Enemies Day

Reading, Watching 03.09.25

This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.

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Some readers don’t like it when I spend a lot of time on score-settling and going after people, they find it unseemly and petty, but alas…this week brought us a few knaves.

First of all, you may remember my piece about the Nazi salutes, or rather, the explainer of the Nazi salute that the Free Press ran. Well, the author has written a response to me. I was sort of wrestling with whether or not to answer, because I don’t want to treat this person as a peer or give them undue attention, but I’ll keep it brief. It’s a weird and incoherent piece, he praises me as a good writer and calls himself a huge fan, but also says, “an angry guy,” “seething with rage” and that I’m “blinded by ideology or hate,” which made me prone to bad arguments and incapable of thinking logically. So am I a raving lunatic or not? Make up your mind. In fact, he said I was a kind of mirror image of fascioid right-wingers with an outlook taken from Carl Schmitt, the political theorist who said that all of politics was about the friend-enemy distinction. “You are the real fascist,” essentially.

First of all, if you need ChatGPT to figure out if I’m a Marxist or not, you should just drop the pretense that you’re some kind of intellectual. You’re supposed to read and interpret: If you can’t do that at a basic level, you ought to be replaced by an LLM.

The real takeaway for me is that this guy is just totally baffled someone could feel passionately about anything—other than maybe that some races or groups are unnaturally inferior. It’s true that Nazi salutes make me feel burning rage and hatred. Nazis and fascists are my enemies as I think they should be everyone else of goodwill. That was my whole point. It might have something to do with the fact that these guys murdered my family members. It also might have something to do with the fact that I view that ideology and movement as the worst thing ever devised in history, as a deep affront to everything good and noble in the human experience. Racism, like the author’s, that tries to pass itself off as scientific or dispassionate does not soothe me into complacency: it makes me even more angry, because it is coldblooded and slimy. I don’t consider it a legitimate object of discussion. It’s an insidious ideology that dissolves the common bonds of humanity. I have more tolerance for ignorant prejudice than for “scientific” racism that tries to organize itself as a body of scientific knowledge that would systematically degrade and ultimately destroy the equality of mankind. To me, a preacher of racism—no matter how subtle or qualified—is not just my enemy, but the enemy of all mankind. Even if it were not all pseudoscience and charlatanism, I would reject it in principle. The division of humanity into racial castes is destructive of the very notion of shared humanity.

I try, imperfectly, to follow Adorno’s categorical imperative, that we must “arrange [our] thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” To me, racist ideology, especially when it’s sanitized and scientized, is the first whiff of poison gas.

I also don’t think this person understands what a profound insult racism represents. My family fought and sustained wounds in Germany’s wars, they earned medals, they believed in the goodness and rightness of their nation, and felt called to sacrifice themselves for it. Look at the soldiers in America’s armed forces now being demoted, removed, and humiliated because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. Or the attempts to erase black citizens’ contributions to America’s wars. These men and women were willing to sacrifice their lives for this country and now some in their country say they are not worthy. It’s been decided they are fundamentally not American. That betrayal should provoke anger in anyone with a sense of honor.

I’m charged with intolerance of those with different views than me, but even the author says that the right is now infested with Nazis. I’ve seen this political movement turn into something monstrous and absurd in my lifetime: a strange cult of personality around an evident moron, and then I’m asked for more forbearance towards my political opponents. I once had hopes in a rational center-right to reject these things. Those hopes have been repeatedly dashed, largely because people like this author are unable or unwilling to see things in their proper perspective. You may read but don’t remotely understand my work or much else in the world. ChatGPT will not help you. While claiming to be defenders of “Western Civilization,” writers like this one have already betrayed its greatest accomplishment in ways they will never fully understand.

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Here’s another gem. In a recent essay on Foucault and neoliberalism his Substack, writer Blake Smith included this paragraph:

In our own day, we can observe that the political consequences of deindustrialization, offshoring, and the erosion of wages and living standards for many members of the working and middle classes in the United States were not politically articulated as a “crisis” (at least, not by more than a few marginal voices) while these processes were underway in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. That last decade witnessed the quixotic and ultimately ineffective anti-globalization, pro-industrial-policy presidential campaign of Ross Perot. It also saw more morbid symptoms of social unrest (militias, cults, riots, and pervasive moods of nihilism and violence across popular culture). By the turn of the millennium, however, neoliberal elites might well have congratulated themselves for reordering the American economy without a “crisis.” Only a generation later, after the interlude of the War on Terror, and through such initially bizarre-seeming phenomena as the Tea Party and the “Birther” movements, did right-wing opposition to the federal government, Barack Obama, and all things related thereto begin to shape itself, temporarily and unsteadily, during the first Trump campaign, into an indictment of constitutive elements of the contemporary neoliberal order such as massive immigration and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs.

Readers will recognize the thesis of When the Clock Broke. Now, I’m somewhat flattered that the history I wrote is being treated as canonical and not requiring citation, but I can’t allow this to pass without remark. This fellow Smith once called me a “retard” and wrote that you could not read “one of my paragraphs without embarrassment or laughter.” To be fair, he deleted that post, but he did not delete this summary of my writing: ‘Drumpf is a fascist; the Dreyfus Affair explains everything; remember the 90s?’” Yeah, I do remember the 90s. And so now do you, apparently! In case you might think that this is just a coincidence, and anyone might come up with this interpretation of Perot and the early 90s, Smith even borrows the language I use in the introduction of the book: I call exactly those things—”militias, cults, riots, and pervasive moods of nihilism and violence across popular culture”—morbid symptoms,” using Gramsci’s phrase. I get that it must be very embarrassing to acknowledge the work of an author you’ve made a show of holding in contempt. But perhaps not more embarrassing than trying to hide the fact.

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Finally, there’s a review by Andrew Busch of When the Clock Broke, in Claremont Review of Books, which is a publication of the Trumpist Claremont Institute think tank. There’s nothing particularly egregious about, but I thought the conclusion was just silly:

Driving Ganz’s analysis is a particular way of thinking, captured neatly in his list of the “good guys” of the early ’90s: Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, Jerry Brown, Harris Wofford. His partisan leanings lead him to make observations that he is unable or unwilling to process fully. Clearly, he fears demagoguery and authoritarianism—at least from the right—but he simply equates democracy with egalitarianism, never pairing it with constitutionalism, rights, or the consent of the governed. Yet, it is precisely democracy untethered to constitutionalism or fundamental rights that is most vulnerable to demagoguery and authoritarianism. Once that door is opened, any unscrupulous actor can walk through. Ganz quotes Huey P. Long as claiming, “There is perfect democracy [in Louisiana], and when you have perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship.” Long might well have read Aristotle. But, sincere or not, Long was nothing if not a voice for egalitarianism—the veritable Bernie Sanders of the 1930s.

It’s a little strange for the Right to continue to give lectures on constitutionalism, rights, and consent of the governed in the wake of Trump and Musk’s constant assault on the constitution. So is trying to tie me to some left-wing populist direct democracy anti-constitutionalist position, as I point out in several places the anti-Madisonian vision of Ross Perot. And, as my book makes very clear, Huey Long and Bernie Sanders have very little to do with each other: Long was not really an egalitarian at all, his social policies were explicitly anti-socialist and anti-labor, and Sanders is a great parliamentarian and institutionalist defender of the Senate, for good or ill. They both attacked the rich and called for redistribution. The analogy ends there. Sanders has more in common with the great historical Senators who viewed their position as a kind of permanent redoubt for a dissenting view of American government.