Reading Watching 06.02.24
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little about what I’ve recently been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
This morning I have for you:
The long struggles of deindustrialized America.
Trying to make sense of the Israeli (?) ceasefire deal.
Perry Anderson’s magisterial “House of Zion” on how hard it would be to end the occupation.
Christopher Caldwell reveals aspects of the American right’s mythological view of Israel.
But first, I’m very pleased to announce the official launch of When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s on June 18th at McNally Jackson Seaport, which will feature me and Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times in conversation. Please go to the event page to RSVP and grab a seat!
Also, When The Clock Broke was featured in The New York Times’s round up “17 New Books Coming In June.”
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)
Part of the story of my book is the deindustrialization of America and in the Financial Times this weekend there’s a long piece on the travails of the former auto town Janesville, Wisconsin. Efforts to revitalize old centers of industry are beset with challenges — the creation of new jobs and opportunities can’t quite match what these towns have lost:
What Janesville went through is classic deindustrialisation, and manufacturing certainly has ebbed; it accounts for one job in six in Rock County, which includes Janesville — nearly 2,500 fewer manufacturing jobs than just before the assembly plant went still. Its identity as an automaking town ripped away, the local economy has become more diverse. As James Otterstein, the county’s economic development manager for the past quarter-century, told me: “It takes 20 to 30 employers to replace the vacancy created by the GM machine.” Some new businesses have arrived, including a Dollar General distribution centre that drew thousands of applicants for about 500 advertised jobs when it opened several years ago. Some longtime businesses have grown. And along Main Street, fewer storefronts are vacant, with a block of historic brick structures now including a wine bar and a shop specialising in olive oils. Amid this are a few wrinkles. Almost none of the jobs added in town lately are unionised and so lack the generous benefits — including days off for hunting season — that GM furnished. Wages are another matter. Even today, Otterstein estimates, fewer than a thousand people in town are earning around the $28 an hour that GM was paying back when the plant closed. And while wages have been rising recently, inflation has been tempering the practical value of such gains, the way it has around the country.
The embrace of industrial policy and efforts to reconfigure the economy towards tech has not yet benefited.
The city’s ambitions have been stoked in part by the economic policies of President Joe Biden, now campaigning for re-election, who pushed through Congress laws to promote infrastructure and new technologies. Just last month, the president visited another small Wisconsin city, about 60 miles east of Janesville, to announce the creation of an artificial intelligence data centre by Microsoft — part of the White House’s “Investing in America” agenda. The catch is, as new federal money has begun flowing from the recent laws to spur the economy, Janesville has not benefited. When the US Commerce Department last October announced grants to 31 regional “tech hubs”, the larger Wisconsin cities of Madison and Milwaukee were on the list. Without a major research university or a large white-collar workforce, said Otterstein, the county economic development manager, Janesville was not eligible to apply. He sees billions of federal dollars from the 2022 Chips and Science Act flowing to Phoenix to expand the semiconductor industry there. “If the federal government would have stepped forward to say, ‘We are going to drive a chip manufacturer specifically to the upper Midwest and locations that are dormant industrial plants . . .’” Otterstein said, “I’m not suggesting our property would have risen to the top, but at least we would have been in the conversation.”
It’s been extremely difficult to untangle what’s going on with the Israel’s response to Joe Biden’s Friday speech where he announced that there was a proposed deal — coming from Israel — for a longterm ceasefire. Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that Israel’s war plans are not changing and Israeli forces continue to press into central Rafah. This has lead to speculation that Biden attempted a bluff wherein he presented the plans as Israeli in origin to back Bibi into a corner but this effort, like many other Biden administrative initiatives, has fallen flat on its face. But a senior advisor to Netanyahu then told the Sunday Times that Israel had approved the plan but that details had to be worked out. Then he reiterated the message that war plans were unchanged. So what on earth is going on? The most convincing analysis I’ve heard so far is that Netanyahu is trying to buy time to decide whether or not to take a big gamble: take the deal and then jettison the support of the far right — Ben-Gvir and Smotrich said they’d leave the government if he did. On the other hand, his centrist allies have also threatened to quit the coalition if he does not develop credible post-war plan. Netanyahu may believe he has more of a political future without the far right. I recommend watching this interview with Israeli political commentator Ori Goldberg, whose takes I’ve found insightful: