Richard Beck is an Idiot

And a Liar

I know that my whole thing of writing ill-tempered responses to reviews is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I beg dear readers’ patience once again. I think it’ll be clear that this one is particularly egregious: I believe it’s written in patent and obvious bad faith, it’s riddled with basic factual errors, and out-of-context quotes. It neither competently reconstructs the book's contents nor accurately characterizes my opinions on other subjects. Instead of dealing with what I’ve written, it attempts to caricature my work and smear my person. The author comes across as bigoted: Not in the racial sense, but in the sense that he has a fixed idea of what I’m all about, and he ignores all evidence to the contrary. What makes this all the more galling is that this piece does not appear in some right-wing rag, but in n+1, a journal of the intellectual left that I’ve read and admired for the twenty years it’s existed. It brings me no pleasure to say this, considering I generally think highly of the people there, but this review does not reflect well on their present editorial standards.

First, some background: In late 2023, the author of this piece Richard Beck and I had a spat online. I wasn’t previously familiar with him. I can’t remember what it was about, but he screengrabbed some tweets of mine and added a commentary I felt was hostile. I responded with what I felt was requisite forcefulness. Then Mr. Beck messaged me saying that he may have expressed himself too harshly, but that he did not appreciate being insulted. He said he had deleted the offending tweets, and I apologized and said I would do the same. (He neither acknowledged nor accepted my apology, I should note.) And that was the last of our interactions I can recall. About a year ago, an editor at the Times asked me if I would like to review Beck’s new book, Homeland. It looked interesting and I agreed, but then I remembered our little fight and told the editor that I probably was not the best reviewer for it, because although I thought I could probably still write a disinterested review, if I did not like the book, it might look like I was settling scores. It seemed to me the ethical thing to do. Apparently, no such scruples attended Mr. Beck’s decision to review my book a year after it was released. Anyway.—

The review begins badly, with a big factual error, setting the tone for the whole shoddy thing:

Less than a year into Donald Trump’s first term as President, the writer John Ganz launched his Substack, Unpopular Front. His first post, titled “Libertarian ‘Democracy Skepticism’ and the Pathological Self,” elaborated on a Washington Post op-ed Ganz had written about the influence of libertarian social and political thought on the Trump-supporting alt-right. Over the next three years Ganz didn’t publish much on Unpopular Front, but in January 2021, after Trump’s supporters rioted at the Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, he decided to knuckle down. On January 23, Ganz wrote an essay criticizing a segment of the left he described as “Sorelian” — after Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist who famously defended revolutionary violence — for sympathizing too much with rioters. Two days later, Ganz argued that “Trump represents an incipient or inchoate fascism.” Two days after that, he published the first installment of what became a multipart series on the parallels between Trumpism and the late Third Republic in France. These pieces established the concerns that would animate Ganz’s writing over the following four years. The first foreshadowed a sustained interest in chiding left-wing commentators for their errors in responding to the Trump phenomenon. The post on “inchoate fascism” identified what Ganz viewed as the most serious threat to the country’s political and social fabric. And the series on the Third Republic inaugurated his practice of combing through the annals of modern European and American history in search of analogues to our current situation.

I didn’t start my Substack less than a year into Trump’s presidency. I didn’t publish on Unpopular Front because it did not exist until January 27th, 2021, when I posted my intro to the Third Republic series. Everything before then was a Medium post that I imported into Substack. Now, this looks like not such a big deal, an honest mistake that just flummoxed an overworked fact checker, and n+1 has already corrected it, albeit somewhat tersely and without detail. But what Beck has done here is to create a distorted image of my whole career as a writer, painting me as a kind of lazy blogger who got so upset by January 6th that I finally got going. If he’s trying to give an instructive summary of what I’ve been doing with my writing so far, he’s already done a terrible job. While I had a full-time job, I wrote quite a bit between that September 2017 Washington Post op-ed and the beginning of my Substack, but mainly for magazines and newspapers. I wrote several pieces for the Baffler, including the one on Murray Rothbard and the one on 1992 that would ultimately become my book. For the Times, I wrote about the danger to birthright citizenship in 2018. In early 2020, I wrote a piece for The New Republic that contended that the conservative movement and Republican Party would not be able to jettison Trump. I’m not trying to give my whole CV here, but the point is if you want to characterize my entire output as a writer and talk about what “established the concerns that would animate Ganz’s writing,” you might have at least done a cursory look into what that writing actually consisted of. So begins the attempted takedown wherein the author didn’t even bother to do his homework. It’s just all extremely sloppy. (And, for what it’s worth, I started my Substack mostly to make money: I lost my job in the pandemic, my unemployment was running out, and I didn’t know what else to do. Thankfully, it worked out.)

From there, the review goes along quite nicely for a while until the problems start. But, of course, Beck cannot bring himself to write too many compliments without some nasty little swipes. For instance, Beck writes, “While the hint of self-satisfaction in Ganz’s prose style can become grating in large doses, it’s mostly good fun.” What? Can you give an example of said self-satisfaction, perhaps a sentence that seems particularly to smirk at the reader? Of course not, because that’s just some hating ass shit. That sentence is linked to a footnote that goes into my admittedly rather pugilistic writing during the fascism debate and concludes with this unwarranted armchair psychoanalysis:

Thankfully, these childish outbursts do not mar the contents of When the Clock Broke. They might, however, illuminate some aspects of Ganz’s affective interest in the right-wingers he discusses, many of whom stood in a relation to the wellsprings of political power similar to the professional position Ganz understands himself to be occupying as a historian. Duke, Francis, Buchanan, Perot, and Gotti were all marginal figures, outsiders who made careers and reputations out of needling, persuading, attacking, and dominating their professional and social superiors. These men delighted in forcing complacent elites in their respective fields to accept them as legitimate players, or at least to contend with their charisma and ideas. (Trump himself is thought to have resolved to pursue the presidency in 2016 after Barack Obama humiliated him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.) Ganz detests his subjects’ politics, but in terms of their insecurities and resentments, he also clearly understands where they were coming from.

Uh huh, well, yes, not all of us went to Harvard, Dick. But seriously, this is just a gratuitous attack on my character. It completely ignores the entire context of the debate, where the other side was not exactly polite either, and makes me sound like a lunatic populist bomb thrower fired by ressentiment and in a campaign of elite destruction. (In a way, that makes me sound way cooler than I actually am.) I felt I was giving as good as I got. Now, this may not clear me of the childishness allegations, but I did not really start this. I was friendly with many of my interlocutors before being shocked by the rudeness and intellectual dishonesty with which they carried on the dispute. Fairness would demand that the bitterness of the whole situation be taken into account. There was a broader context, but Beck is particularly bad when it comes to context, as we’ll see.

Let’s get to the actual substantive parts of the review.

Alongside these merits, however, lie significant analytical omissions and deficiencies. For a work of history, When the Clock Broke is frustratingly reluctant to advance explicit historical arguments. The book’s introduction only argues by insinuation, signposting ideas that the reader assumes Ganz will substantiate by the end of the book: above all, that one of Ganz’s central goals will be to explain how Trump’s presidency became possible. Ganz confirmed this impression in a Substack post published shortly after the book’s release. Helpfully titled “What My Book Is About,” it revealed that Ganz’s initial interest in the period stemmed from the realization that “all of these alt-right guys, who had become fascists and were so excited by Trump — to a man — said their political awakening started with reading Murray Rothbard.” I would like to suggest that this might have been a useful piece of information to include in the book itself.

In the same post, Ganz identifies what he calls the “central historical problematic of the book”: “How do we get from Reagan to Duke, Buchanan, and eventually to Trump?” At no point, however, does When the Clock Broke even try to explain how any of the first three people produced the forty-fifth President of the United States. Instead, Trump haunts the book like a version of Yeats’s “rough beast” — slouching toward Washington but not yet born. Ganz succeeds in sketching a plausible genealogy of Trumpism’s political and rhetorical style, but he never manages to connect that style’s originators to the man himself. More importantly, Ganz doesn’t explain how all these “losers” he describes with so much wit and fluency eventually managed to produce one man who won big and came to dominate the country’s politics, succeeding where so many others had failed. He never even tells us whether the figures he discusses had any connections with Trump — social, commercial, or otherwise. And he doesn’t explain why, if the country had “cracked up” and the Republican Party was adrift by 1992, it took another quarter century for Trump’s rise to become possible.

I do have a fairly clear account of how we got from the early 90s to Trump that I outline in the introduction. Beck just does not attend to it in the slightest. It might elude a lay reader, but a trained historian, especially one with a materialist orientation, should’ve picked up on it easily; Beck is apparently quite dense.

Here’s how I characterize the period on the second page of the book: “It’s a time out of joint with the two eras of—at least superficial— prosperity and optimism that preceded and followed it—but it may feel more familiar today…This episode of crisis was not unforeseeable or unprecedented: it was a conjuncture where chronic troubles briefly took on acute expression, but then appeared to go into remission or repose.” I believed the period I was writing about revealed a structural problem in the United States that was largely papered over by a superficial sense of security and wealth of what Beck and others label neoliberalism. And I’m fine with that name for the ease of discussion. I do advance an argument about the nature of that structural crisis that Beck just fails to pick up on. The introduction attends quite carefully to the state of the American economy post-Reagan, and then goes on to culture and politics. Then I get to the case the book is making: this post-Cold War moment signalled the onset of a Gramscian “crisis of authority” or “crisis of hegemony.” I do not insinuate at all, I explicitly write, “The sudden loss of faith and credit in the American system was the acute onset of just such a crisis of hegemony,” where as Gramsci wrote, “the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example).” Then I contend: “In this period, that failed political undertaking was the project of Reaganism: the reorganization of the economy for short-term gain and sharp upward redistribution and its unexpected and expensive victory in the Cold War.” The reason I used this frame is because I believed that there were signs of a “conflict between representatives and represented” in this period: the two-party system was already showing strain, having trouble creating consensus, and open to outsider attacks from Caesarist figures who claimed to be able to fix the situation by force of their charisma. One of my inspirations here was Dylan Riley’s book Civic Foundations of Fascism. Another one was Hannah Arendt’s account of crystallization in Origins of Totalitarianism: I took these to be diffuse elements of Trumpism that coalesced fully when the historical conditions were right. I didn’t want to burden my lay readers with a lot of abstruse theory. (Gramsci and hegemony were already pushing it: I wanted to sell some books, after all.) But if you look at my writing on my Substack, I make those theoretical orientations explicit. A smart, erudite critic might have found fodder for an incisive critique there. He didn’t. Probably, because he’s not a smart, erudite critic.

So too might this smart reviewer have just paid attention to the book’s clearest argument. Whether or not this period did, in fact, constitute a Gramscian crisis of hegemony, either in nuce or full-blown, would have been an interesting and generative point of critique, but Beck just ignored that entire argument—and it is a clearly delineated argument—for some reason. There was also an opening here for an easy dunk: had he known his shit, he could’ve said “Ganz’s application of the crisis of hegemony frame is not really appropriate, because Gramsci used that for the post WWI situation in Italy, and post Cold War America was not in any where near as dire straits, blah,, blah blah, .” That would’ve been a fair critique that I might’ve had some trouble defending against. But he missed it because he was more concerned with driving home a personal attack.

If you totally miss the crisis of hegemony argument, then you are gonna not going to get how we get from ’92 to ’16, but it’s really not a difficult extrapolation for an attentive enough reader. I’ll spell it out for Beck: we saw the first problems—cracks—with the neoliberal economic and political order in ’92 and the end of a war with an ambiguous outcome that failed to create a lasting sense of shared national purpose, it generated this kind of figure and political style, and 25 years later, after the 2008 financial crisis, the further fragmentation of media, and the disasters of the war on terror, it all came back with a vengeance. If the structural case is plausible enough, I don’t need to prove that Trump learned from or had a personal connection to Duke, Buchanan, Perot et al. He represents the return of a similar phenomenon. I mean, who is the better Marxist here? The person advancing the argument that history has some identifiable patterns and deep structures or the one insisting that I show how every person was directly connected with this very simplistic notion of direct causality? What were they even teaching you there at Harvard, Richard?

But there are a lot of direct connections. First, Trump was aware of Duke and Buchanan and commented on the effectiveness of their angry politics on the Larry King show in late 91. I just missed this in my research at the time and sorely regret it now. Second, Trump started his political career in Perot’s Reform Party. Duke infamously endorsed Trump in 2016 and Trump really did not want to repudiate that endorsement. Trump has recognized Buchanan as a precursor. And Buchanan has recognized Trump as carrying on his ideas. And it does not take a genius to just see that Trump’s strong emphasis on protectionism and immigration is more similar to Buchanan than Reagan or the Bushes. If you want to get more into the nitty gritty, a lot of Republican staffers are now devoted readers of Sam Francis and Murray Rothbard. Maybe I should’ve included more of this in the book, but I assumed that Beck would know at least some of this stuff. I also didn’t know Trump would even run in 2024: I started the book in early 2021. Also, this points to a contradiction in Beck’s contention with me; he wants to say I don’t pay enough attention to Trump’s rise in the book, and then he wants to say I’m also a Trump obsessive. Which is it? By putting him in the background, the book treats Trump as more symptomatic of larger forces than some great man of history or aberration. I think his emergence was contingent, but I think I made the case that something like him was brewing.

Beck writes:

None of the following receives a substantive assessment in When the Clock Broke: NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W. Bush, the 2000 election, September 11, the war on terror, the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, the legalization of gay marriage, the presence of the Minutemen on the country’s southern border, the rise in mass shootings, Occupy Wall Street, Senator Mitch McConnell’s lengthy effort to enable minoritarian rule by packing the courts with right-wing judges, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, or Citizens United.

Okay, well, the book was not a CNN special on the 90s and 2000s. I had to focus on the time I felt was important and interesting. It’s just true that other books might fill in the gaps. But I do provide a pretty clear assessment of the importance of trade in the election of 1992 (NAFTA had not yet been ratified but was an issue I discuss) and how I thought Newt Gingrich’s politics worked within the anti-establishment, populist tenor of the times. But a lot of those things, including Newt, have been treated by other writers elsewhere at considerable length, and I wanted to focus on things that I felt had been ignored. So, yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t write the omnibus history of America.

Now the utter falsehoods just start to pile up as Beck builds a head of steam:

Ganz and other analysts of American reactionary politics seem to believe that it is Trump and his right-wing allies and predecessors who are collectively responsible for causing the crisis. This belief is the source of their urgency. We need to learn as much as we can about the American right, and as quickly as possible, the thinking goes, so that we can develop strategies to neutralize them as a political force — a task on which the very fate of American democracy may depend.

That is just not true, and again, it is only possible to contend if you ignored the book’s structural argument. The entire point is that the failure of the political establishment to manage the country gave rise to these figures: That’s what a crisis of hegemony is, a failure of political leadership.

Beck goes on to write:

But while this kind of thinking never tires of scrutinizing the Democratic Party’s tactical approach, it exempts their larger political project, and their ideology, from analysis and critique. The account of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign that Ganz provides in When the Clock Broke unfolds along these lines. Much attention is paid to Clinton’s strategic maneuvering, from his demonization of Sister Souljah, which effectively crippled Jesse Jackson’s progressive Rainbow Coalition, to his hammering Bush Sr. on economic issues as the country’s recession dragged on. But someone whose knowledge of Bill Clinton was confined only to the narrative Ganz provides would have no idea that Clinton thoroughly transformed his party. Although the word neoliberalism does not even appear in the index to When the Clock Broke, Clinton’s enthusiastic embrace of neoliberal economic and social policies — from gutting the welfare state, to orchestrating the passage of the extraordinarily punitive 1994 crime bill, to supercharging the geographic mobility of capital through free trade and financial deregulation — was exactly the kind of “bold move” of which Democrats are supposedly incapable. Ganz, however, presents Clinton’s victory as electorally underwhelming and therefore relatively inconsequential from a political perspective. While noting that Clinton won by a wide margin, he cautions that “it was difficult to claim a powerful mandate with a mere plurality of the popular vote” (Perot made winning an outright majority impossible). Ganz further observes that “a majority of voters still described themselves as ‘concerned,’ ‘scared,’ or ‘apprehensive’ at the prospect of a Clinton presidency.” But this has little bearing on the question of whether Clinton was a consequential figure. After all, Donald Trump also failed to win a majority of the popular vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024, even without a serious third-party candidate in any of those elections.

Where to even start? First of all, this contention that “neoliberalism does not even appear in the index” is completely fatuous. The entire introduction is dedicated to the effects of neoliberalism, although I only use that term once. I write: “The restructuring of the American economy that took place in the 1980s, whether one called it “Reaganomics,” “voodoo economics,” “trickle-down economics,” “supply-side economics,” “financialization” — or, as it would come to be increasingly labeled, “neoliberalism”— provided a glitzy veneer of great wealth. The underlying reality was less pretty.” I don’t insist on the term “neoliberalism” because it’s a little bit of a cliché now, and it’s the type of abstraction that makes casual readers’ eyes glaze over. Here’s what I write about Clinton at the end of the introduction: “Benefiting from a wave of popular discontent, the Clinton administration opted to continue many of the Reaganite policies that contributed to the crisis in the first place: reducing or redirecting the welfare state, deregulating finance, and pursuing free trade agreements.”

I do talk about Clinton and the DLC’s project to reshape the Democratic party in a more business-friendly direction. And the point about the underwhelming nature of Clinton’s victory is not to say he was politically inconsequential, but rather that he affected such changes in his party and country without a strong consensus behind them. Again, this goes back to the crisis of hegemony argument. I don’t think the neoliberal turn in the Democrats won a hegemonic bloc the way Reagan did. And, yes, I don’t know if it was a bold move so much as responding to the political terrain that Reagan and the Republicans had already shaped. And how whole-hearted or pre-planned it was is debatable, too: Lichtenstein and Stein’s recent book A Fabulous Failure makes a convincing argument that the Clinton administration was split between neoliberalism and a more social democratic approach, but because of a number of political and economic conditions, neoliberalism won out. I believe this strengthens my case as well, because Americans didn’t fully know what they were getting in Clinton: sometimes he sounded like he was gonna do industrial policy and a domestic Marshall Plan, and sometimes he sounded like Reagan Lite. It was all a bit incoherent, which led to its immediate political success perhaps, but also to its ultimate fragility.

Then, all of a sudden, the piece makes a rapid turn from my book to my putative beliefs about Palestine. How is this relevant? Well, it shows that I’m a “liberal” and therefore politically unreliable.

The best explanation for Ganz’s reluctance to criticize the Democrats on the substance of their politics is that he ultimately shares their worldview. Although Ganz has made it tediously clear that he would rather not be identified in a direct way with any political tendency, it is safe to describe him as a left-liberal. He wrote in 2021 that he is “not offended by being called a liberal even though I read Marx.” After the Democrats held their ground in the 2022 midterms, he wrote that the idea of “fully [embracing] dangerously corny levels of American liberal patriotism and Aaron-Sorkinism to create a kind of left-Reaganism . . . was correct in its basic outlines.” He embraced the logic of the Biden Administration’s defense of Ukraine against Russia, and he has been caustic in responding to leftists who see US support for NATO expansion as contributing to the militarization of Europe.

Equally in keeping with liberal prerogatives, however, Ganz’s sympathy for people fighting against a brutal occupying army turns out not to extend to the Palestinian resistance. [N+1 made this their pull quote for some reason.] “While I agree with the principle of national self-determination for the Palestinian people,” he wrote on October 8, 2023, “both the ideology and tactics of the groups that currently embody that aspiration are disturbing and unacceptable to me.” (The well-documented presence of neo-Nazi groups among the Ukrainian armed forces has not caused Ganz to renounce his support for the Ukrainian cause.) After the IDF killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in October 2024, Ganz wrote that Sinwar was “a murderer, pure and simple.” A week before that, he offered the racist musing that while of course one would like to see an end to the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, one should not be too quick to hope for a Palestinian victory, because Palestinians themselves might not have the moral maturity to shoulder the burdens of self-determination: “Are we to expect that victorious Palestinians will be especially generous to their defeated foes after years of suffering at their hands? Wouldn’t it just be one vast October 7th?” All the while, he has said nothing whatsoever about the war’s central political issue, which is American military aid to its most valued client state. At the risk of repetition, this is worth emphasizing: Ganz’s commentary on the war has completely ignored America’s decisive role in making Israel’s genocide possible.

Yes, I’m sorry, but I do not think Hamas constitutes a constructive political force in the region. And October 7th made that painfully clear: I don’t sympathize with them. I think their leadership of the Palestinian national cause has been catastrophic. And I reject calls, like those by Jodi Dean, that leftists must accede to their leadership of “the resistance”. To the point about Ukraine, if Azov was in the driver’s seat, and Ukraine was currently led by a national-chauvinist of that ilk instead of President Zelensky, I would say something about it. I am not some jingoistic warmonger on the issue of Ukraine. My first piece of writing on the Ukrainian war was a call for a ceasefire. And my latest writing on the conflict has called for an end to the war with a just peace settlement. I just happen to think Russia is the clear aggressor and Ukraine is defending itself. And I have, in fact, written critically about Ukrainian nationalism as a compromise formation between civic and ugly ethnic nationalism. And you could just as easily make Beck’s point in reverse: Why are some leftists so squeamish about some Ukrainian nationalist group’s antisemitism but are willing to tolerate it among Hezbollah or Hamas?

Fairness demands that Beck include what else I wrote on October 8th, 2023:

…I’m not a Zionist; I certainly feel no romantic pull to the national project of Israel. Nor does the pragmatic argument that Israel provides a safe homeland for the Jews hold much water for me, since it’s security is always in peril, as we can see now. I believe it’s a state founded on a world-historical crime of the expulsion and massacres of Palestinians in 1948. I believe the occupation is an ongoing crime, the expansion of settlements in the West Bank is outrageous, and the hellish conditions enforced on Gaza are unsupportable. It was once only activists who referred to the regime enforced on the Palestinians as “apartheid,” now it is mainstream, and it is hard to argue with. In addition, the tenor of Israeli politics seems to grow ever more frighteningly anti-democratic and extreme by the day. The current cabinet surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu, a crook who would snuff whatever is left of democracy in Israel out in a second to avoid any repercussions, is a gaggle of low-rent fascists. And despite their tough talk, they’ve been apparently unable to provide basic security. Now, it is likely they will respond with all their hate and fury to cover up the humiliation of the moment, not to mention use it to push for the realization of their most brutal programs. In this moment, I fear that Israel will essentially level the entirety of Gaza and cause its population to flee, in a nightmarish repeat of the worst events of 1948.

This begins a pattern of Beck’s selective quotation to make me sound bigoted about Palestinians and a covert sympathizer with Israel’s genocidal war. For instance, in my piece where I call Sinwar a murderer, which is just true, I sharply criticize those celebrating his death as well. As far as my supposedly “racist” comment about October 7th, it was made directly after this statement, “But the embattled Yishuv was once considered by many to be the underdog—until they won power for themselves.” The whole point of the piece was that the righteous and persecuted Jews in the Zionist movement committed an atrocity and continue to commit them. Is it racist to consider whether or not the righteous and persecuted Palestinians in the Islamic Resistance movement might be tempted to do the same, especially after a group of them just did? I was pointing out that the movements were similar in a lot of ways, whereas a racist argument would be to say that there was something particularly barbaric about those Palestinians. My actual position is the exact opposite of racism: I don’t think that either people are intrinsically, essentially brutal, but rather that historical conditions have made them so. My sincerest hope is that this visegrip of history can be broken and these two peoples can live in peace. In the same piece, I write:

I was never among those who celebrated or justified or even excused the October 7th attacks. Nor do I believe that the horrors of that day justify the Israeli response, which is not driven purely by military logic but rather that of revenge and punishment and has managed to totally eclipse the atrocities of the 7th in its ferocity and scope in the world’s eyes. I want the hostages to be released so as to end one justification for the conflict, but it is difficult to care about their particular fates after the oceans of blood that have been spilled since. In order to excuse the extent of suffering inflicted on Gaza one has to adopt a logic that is at least implicitly and often explicitly genocidal: that holds the Palestinians collectively responsible or treats them as a lower form of life.

Again, this gets no comment from Beck. For some reason, Beck and others just totally ignore this context.

Beck thinks he’s making a deadly point here—”All the while, he has said nothing whatsoever about the war’s central political issue, which is American military aid to its most valued client state. At the risk of repetition, this is worth emphasizing: Ganz’s commentary on the war has completely ignored America’s decisive role in making Israel’s genocide possible.” This is just downright false. Once again, he’s either lying or didn’t bother to do his research. In December 2023, I was highly critical of Biden’s Zionism. Before the election, I granted that “Biden seems to be totally unwilling and unable to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel. To many, his statements about the demonstrations against the war on college campuses have functionally led a smear campaign against the protestors as an antisemitic mob and have given permission for a nationwide wave of repression.” In November, I wrote about “the current administration’s constant support for the ugliest sort of ethnonationalist regime in the Middle East, a terrible betrayal of their putative stance on the side of democracy and liberalism. In December, I wrote:

This entire year was also dominated by news of the catastrophe in Gaza, which has been the biggest moral and intellectual challenge of my lifetime and has sometimes threatened to overwhelm my powers of judgment. I had no illusions about the regime in Israel and fully expected it to react in this manner. But by allowing and abetting the slaughter of Palestinians, the Western world can no longer seriously present itself as the defender of human rights and the opposite of the “authoritarian world.” Of course, critics will, with good reason, point out that this always has been mere pretense: the United States, while labeling itself the defender of freedom and democracy, was the motive force of unspeakable atrocities during the Cold War, not to mention the many crimes of imperialism carried out in the name of civilization. So, that universalism was perhaps always a false one. But Israel in particular represents a contradiction in the ideological armature of the “democratic” world. It was the creation of a post-war order that was supposed to replace brute force with international law and to do justice to the victims of genocide. Instead, it stands for the cruelly ironic failure and repudiation of that hope. Its present incarnation gives the lie to the notion that “Western Civilization” means much more than technologized barbarism. And it’s clear now that the state of Israel did not compensate for Hitler’s crimes so much as to ensure their reach extends into a new century.

And this brings us to one of the most moronic of Beck’s points:

For a long time, as far as I can tell, Ganz had nothing to say about this crackdown. For all the effort he has devoted to finding echoes of European fascism in contemporary American life, the spectacle of Columbia administrators summoning NYPD officers in riot gear to arrest their own students seems to have left him unmoved. To ignore that while reflecting on the possible emergence of fascism in 21st-century America amounts to something worse than a failure of analysis — it is a refusal to see what is right in front of you. This changed in early March. When federal agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement abducted Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, and when Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently announced that Khalil’s green card would be revoked, even though he had not been charged with any crime, Ganz took to his Substack. “I believe it’s appropriate now to refer to the present government of the United States not as an ‘administration’ but as a ‘regime,’ with all of that word’s dark and ugly connotations,” he wrote. I can’t know for sure what prompted Ganz to finally notice the government’s crackdown on student protest, but I suspect it had to do with the change in who occupies the Oval Office. Better late than never, I suppose, but one would still prefer that political analysts pay attention to what’s going on around them even when the party they support is in power.

I don’t know if Beck is aware of our federal system of government, but there’s not just “the government” out there. There is a significant difference in the NYPD being called in to arrest protesters and using the full power of the federal government to try to deport people for political speech alone without due process. I’m sorry, but does anyone not think that this represents a serious qualitative shift in repression? This makes me really fucking angry. For someone who is so down on insinuations, Beck just “suspects” that it’s just because of the change of administrations. Well, that’s just patently unfair. So, for some reason, when I stand up for what he also thinks is the right thing, it must be for the wrong reasons? And why does he think I would’ve kept quiet if the Harris administration had done this? Why the constant imputation of a dishonest motive? Because he has a bigoted—that is to say, impervious to any evidence to the contrary—understanding of who I am and what I care about. I do think the Trump administration’s actions confirm identifying it as the greater danger. For all of the faults of Biden and Harris, the Biden administration did not take that step, while Trump is, but somehow this proves I was wrong in saying that Trump was an authoritarian threat? This is a dirty and dishonest smear with bogus logic and imagined evidence. Fuck you.

Let’s move, finally and mercifully, to Beck’s very stupid conclusion:

Ganz’s vigilance when it comes to Donald Trump is accompanied by excessive complacency regarding the rest of the American political system, and liberalism has had a much more destructive legacy over the past thirty years than Trump, Ross Perot, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and the rest of the alt-right combined. Which of the following is actually more ominous? The attempted January 6 putsch, which briefly seemed to be realizing all of Ganz’s most anxious fantasies about Trump’s authoritarian drive before it collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence? Or the fact that what actually brought Trump to power, twice, was America’s electoral system functioning in exact accordance with its own rules?

My friend, these are not just my anxious fantasies; Trump is directing this authoritarian drive against the Palestinian movement as I write. He is menacing freedom of speech, the rule of law, free and fair elections, and the list goes on. Again, the entire point of my book was about the failure of the American political system to address these problems, which led to Trump. Beck thinks I am someone else than I am, that my work says something else than it does, and he presents what I think must be a deliberately misleading picture of my writing. Why? I don’t know. Unlike him, I won’t make little insinuations about possible “insecurities and resentments.” I will rely on what’s clear in the text: he’s a bad reader and writer.