The Jerk Store Called...

A Response to Freddie de Boer

On his Substack, Freddie de Boer has taken a crack at my take on January 6th and at me, personally. Here is how he assesses my character:

Ganz has always struck me as a writer who’s extremely calculated in how he’s built his persona and career, which includes tailoring his dyspeptic Twitter feed to just the communally-approved level of rudeness and embracing the book media’s pinched ideas about the correct focal length for doing political analysis through history. (I liked his book, more or less, when it was doing something other than courting the favor of the kind of people who read the NYRB.) But of course his attitude is just one symptom of this broader contemporary demand that everyone feel the way panicky liberals feel. To repeat myself, the paradigmatic liberal complaint in 2016 was this is not normal, the constant fixation on some universal definition of civic propriety and what it should and should not allow and a mutual sense that it was somehow being violated. The lament of the early Trump years was not that democracy had yielded destructive results, as it sometimes/often/usually does, but that the delicate sense of order in the universe held by front-of-class kids had been unnaturally broken. Oh well.

I don’t follow Freddie de Boer’s writing, because, frankly, it doesn’t usually interest me that much. When I’ve read his work, I’ve found that he does the same thing over and over again, which is to insist that he’s the sole authentic voice and that the rest of the media is some kind of conspiracy against Freddie de Boer. He writes, “Ganz has always struck me as a writer who’s extremely calculated in how he’s built his persona and career…” Yeah, but Freddie that’s what you think about almost everyone and anyone from what I can tell. Even though this is a pretty nasty attack on my character from one perspective, I’m not particularly insulted, because this is a tic, it’s a compulsive way of viewing the world—he just can’t help it.

Only Freddie speaks from the heart, is willing to take risks, has a soul, and has suffered, everyone else is a craven careerist, a little Machiavellian automaton seeking their own petty advantages. It’s a little like Jean-Jacques Rousseau: he’s a perfectly well-intentioned being of total sincerity within a treacherous and dissembling society. I don’t mean this as a compliment: in the 18th century, Rousseau’s form of self-regard was a groundbreaking step in the evolution of human consciousness, today it sounds like what every suitably rebellious adolescent can accomplish by age 17. Class politics animate de Boer. And I do not mean in the Marxian sense. No, he’s obsessed with the existence of some high school pecking order that he’s been excluded from. He’s obsessed with the tyrannical rule of various orders of kids: the smart kids, the cool kids, and here, “the delicate sense of order in the universe held by front-of-class kids.” We exited high school over two decades ago. It’s time to get over it, Freddie.

De Boer writes, “I suspect that what motivates analysis like Ganz’s - and he is far from alone in this relentless threat inflation - is the endless wheel of resentment that does so much to direct this industry.” But what of his own “endless wheel of resentment?” De Boer says that I’ve somehow been able to crack the media code and figure out just what critics are looking for and just how cranky to be. My god, if it were true! I’m happy with my relative success, but it is quite modest in the scheme of things. And I do believe I came by it honestly, or as honestly as possible in a debased world. Freddie makes—from what I can tell—significantly more from his Substack than I do from mine. So how does de Boer account for his success? In his worldview, shouldn’t the filthy lucre go to the unworthy? Or, when he does well, is that the genuine acclamation of the people breaking through the morass of media conformity? If I were to do an obverse Boerian reading of de Boer, I could remark about how big of an audience there is for his particular brand of grievance politics, a sign of the cheap populism that defines our benighted times. O tempora, o morons! Or some such.

Far from being out-of-step with the dominant media landscape, de Boer is its perfect exemplar: he writes wholly in stereotypes, there are types of people and they do the things that those types of people do. It’s ultimately a very depressing universe, one withouit depth or human interest, just puppets and shadow-play. Freddie boasts he is above the status game of media and publishing, but he constantly betrays his total obsession with it. He accuses everyone of being fixated on positioning, but that’s his major preoccupation. He implies I am trying to curry favor with Rachel Maddow—I criticized her in a recent piece, but maybe that’s just another one of my diabolical little stratagems—but, to me, de Boer reads like he’s trying to win points with Pamela Paul. Every stance and judgment is made in self-conscious relation to a dreaded Other: He begrudgingly says he liked my book‚—glad you were able to enjoy it Freddie— but cannot get it out of his mind that it was somehow paying court to a stereotype he holds in contempt. He affects to stand apart from the social media hivemind, but can only replicate its most standard approach to others: it’s not that you disagree with someone, or just don’t care for their sensibility or the way they express themselves, but that they must, must, also be dishonest. Is de Boer doing an act, a song-and-dance routine of some kind? Not more than we all are: We are all shaped and sometimes deformed by our markets and publics. No, the problem with Freddie I think is that he’s expressing himself quite honestly and that’s why I choose to turn away: It’s ugly and boring, like so much else these days.

Anyway! Now, that we’ve gotten the ad hominem stuff out of the way, maybe we can get on with the substance of the argument. First of all, I have to admit my January 6th piece was not my best piece or most tightly argued piece of writing. He is right to identify it as a lament and I was just grumbling a bit. Sometimes we try to fire a take off and we fail of our effect. But still, I think de Boer misread it, and didn’t take much care to consider it generously or put it in the context of my other writing on the subject. De Boer writes:

…it’s a non sequitur to say that a coup or insurrection attempt was successful because of vague political value, as the entire point of a coup or insurrection attempt is to take actual material political power. A coup can only be a great success if it actually results in a transfer of power. And that did not occur, on January 6th; as badly as our hysterical liberal media wanted it to be the case, the operational integrity of the United States government was never threatened. You can’t have a coup without the support of the military and Trump plainly did not have the support of the military. It wasn’t the Joint Chiefs of Staff talking about hanging Mike Pence, it was a bunch of idiot yahoos who had staged a directionless riot - most of whom appeared to have no idea that they were supposedly trying to overthrow the federal government. Some large number of them showed up to a big stupid rally, a riot broke out, and they did what rioters do. That certainly is disturbing and it certainly is worth taking seriously, and the first priority when taking a crisis seriously is to call it by its right names.

What I meant to say by calling it “successful” was to suggest that by minimizing it, Trump has degraded the constitutional order and come closer to ruling as a dictator. I grant that he has not been able to, he may not be able to, but I insist that he would like to and things like January 6th are attempts in that direction. By making an illegal seizure of power a negligible event he has won a victory in that project. He openly says as much. I think he is successfully degrading our commitment to democratic governance. And when it’s gone, a poisonous cynicism will allow us to say it didn’t really exist in the first place anyway, it was all a sham and a charade. This is the same pattern that the abandonment of republican forms of government took in the interwar period. “What was democracy, anyway?” people asked. Just some kind of complex of lies.

Is this hysteria? Well, psychoanalysis tells us that hysterics are often very perceptive. Before January 6th, a lot of critics of liberal hysteria said such a thing was not possible. After January 6th, a lot of the same critics turned around and said it was not such a big deal. It didn’t really happen. But it did. In my previous writing, I’ve tried to strike the right balance between its farcical and serious nature. A lot of people thought Mussolini was not serious. Or Hitler. Does that mean every leader who is buffoonish is as dangerous as they are? No, of course, not, but buffoonish can also distort our judgment of an underlying danger as well.

To de Boer’s point about the generals etc., I think we are speaking of different phenomena so the word coup might be misleading. The imagery of coups is of generals making pronunciamentos on TV and so forth. But I think what January 6th looks like is something more like the putsches and attempted putsches of interwar Europe, where fascist movements tried to use mobs to seize or subdue the state. Many of these failed: the Kapp putsch failed, the Beer Hall putsch failed, and the February 6 1934 riots in France were put down. But these were populist or pseudo-populist moves directed, at least performatively, against the ruling elite. Ultimately they won their assent and found co-conspirators in the ranks. In many cases, the elites found the fascist rowdies distasteful and even dangerous, but in the end, went along with them. Do I think there are high officials in the bureaucracy and national security state as committed to the demise of the republic as there were in Weimar? So far, no, thank God. Do I think we have an analogous level of democratic crisis? No, but I think it’s a bit closer than the dismissive critics like to say. And I do think it’s disturbing that the slate seems to be now washed clean by a single vote. In the case of February 6th, 1934, it was not a coup attempt at all—merely a riot, but one that showed the strength of an incipient and still disorganized fascist movement and its willingness to violently attack democratic institutions. In response, there was a mass democratic mobilization, and the creation of the Popular Front, which led to substantial social reforms. It’s this absence of this I lament.

I frankly don’t think all the liberal upset about Trump was counterproductive or useless. It was heartening to see the mass marches after his election in 2016, even if I quibbled with their message: it was a sign that a vast section of the American public rejected what he stood for—and Freddie and I both agree, what he stands for is revolting. I think the demonstrations to protest the Muslim ban were a good thing. I think it was also a good thing that a large section of the country rose in righteous anger after witnessing a video of a lynching. I am not cynical about those things even when I can see their limitations. I think they were real moments of mass politics in an aroused democratic public, not just illusions. What I wish were the case was that there was a political leadership that could’ve kept some of that energy going and not dissipated in expert and bureaucrat-worshipping liberalism. After the January 6th mob, it would’ve been nice to see some mass rallies to demonstrate public rejection of an attempt on democratic rule—and I do sincerely think that’s what it was. I think the Democrats were afraid of looking like rabble-rousers themselves after the George Floyd protests and wanted to calm things down. Or it just wasn’t part of their political imagination. So, I think there was a missed opportunity. Is this naive? Do our institutions deserve such a rally in their defense? Maybe not. But I hoped that such a defense would turn into their transformation and reform. The New Deal was a defense of democracy and so was the French Popular Front and they saw huge changes in society, not just a reaffirmation of the status quo. Is this as unrealistic as believing in a revolution? Maybe! Then I cop to being unrealistic.

De Boer writes, “Feel harder” has become an inescapable, vaguely totalitarian demand from the left-of-center in our current political era, and it seems utterly useless to me. If feelings stopped Trump, we would have stopped Trump already. The one thing Democrats absolutely have not failed to do, since the end of the Obama administration, is to panic.” I mean, the point of our type of writing is to transmit thoughts and sentiments and to persuade through rhetoric and argument, so I think it’s sort of weird to attack a writer for trying to influence the sensibility of his readers. And how is it any less ridiculous to call that very normal practice “vaguely totalitarian” but not what Trump did vaguely a coup? Just because the embarrassing hysterical libs say something doesn’t mean it ipso facto false. But this brings us back to the question of positioning. It becomes a reflexive contrarian pose to constantly assume that the libs are morons and go from there. Sometimes, they might have a point, no? Maybe they are expressing something true but badly.

De Boer quotes me as saying, “We are accustomed to repeating now that Trump’s coalition is fragile or that there are intrinsic weaknesses in his governing style.” That’s because it is and there are!” I agree, my point here was just that we’ve underestimated him before. I am offering a possible corrective. Am I overestimating his political strengths or his potential for criminality? Maybe! But I think my judgment is correct because it’s been borne out by the facts. He has constantly spoken and behaved as if he wants to rule by decree. That’s what I took January 6th to signify. He would if he could. Do you really disagree with that Freddie? And now that he has gotten away with something it seems like he might try again. Is that an unreasonable surmise?

I just take this all more seriously than de Boer does, and I believe other people should take it seriously as well, and I have spent a great deal of energy and time trying to convince people of that. If I fail, I fail. If I were as insincere and calculating as he thinks I am, wouldn’t it be easier to calculate some more fashionable position? It’s sometimes embarrassing to be on the same side as some of these people who share my views, but I happen to think they are in the right and there are more important things than appearing cool. Alas, here I stand, I can do no other.