Reading, Watching 05.26.24
This is a feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
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Some more commercial necessities: When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspirators, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s is out in less than a month — June 18 — and you can pre-order it now. Also, on the book’s page, you can now read or listen to an excerpt of the audiobook. I’ve listened to part of the audio and the reader has a great voice and does a wonderful job, so if this is how you prefer to consume your books, rest assured it will be done well. But don’t take my word for it, listen for yourself!
Here’s some of the press the book has received so far:
“The book is a whirlwind.” —Bijan Stephen, The Whitney Review of New Writing
"Lively and kaleidoscopic." —Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker
"[A] fascinating shadow story of the 1990s." —Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show
"Lucid and propulsive . . . [When the Clock Broke is] woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary . . . Ganz's dry wit is ever-present . . . This is a revelation." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A searching history of a time, not so long ago, when the social contract went out the window and Hobbesian war beset America . . . Ganz makes a convincing, well-documented case that everything old is indeed new again. A significant, provocative work." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The fascism debate is back in full swing with some truly shocking developments. Thomas Zimmer, historian at Georgetown recently participated in a discussion with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, editor of the anthology Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America. This is what he reports as taking place during the debate and its aftermath:
While Steinmetz-Jenkins stuck to the “deflationist” refrain in his prepared remarks, he went much further in the discussion with the audience afterwards. Not only did he blame Democrats, and President Joe Biden specifically, for supposedly calling all Trump voters fascists all the time – something that, to my knowledge, Biden has actually never done. When asked how he reconciled his insistence that there was no serious fascist threat to democracy in America, that fascism was not an adequate term to describe the forces that were fueling Trump’s rise, with what happened during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, Steinmetz-Jenkins insisted that there had been “many Black people” marching with the neo-Nazis and far-right militias that day. He presented this as evidence that it was wrong to call the “Unite the Right” protesters a white supremacist or fascist movement. When pressed by journalist Sarah Posner, who was in the audience and on the ground in Charlottesville in 2017, he referred to Cornel West, one of America’s best-known Black intellectuals, as a witness: West was among the counter-protesters in Charlottesville and, according to Steinmetz-Jenkins, confirmed that “many Black people” were marching under the “Unite the Right” banner (I have not been able to find anything in the public record that would support the claims Steinmetz-Jenkins made about Cornel West – I might well be missing something, but it seems West was very explicit that what he encountered in Charlottesville was indeed fascism). Why would people of color make common cause with those who openly identified as Nazis and white supremacists? Because, as Steinmetz-Jenkins suggested, they were disillusioned, disaffected – frustrated with a system that wasn’t working for them. That was, in this interpretation, the real problem on which we should be focusing if we are worried about democracy: Not the hysterical “fascism” chimera, but the neoliberal order and those who uphold it. Anything else is just an undue distraction.
I must admit I was completely flabbergasted by these remarks in the moment, and I would have liked to write about them sooner. But I wanted to wait until the video recording of the event was out, so that everyone might have a chance to confirm for themselves if my presentation of what transpired was accurate. The video is now, finally, out. However, if you’ll make it all the way to the end, you’ll see that it actually cuts out rather abruptly, and before Steinmetz-Jenkins has made any of the remarks I am criticizing. That is because Steinmetz-Jenkins has blocked the release of the full recording. According to the organizers, he would not consent to the release if it entailed the whole discussion, even though the event had always been announced as public, the intent to publish the recording was clearly communicated to everyone involved, and no one else has any objections. As a matter of fact, all other participants have made it clear to the organizers that they want this whole thing out in the public. Alas, the organizers have decided they cannot overrule Steinmetz-Jenkins’ veto. And so, I have to rely on my own notes taken during and immediately after the event, as well as several conversations with multiple other people who were in the room that night.
It’s been my contention for a while that the deflationist side in the debate has become increasingly intellectually dishonest and mendacious. And here it is illustrated perfectly. I mean say what you will about Trump, the attempt to argue that “Unite the Right” rally was not fascist is truly absurd. To me, this is the entire debate in a nutshell: the artwork for the panel was of demonstrators at Charlottesville holding a swastika flag and then Steinmetz-Jenkins just goes, “Nothing to see here!” The deflationist side has reacted with their characteristic grace and generosity. Zimmer’s two pieces engage very carefully with the arguments at some considerable length, but now Daniel Bessner responds that this is a sign of “bizarre” fixation on him.
This is truly shameful and immature behavior — and I oughta know. Do you want to be taken seriously or not? Do you want to have a debate or just say your piece and then get to taunt the other side? It’s one thing to mock me, a lowly pamphleteer, but now they are doing the same to their fellow academics! I will have more to say in the coming week.
I’ve finally been reading
’s opus The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. The amount of rigor and detail is staggering — the book comes to some 1,500 pages — but it remains highly readable and compelling nonetheless. We tend to think of Nazi Germany, with its Autobahns, Panzers, and Wunderwaffe — the first jets, the first ballistic missiles, the first submarines that could operate submerged at all times — as a technological giant, but Germany could never hope to match industrial production with the Allies. In fact, although we associate the German war effort with the mechanized Blitzkrieg, their armies still heavily relied on his horses. And prior to the war, Germans had a considerably lower standard of living—fewer home appliances and much less disposable income—than Americans or even Brits. Tooze presents Hitler’s National Socialism as a desperate effort to keep Germany from permanently falling behind the Anglo-American industrial world order:The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States.
The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalized as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today. But at the same time an understanding of the economic fundamentals also serves to sharpen our appreciation of the profound irrationality of Hitler’s project.
I think it may be possible to bring together the cultural and ideological histories of the Third Reich and Tooze’s economic history to reveal a dark rationality underlying that apparent irrationality. During my reading of Tooze’s book, I can’t stop thinking of two texts: the first is Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich and the other is an essay by the Marxist theorist Moishe Postone entitled “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.” Herf’s thesis is that rather than being an anti-modern, nostalgic movement, Nazism combined a desire for a reactionary social order with a forward-looking technological push. Tooze’s economic history makes clear that Herf’s cultural history is simply correct. Postone gives us one of the most remarkable and ingenious theories of Nazi antisemitism as a particular manifestation of the commodity fetish. In the partial anti-capitalism of National Socialism, Jews came to represent the abstract, “unnatural, unhealthy” power of finance and money, as opposed to “healthy, natural” production, industry and technology: