But if we’re interested in that question — “Why was Trumpism electable, and why was it durable?” — from the get-go, an uncontextualized focus on conservatism’s darkest corners can make it hard to understand why people find Trumpian politics appealing.
What do you mean “uncontextualized?” I think the book takes a lot of pain to put ideas in their economic and social context. Their ideas were shaped in a certain institutional context, which I describe, and got some purchase when the country was in a certain economic and political crisis point. And the point is that that these figures in the end were not all that fringe: all of them either successfully challenged the GOP establishment for a time or were ensconced in it some way. Buchanan worked in two White Houses and was a figure on TV for decades. Francis was a Senate staffer and an editor at Washington’s premier conservative newspaper. Sobran was a nationally syndicated columnist. The dark corners are sometimes very close indeed.
Gripes are over. Have a nice week.