Another Gripe

A response to a critic

I’d planned to do something new today and publish something from another writer: a researcher on far-right paramilitaries who wrote an informed and compelling critique of my position in the fascism debate, but there was a review of my book in the journal American Affairs that I feel like requires a response.

Now, responding to reviews, particularly in ill-temper, is generally considered to be poor form. The conventional wisdom is to pretend to ignore them, act aloof and superior, and then seethe privately with one’s friends. So far as I can understand, there are a few reasons for this: it brings unwanted attention to negative opinions about your work, it opens you up to bigger attacks later down the road, and if the author of the review intended to wound you, any outburst gives evidence that they did: silence is meant to deny them such satisfaction. Mostly though, it just makes you look bad. It’s undignified: You come off as aggrieved, petty, and even possibly a little unhinged. In my own case, the book has received a friendly-enough welcome in the world that throwing a tantrum about a negligible review in a small publication looks even more unseemly. To all that, I can only say, “The cat’s out of the bag.” I can no longer make any convincing pretense about the limits of my own pettiness and I’ll let my readers be the judge of my mental soundness.

Do I have any greater purpose writing this than to vent my spleen? I genuinely hope so: I think this review is so badly done and its author so clearly unable to make basic sense of the text in front of him, that he shouldn’t be permitted to write reviews of books in the future. He has no business doing it. He’s completely deaf to tone and resonance, cannot pick up on irony and humor, cannot see metaphor or imagery, mangles sentences to make arguments land, ignores sections of the book that don’t accord with his points, and then makes baldly untrue assertions. He writes that my “prose is sometimes less than fully literate.” Well, that’s funny, because “less than fully literate” is exactly how I’d characterize this review: Traldi, like so many others in the social media era, manages to combine pedantry with illiteracy. It’s important to remember that literacy has two related, but distinct, senses: the basic one of just understanding what words and sentences mean, and a more advanced one, that of possessing a broad enough literature to understand a text on a deeper level than the most literal one. This review fails on both accounts. So, while this might seem like a strictly personal diatribe, consider the possibility that I’m being self-sacrificing: risking looking a little ridiculous to improve the world of letters, which needs all the help it can get these days.

First off, full disclosure. This writer, Oliver Traldi, and I do not like each other. We’ve fought on Twitter in the past and I’ve written criticisms of his articles in this newsletter. When he received a review copy of my work, he tweeted out something to the effect of he was disappointed to find that it was well-written. Why was he unhappy to discover it was an able-enough work? Well, because he wanted to use this occasion to write a takedown and thereby launder his personal distaste for me in some intellectually respectable way. Clearly, I’ve nothing against spirited writing or polemics, but when I’ve had a prior fight with a writer I’m reviewing, I let my editor know in advance. This is for reasons of professional ethics: I take my work seriously and believe it should serve some function beyond mere score-settling.

Okay, anyway, enough throat-clearing—let’s get going. Traldi writes:

Ganz’s disdain for his subjects often clouds his analysis. He is perhaps at his most bilious when discussing the mild-mannered George H. W. Bush, attributing to him “the ditziness of the high WASPs”—a bit like saying I have “Jewish neuroticism” or “Italian passion” (both admittedly true)—and allowing him competence only “within small bounds and small groups,” with the examples of such small bounds and small groups being “diplomacy and warfare, those true callings of patrician statesmen.” My sense is that if you’ve got diplomacy and warfare covered, you’re doing pretty well as commander‑in-chief. Most of the snarky attempts at belittling Bush, like calling the CIA “the nation’s Super Secret Club for Privileged Boys,” belong in Teen Vogue at best. The too-frequent asides about his targets’ habits in dating and sex are often accompanied by uncomfortably visceral agita­tion at their successes and uncomfortably triumphant mockery of their failures, or by odd comments like “Perhaps Clinton exercised some Protestant self-restraint, after all,” regarding Gennifer Flow­ers’s reaction to a question about whether Clinton had used condoms during their affair.

Alas, my reviewer seems to lack a Jewish sense of humor. First of all, the passage in question is not in any way “bilious:” it’s meant to be irreverent, ironical, and deflating—something most other reviewers and readers seem to grasp. It is even a little sympathetic, albeit in a condescending way to the hapless H.W. It is a character sketch of a man out of step with the times, a figure I return to throughout the book. Then Traldi just chops apart a sentence to make a point and so misrepresents what I actually meant. Here’s what I wrote in full: “Bush was not an incompetent, a feebleminded product of aristocratic inbreeding, rather he was competent within small bounds and small groups: he was comfortable within the clubby confines of state offices and as president of a council of ministers rather than in the bully pulpit.” But I didn’t write that “diplomacy and warfare” were small bounds and small groups,” I said that the state offices and councils of wars were small, because they are quite literally smaller spaces and smaller groups of people. The entire point of the paragraph was that he was an effective aristocrat and bureaucrat, a leader of councilors and ministers of state, and not an effective demagogue or popular tribune. This seems small but it goes to a fundamental problem of competence. Either Traldi was unable to glean the meaning of the paragraph or he did and deliberately pulled parts out of context to try to confuse the issue.

Traldi doesn’t care for my crack that the CIA was “the nation’s Super Secret Club for Boys for Privileged Boys,” saying that it belongs in Teen Vogue. This speaks to a lack of broader cultural awareness: the word “privileged” is evidently a triggering shibboleth to Traldi, probably because he associates it with “wokeness.” His frame of reference seems limited to the Internet culture wars of the past decade or so. Anybody with even a cursory knowledge of American history would know that I’m making ironic reference to the tendency of the CIA, especially in its early days, to be staffed by toffs from Yale. That is to say, they were quite literally from privileged backgrounds: you know, wealth, status, fancy schools, connections, etc. This is again the issue of literacy in two senses: the word’s semantic associations are limited for Traldi and he doesn’t know any broader context, historical or literary. And that’s also probably why he doesn’t get the joke (admittedly not my best) about Clinton’s condom use: does he even have the range of cultural references to know that Catholics traditionally do not use contraception? Was he even able to connect it to the previous discussion in that chapter of Protestant self-restraint that Clinton’s professor Carroll Quigley said was an essential part of the American character?

In other places, Traldi attempts to infer things from what he thinks he knows about my politics and there he badly missteps. While trying in vain to discover hints of tendentiousness in my writing he only reveals his own. Here:

It is similarly unlikely that a Clintonite politician today would abandon Sister Souljah, of whom Ganz writes, “She attempted to use her voice and assert herself, but in the end her name became a symbol, a signifier, a catchword. Her actual remarks are largely forgotten. Sister Souljah is now known for what Clinton said about her, not for anything she said herself.” But Sister Souljah’s comments were stupid and pugilis­tic—“I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people,” or “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them”—and she walked back their implications herself. Moreover, her kind of race militancy has only grown in popularity on the American left. The sentence after quoting Sister Souljah as saying that she was part of a “race war,” Ganz describes her fans as a “young, politically-conscious crowd.” “Conscious” is a success term; Ganz must think the proponents of race war got something right. Similarly, Ganz tiptoes around what he calls “the theories of Molefi Asante,” the Afro­centricity gibberish that was popular around that time. And New York’s Crown Heights riots bring out some old-fashioned euphemisms: Ganz writes of one of their central events, “a gang of youths stabbed an Or­thodox man.” The riots occasioned “a bevy of explanations and recrim­inations and counter-recriminations: permissive liberalism, Black anti­semitism, racism, the insularity of Hasidic Jews, the unfair privileging of the Lubavitcher community above their Black neighbors, apartheid, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Ganz doesn’t give much thought to blaming the riots on the rioters, and he doesn’t show much interest in assessing the plausibility of any of these explanations.

I suspect the reason Traldi knows what Sister Souljah’s full comments were is that I reproduced them in my book. He’s quoting my book quoting her. I did not try to hide the ball. He goes on to say: “Ganz describes her fans as a “young, politically-conscious crowd.” “Conscious” is a success term; Ganz must think the proponents of race war got something right.” What? I had to look up what a “success term” is. Sure enough, it’s some kind analytic philosophy bullshit—the writer is an analytic philosopher. What I meant by saying they were “politically-conscious” was that they were conscious of politics and that’s just plainly true: Souljah’s fans would’ve been more aware of political issues than the general rap audience. There’s no attempted attribution of positive value there. If I’m so covertly sympathetic to Souljah’s race politics why do I reproduce the writings of her black critics who agreed with Clinton’s denunciation? And why do I take pains to show how her thoughts on welfare and social policy were really quite conservative and ironically not that different from Clinton’s own? This is all extremely thin gruel.

Next, I do not in the slightest “tiptoe” around the theories of Molefi Asante. I give a full and accurate description of them, including this sentence:

Though in 1992 Asante claimed that “Afrocentricity does not seek to replace Eurocentricity in its arrogant disregard for other cultures,” his book told a slightly different story: it repeatedly refers to the “decadence” of Western society and proposes Afrocentricity as an all-encompassing social and intellectual framework, a rival to other ideologies and religions.

Again this is meant to be an ironic deflation, but that’s a tone Traldi is entirely deaf to: in this case, the “slightly” is facetious, ironic, sarcastic, whatever you wanna call it: it actually means “quite, very, extremely.” I’m saying that Asante mischaracterized his work publicly and that an actual look at it reveals a grandiose and even totalitarian ideology. Then, I go on to quote at length contemporary criticisms of Asante that say exactly the type of thing Traldi is saying about him, including one by Henry Louis Gates Jr. I also then write about how Samuel Francis saw a clear parallel between Asante’s racecraft and David Duke’s. Maybe Traldi would’ve been happier if I said, “Bad!” a la Trump-tweet at the end of each passage, providing a sort of semantic punctuation that might help him make better sense of paragraphs.

Also, in what sense is writing “a gang of youths stabbed an Or­thodox man” in any way “euphemistic?” What word here would be less euphemistic? It’s literally what happened: they took a knife—or one of them did at least—and stabbed him. I didn’t write, “In an affray with a gang of youths, an Orthodox man ended up being accidentally stabbed,” no, I wrote that the gang stabbed him and then I said he died in the hospital from his wounds. That’s just true. As far as attributing blame for the riots: I’m not a prosecutor, I’m a historian, I can describe what happened and I can describe the context. Included in the context I describe is nasty antisemitic propaganda from people like Leonard Jefferies and Sonny Carson. In no way do I shroud the ugliness of the riots. I describe the crowd shouting “Jews! Jews! Jews!” and I tell the story of an elderly Holocaust survivor’s suicide. Should I have written, “These antisemitic rioters were very bad and ultimately responsible for their actions?” My book is not about the Crown Heights riots nor does it attempt to give an exhaustive explanation what happened there. It’s included in a chapter on New York politics and it’s meant to give an impression of its noxious atmosphere at the time. Here Traldi tries to look for a subtext, but it simply isn’t there. If I may venture my own reading of Traldi in response, he’s basically saying, “Mr. Woke John Ganz is being a little too soft on the blacks here.” I make no bones about my political sympathies, but I was trying to give a reasonably accurate reconstruction of that moment as a historian. And I’m touchy about this because it becomes a question about my intellectual honesty. I don’t think any fair-minded reader can say that I hid or even soft-pedaled any of the relevant facts, which is why Traldi has to grasp at straws here.

Traldi struggles even with basic syllogisms, which is one thing I’d expect him to understand as an analytic philosopher. He writes, “…Ganz, who is surprisingly adept at letting the facts speak for themselves, falters occasionally when he pushes them a bit too far, either stylistically or conceptually; in these moments he picks his targets a bit more purposefully than his words. Early on, he says that Reaganomics “would come to be increasingly labeled ‘neoliberalism.’” But American trucking was deregulated under Jimmy Carter, and the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed by Bill Clinton; while Reaganite tax cuts were partisan, core neoliberal ideas were bipartisan.” I’m not saying that “Reaganomics = neoliberalism,” I’m saying the types of economic reforms that typified the Reagan era would come to be labeled neoliberalism. That’s it. I’m perfectly aware it was bipartisan consensus and had Traldi been paying attention he would’ve seen this. In that very chapter, I talk about Clinton’s continuation of those same policies. Clinton’s signing of NAFTA makes up part of the coda of the book. Again, he’s trying to fact-check me with facts that I recount! Elsewhere in the book, I talk about Jimmy Carter’s administration beginning the deregulation of the FCC prior to Reagan. And I use the very word “bipartisan” to describe the deregulation of finance in the early 1980s. Traldi is trying desperately here to make me seem ill-informed and unsophisticated, when any fair-minded reader would see clearly what I meant.

In this next instance, I can’t believe he is really this obtuse: He must be operating in bad faith. Traldi writes, “He calls Bob Casey Sr. “Pennsylvania’s pro-choice gover­nor” (Casey was probably the most prominent pro-life Democrat of the era, and the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act was challenged in Planned Parenthood v. Casey).” This is obviously a typo that made it past copy editing: I meant to write “pro-life.” If he read the book, Traldi would know that I know about Casey’s stance, because I talk about Planned Parenthood v. Casey at some considerable length and Bob Casey features in Pat Buchanan’s “Cultural War” speech to which I dedicate an entire chapter. Does Traldi really believe I think Bob Casey was pro-choice—in which case, he’s inattentive or simply dense—or did he see a cheap opportunity to try to make me look dumb? In either case, it’s unbecoming of a serious review. Where was his editor?

Traldi also apparently just doesn’t understand metaphors. He writes:

In his introduction, Ganz writes that Donald Trump “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate in the period of this book,” that is, in the 1990s. But the opposite seems true. The figures who concern Ganz articulated political visions, took stances, connected their views to broader ideas about society and culture, and were helped along by prominent conservative writers and thinkers. Trump, by con­trast, is a sloganeer with little interest in crystallizing anything, and to the extent that there is such a thing as Trumpism, it is usually either a post hoc interpretation of Trump’s appeal or a return to the very sorts of figures, like Christopher Lasch or James Burnham, covered by Ganz. Certainly, Trump is more popular—he won, and (as of this writing) he might win again!—than the “con men and conspiracists” of When the Clock Broke, but even if Ganz is right about the connection here, that popularity comes not from crystallization but from its opposite, obfus­cation.

Crystallization in this context does not mean to clarify. It means to take definite and fixed form, you know, like a crystal. The image is borrowed from the process of crystallization in chemistry: the subjects of the book are disparate elements—that word should’ve been a big clue—the atoms and molecular components that ultimately came together in the form of Trump. I’m not saying his popularity comes from his ability to clarify things: of course not. I’m saying he combined in a certain recognizable structure the political and cultural material I attempt to chronicle. That may be the wrong way to understand things or an inapt metaphor, but it should critiqued on the possible failure of its own terms, not according to a gross misunderstanding.

This person Traldi should find another way to occupy his time. He simply can’t read at the level required to review books properly. And his review does more of a disservice to the readers of American Affairs than it does to my book: It provides absolutely no intellectual illumination whatsoever.

I thank the reader for his or her patience.