Those interested in the common project and common obstacles of liberalism and socialism should also read Jack’s post on The Black Sheep. His history of the Socialist Party of America will be available in paperback by Sublation Media this year.
The much anticipated release last summer of When The Clock Broke by John Ganz, an amateur scholar of historic European fascism and its present-day relevance widely read in prestige media circles, despite a generally favorable reception came as something of an anti-climax. By June of 2024, even elite discourse had mostly moved on from understanding Donald Trump and the rise of his coalition as being contiguous with earlier racist and radical right movements in the history of American politics, and of having any such core ideological motivation. The Ganz thesis, to the extent there even was one in his lackadaisical attempt at a Hunter S. Thompson-esque recounting of the cultural politics of the George H.W. Bush administration, already seemed out of date.
But in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, the particular paranoias of the pathetic sequel to resistance liberalism rejuvenated Ganz and revived his influence. Specifically, his succession of post-election theses superficially lent themselves to what was notably lacking in his earlier work – any sense of what he was actually for and not just against. What is most revealing about them is that they seem to indicate that Ganz subscribes to the same definition of “radical Left Marxists” as Trump – the permanent bureaucracy, the so-called deep state, and its aligned ideological commissars.
Yet far from strange or puzzling, on closer reading this is only the logical and disturbing conclusion of a certain counterintuitive idea of the Left as it has evolved over the last century. Let us begin with Ganz’s most dramatic statement that also happens to be closest to his hobbyhorse in the history of the French Third Republic. As he wrote on Substack just a day after Trump’s inauguration:
If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime. It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics. It’s a regime born of exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic. A regime of national humiliation pretending to be a regime of restoration of national honor. It claims to be at once a national revolution and a national restoration. It’s a hybrid regime: a coalition that includes the fascist far right, of course, but also technocratic modernizers who might have once called themselves liberals, the big industrialists, and old social conservatives. Even some disaffected socialists and leftists for whom liberalism was always the main enemy want to give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a regime of collaboration and sympathy: the #resistance may have dominated the political style of the first Trump administration, but now, as Trump says, everyone wants to be his friend.
On first reading, I immediately thought of a long essay in the fall of 2017 by Ganz’s close comrade Jeet Heer when he was editing The New Republic, calling for a new “Popular Front” between the revived Democratic Socialists of America, right on the heels of its big coming out, and the Democratic Party establishment. Never mind that this ponderous navel-gazing exercise elided any mention of the Communist Party USA in describing the historic Popular Front, which is typical enough for their academic nostalgists and apologists. The essay did not once even bring up the existence of the Soviet Union!
Likewise, Ganz managed to completely sidestep the small matter of there being no foreign occupier to serve as the object of capitulation, collaboration, and sympathy in “Vichy America.” Indeed, this too is an unspoken underlying assumption that Ganz shares with Trump – that there was some great calamity or disruption to the American regime that should compel a restoration movement to “make America great again,” that the Obama presidency did in fact represent some revolutionary tide for their shared idea of the Left.
But in unpacking Ganz’s description of “Vichy America,” I must begin with the pleasant surprise at what he actually gets right. The leaders of the late Third Republic were not scheming reactionaries like Hindenburg but decadent bumblers completely out of their depth. The point was driven home to me when I read the Julian Jackson biography of Charles De Gaulle in an effort to know hope in the summer of 2020, leading me to imagine a portrayal of the last days before the fall of France in the style of The Death of Stalin. As for the truth in Ganz’s description of the mood of the country, while the example of De Gaulle certainly inspires as to how America might at last move on from the culture war that produced the Age of Trump, the drearier British example of post-imperial transition is obviously also relevant – as seen in the entire subtext of The Crown, how Britain only finally moved on from the war with the election of Tony Blair.
Actually, De Gaulle is as starkly absent from the Ganz ouevre as the actual totalitarian Great Powers in back of the two sides of his 1930s streetfighting fantasy, for the obvious response to a snarky subtweet of left-conservatives “If only there were a convenient shorthand for this kind of politics like national socialism” was and remains “If only there were an anti-Nazi hero who successfully modeled those politics like Charles De Gaulle.” Ganz is evidently less interested in a real personal or intellectual reckoning with history than in maintaing a hipster cosplay of the anachronistic Left Bank scribblers who warned of imminent fascism at the dawn of the Fifth Republic.
The very title When The Clock Broke is revealing here, a reference to a speech by the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union as proof that one can not only “turn back the clock” of the capital-P progressive “right side of history” but break it. Yet what, exactly, is the idea of capital-P progress that Ganz believes “broke” in American politics in 1992?
The closest the book comes to providing an answer are a few passing allusions to fleeting possibilities for a “progressive” response to the economic and class dislocations of the Reagan era. “If only Jesse Jackson could have turned the country around” – a farcical echo of a certain tribe of postwar Leftists who pined for what might have been had Henry Wallace still been Vice President upon the death of FDR. For indeed, that antecedent pops up in a later post-election Ganz analogy at truly alarming depths of ignorance:
Today, there is a similar response to Musk and Trump’s bureaucratic purges. Some say, “Well, there is probably corruption, and we don’t like DEI stuff, but this isn’t the right way to do it.” But this is exactly the point . . . If you look at the accompanying “theories” cooked up by the right-wing propaganda machine on X they are all just rehashes of old John Birch Society fever dreams: the left and liberalism are just a conspiracy sustained by the CIA and USAID . . . As Landon Storrs has pointed out in her book The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the American Left, the isolation and destruction of those in government with social democratic and social liberal views was the point.
Before we proceed, it is necessary to quote at some length the exceptional scholarly fraud and falsehood, even for the apologist school of historians of American Communism, committed by Landon Storrs:
The accused . . . were a varied group of leftists who shared a commitment to building a comprehensive welfare state that blended central planning with grassroots democracy. Some called themselves social democrats, some belonged to the Socialist Party, and others resisted categorization, but they agreed that economic and technological development had created interdependences among people and among nations that rendered the ideologies of individualism and nationalism obsolete and even dangerous. As internationalists, they sought to use the social policies of other nations as models and to apply American resources to reduce inequalities and promote peace abroad. . . Before loyalty investigations pushed this cohort either out of government or toward the center of the political spectrum, the transformative potential of the New Deal was greater than is commonly understood.
This is an exact and unusually shameless repetition of the partisan subterfuge and mythology of the Communists and fellow travelers who opposed the Marshall Plan in service to the Soviet political line, to the point of backing the doomed presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948 as the purported true heir to the New Deal. But it is especially appalling and outrageous for invoking the Socialist Party, perhaps the most outspoken opponents of Wallace in their last stand as an independent electoral party whose survivors became leading stalwarts of Cold War liberalism, often though not always of its idealistic better half.
It is all the more telling that Ganz retreats into a New Dealer paradigm of anti-Trump resistance at the very moment when his authoritarianism has actually for the first time risen to the level of Japanese internment, in Trump’s boastful establishment of a Central American gulag and suspension of the Bill of Rights in the name of equity and inclusion for hard right Jewish nationalists. But the gaps in Ganz’s historical knowledge are made even clearer by the most obvious historical parallel to the revelations about USAID – the expose by Ramparts magazine in 1967 of the whole CIA apparatus behind the cultural Cold War largely shaped by those very same survivors of the non-Communist Left slandered by Landon Storrs.
But whatever the sins of the CIA effort to counter the Soviet Union’s Communist Information Bureau through what became known as “the mighty wurlitzer,” it was a far cry from, as Matt Taibbi dramatically made plain before Congress, a vast conspiracy against the political freedom of the American people, and the very reversal of that legacy of free societies throughout Europe as called out in Munich by Vice President Vance. The recent revelation of the so-called “Schlesinger memo” in the JFK files, the thwarted plan to drastically reform the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle, undescores how it was some of the most maligned champions of Cold War liberalism such as Arthur Schlesinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan who most clearly foresaw what the so-called deep state would metastasize into.
It was in his more immediate post-election theses that John Ganz made it most clear that the foregoing is indeed his idea of the Left. Ganz removed any doubt that he is a frank opponent of the first amendment with his approving illustration of the replacement of the values of a free society with what Christopher Lasch called “the democratization of self-esteem”:
In his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, the philosopher Richard Rorty included a prophetic warning of what might happen if America elected a strongman type figure: “One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. . . All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will come flooding back.” Well, it seems like Elon Musk and the folks at Twitter are working very hard to make this come true!
In his very next post on Substack two days later, Ganz unequivocally endorsed this breathtaking self-regard by an ivory tower mandarin as the central paradigm of the class struggle:
It is first and foremost an attack on the ideology, employment structures, and political organizations of the professional-managerial class, those you might shoehorn into an orthodox framework as “the progressive petit bourgeoisie” or, when they lack property, “knowledge workers.” The tech-capitalist avant-garde are taking back control over the means of production and the systems of communication and knowledge dissemination. . . This is clear-eyed class war on the part of the capitalists. There were signs of radicalization in the steadily proletarianized section of the “cognitive elite”: increased pace of white-collar workplace unionization, a growing interest among college-educated young people in socialism and the labor movement, “wokeness” causing workplace problems, the multi-racial uprising during the George Floyd protests . . .
In the 1990s this was heralded as the rise of a new “social movement unionism” that within a generation, after finding vastly greater traction among white collar workers than blue collar, proved in practice to be a principal means of imposing ideological diktat from within much of American media and elite institutions. A decade earlier, that had been the means by which the Sandinistas used the regime-controlled union to destroy Nicaragua’s sole independent newspaper La Prensa; the specter that Communist Party control of the Newspaper Guild once held the potential to produce this menace on a massive scale was a principal motivation behind the Taft-Hartley Act.
My grandfather, who intimately knew almost everyone worth knowing in the midcentury labor movement, played an important role in the expulsion of the Communists from the CIO. And of course, the McCarthy era that followed has many lessons for today when it comes to carefully distinguishing noble ends with what can be dubious means at best – the Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No principle is more relevant than at any time since the fall of Joe McCarthy.
One can recognize all of this as echoed by Marc Andreesen in his account of the social history of Silicon Valley in the last decade – the impeccably anti-MAGA Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has even provided a detailed account of the dystopian plans for AI, and how the danger is far from passed, that Andreesen described as the motivation for him and his colleagues to back Trump in 2024.
But his understanding of the young professional mob, as motivated by their reputed anti-capitalism, much less as contiguous with the movement against the Vietnam War, is extremely dubious, traceable to the (recently deceased) fanatical David Horowtiz, the father of Andreesen’s venture capital partner. The great oversight in the fashionable historical arguments about the Civil Rights Act and Great Society from Richard Hanania, Christopher Caldwell, and Chris Rufo is that most of what they deplore was first implemented by Nixon, and that if any major political force back then was in a position to halt its metastasization, it was the AFL-CIO back when it mattered under the guidance of Bayard Rustin.
A principal reason they did not were the foreign policy preoccupations of the early neoconservatives, much as the critical early vector of intersectionality in “social movement unionism” would have an analogous devastating effect in diverting the post-Cold War labor movement from helping arrest the de-industrialization of America. In the highly parallel risings of both the neocons and the woke, the manipulation and plunder of the labor movement by a dedicated cadre was an essential first step.
The debate between the post-New Left academic apologists for the Communist Party and its earlier Cold War liberal historians centered on whether the movement should be understood as subservient to Soviet policy or as an “authentic expression of American radicalism.” While American Communism was most assuredly the former, both sides in the debate took for granted that it had been a natural extension of the American labor and Socialist movements from before World War I. But the resemblance to the 1930s Popular Front points to an entirely different understanding of what made it authentically American: the Popular Front, to the extent it could share the same label of “Radical Marxist Left” with the shared conception of Donald Trump and John Ganz, was an expression of the Puritan and WASP progressive inheritance that took hold among its youth in the wake of the Great Depression.
The Popular Front was the ratification of what Chris Cutrone has long identified as the death of the Left in 1919 – following the failure to extend the Russian Revolution into Germany, the abandonment of the historic task of social democracy to complete the bourgeois revolution. In America this legacy was intertwined with the suppression of the Socialist Party, the last stalwarts of the American revolutionary republican tradition, amid the suspension of the Bill of Rights when America entered the First World War. In the 1930s, it was necessary to make the attempt to build a viable democratic socialist alternative to the Popular Front, even as their stalwarts became the founders of Cold War liberalism. Whatever their failings, they offer a highly instructive analogy to this moment.
I had enough desire, if a note of self-deprecation be permitted, to maintain the purity of my own soul this past year to vote Libertarian rather than stop worrying and get on the Trump train, and thus never knew more how it felt to remain a Norman Thomas voter all through the 1940s. Both then and now, one could be clear-eyed about the unprincipled, unscrupulous Bonapartist in the White House while trimming their sails for what would come after, recognizing, as Ross Douthat wrote in the wake of the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, that “in a struggle with a man of destiny, there is no normalcy to be restored.”
There remain pleasant surprises in both domestic and foreign policy of key appointees who would have been recognized by any Bernie Sanders supporter in 2015 as well to the left of Obama. Indeed, with the so-called tech right representing the promise of restoring the civil libertarian ethos both at home and abroad, it logically follows that any hope for a decent Left lies, to put it in cringe Harringtonian terms, in building the left wing of the tech right.
What this means in the long history of the Left can be seen in terms of resetting its historical point of reference away from 1917 and back to 1912 – the election year in which the political economy was settled for what was both then and now the world’s leading capitalist economy. Historically speaking, the administrative state targeted by the so-called DOGE is the system of federally appointed commissions implemented by Woodrow Wilson at the height of the Progressive Era, against the full-fledged authoritarian corporatism of Theodore Roosevelt and the reliance on the courts preferred by William Howard Taft.
The distinct but complementary models of anti-monopoly in 1912 of both the Socialist Party and the early campaign of Robert LaFollette thwarted by Roosevelt, and even elements of the Taft model, are all relevant to building a 21st century political economy, concerned less with preventing “bigness” than with the strict separation of sectors – tech, retail, and media – in the internet economy. That same “Progressive” tradition into the interwar era represented the hope behind the Socialist Party’s efforts of the 1930s, for a genuine social democratic labor party against the New Deal and Popular Front. The crypto revolution has even reopened the money question for the first time since a Socialist Party fellow traveler denounced the establishment of the Federal Reserve on the floor of Congress as “the most gigantic trust on earth.”
The realignment of the electoral coalitions of the major parties that began in 2016 is now largely an accomplished fact, it being only a matter of time before the remaining demographic holdouts and their legacy elected officials give way. What remains to be completed is the realignment of elite and ideological coalitions. On the one hand, a “post-neoliberal” coalition seems to be in a late stage of consolidating among moderate libertarians, anti-woke liberals, and the formerly “heterodox.” The task now for a decent, self-respecting Left is to consolidate its populist opposition, looking beyond both the latest MAGA depravity and Millennial Left bitter-enderism toward a new vital center, and leave the Ganz-Trump idea of the Left behind.