The Rightoid of the Left

John Ganz as the mirror image of right-wing Schmittian culture

John Ganz is an angry guy. His articles are a constant stream of invective against the right and anyone who does not stand against it with the same moral clarity and self-righteous rage that he brings to political fights. I’m unclear on whether Ganz identifies as a Marxist, and so was ChatGPT when I asked it, but “guy who can plausibly be called a Marxist” is a good enough descriptor of his politics.

A few times I’ve tried to ask him a question or engage with one of his articles, and his response in each instance has been to start cursing. Once, Substack gave me a paid subscription to his newsletter as part of a promotional program because I was sharing so many of his pieces, being the huge fan that I am, and when he got the notification he apparently went and manually undid it so I would be unsubscribed. For me, it’s hard to imagine not wanting someone to read my work, even if I didn’t have the highest opinion of them, as I would assume they could benefit from it. But I’m telling you, this guy is seething with rage. Most people this angry usually can’t control themselves long enough to publish articles and books, but Ganz is unusually good at channeling his hate towards productive ends.

He’s also a good writer. And he is particularly astute when it comes to analyzing the most energetic forces on the modern right, which I think one can’t have a low enough opinion of. Here he is on his time spent undercover among rightists.

Were they getting more extreme? Or, gradually, showing me more of what they actually believed? I can’t say for certain. But one thing I noticed was just how’d they’d just repeat things. They would get some meme or idea from the netherworld of right-wing twitter that sounded sort of bizarre or amusing, and just start repeating it, repeating it, repeating it. And then it went from a joke to something else. Then they believed it. The other thing I saw is that they related to the extreme fringe as some kind of oracle of forbidden knowledge. They were like these chtonic forces that had to be listened to for some reason. They would show me things and I was like, “These people are just obviously mentally disturbed shitposters,” but to them it contained some deep wisdom. And often, the more deranged, the better: it was closer to The Real for them.

This idea of online racism being The Real as the key to understanding the right gets at something very deep.

Unfortunately, Ganz has a kind of tunnel vision on these things, which leads him to paint with too broad of a brush and fit everything into his framework of rightists as maladjusted, hateful, anti-rational chuds. The irony here is that in reading Ganz, his flaws remind me of the things that drive me up the wall about many forms of right-wing analysis.

What we call “conservatism” and “liberalism” are massive coalitions composed of people with widely different motivations, incentives, ways of thinking, and ability and willingness to engage with ideas. Among rightists, you’ll often hear something along the lines of “They tried to beat Trump. They tried to impeach him, they tried to put him in prison, they tried to kill him.” The word “they” is doing a lot of work here. As far as we know, the people who tried to impeach Trump had no connection to those who tried to assassinate him (“of course that’s what they want you to think”). One could have the view, as I do, that some prosecutions of Trump were justified, while the New York hush money case was not. Each one of the challenges faced by Trump can be analyzed on its own merits. To take everything bad that has ever happened to the man and ascribe it to “them” provides absolutely no insight into what any liberal is thinking or doing at any moment.

It’s not just about Trump. This kind of lumping analysis is quite common on the right. It’s a staple of Alex Jones’ view of the world, where he’ll talk about how elites want to make you live in tiny apartments and be forced to get dozens of vaccines to be able to walk outside, and then as evidence he will present quotes from a UN official, a Hollywood actress, and a CDC guidance memo. Articles at The Federalist are often more high-brow versions of this kind of thinking.

That doesn’t mean rightists can’t have decent insights when focusing on specific individuals or more narrowly defined groups. There is no psychological or ideological framework that has much to say about Joe Biden, George Clooney, Ibram Kendi, and Keith Olbermann, even if all of them can broadly be considered of the left. To talk of establishment Democratic politicians, or Critical Race Theory scholars, in contrast, can be useful.

Rightists work themselves into a rage by taking legitimate criticisms of the most objectionable forces on the other side and declaring them representative of the whole movement. Biden is not a queer studies professor. There are deranged leftists, but many who give them what they want submit because it is the path of least resistance, or they vote Democrat for reasons that are misinformed or even sympathetic.

In sum, typical rightoid analysis has the following beliefs

1. All my enemies on the other side of the political spectrum are fundamentally the same. All seemingly major distinctions between them are unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

2. All my enemies arrive at their positions due to reasons of greed or personality flaws, including sadism and insecurity.

3. The people on my side of the political spectrum who can’t see all of this are not simply making a good faith mistake, but also suffering from a personal flaw, like a need to kiss up to the enemy or remain respectable.

4. Knowing the details of public policy debates isn’t all that important. Good people just need to defeat bad people, and this is what politics is about.

You’ll find this kind of thinking among neoreactionaries, more intellectual MAGAs, and the dissident right. Sometimes these people can make compelling arguments about a portion of the left, but they are bad at understanding the left more generally, and especially bad at recognizing the flaws of their allies. They love Carl Schmitt, the once pro-Nazi philosopher who they believe gives them an intellectual foundation for hating their enemies and not having to think too much about politics otherwise.

With the triumph of Trumpism, this kind of analysis has become the dominant mode of popular punditry on the right. It is less prominent on the left, which is generally higher human capital, more informed, and more nuanced in its thinking. Yet Ganz is an exception, and shows us what a left-wing version of modern rightoidism looks like.

Last week, he wrote a piece that was predictably angry about my article in The Free Press on Nazi salutes. The most reasonable point he makes is that I didn’t take Bannon’s own professed ideology seriously enough, as it certainly resembles something like fascism. I acknowledge there is something to this, and my mistake in part came from not respecting Bannon enough as an intellectual to credit him with having any ideas at all. Nonetheless, as Ganz taught us, rightists with fascist inclinations have always been sort of confused.

The rest of the article is mostly a collection of non-sequiturs and strained analogies. For example, he dislikes the fact that I compared Bannon to Al Sharpton due to the former’s recent call for minority quotas in Silicon Valley. Ganz:

In a proud neocon magazine the presence of Al Sharpton is now taken as evidence of the absence of antisemitism. You must be shitting me. Thirty years ago half the articles on the front page of the Free Press would’ve been trying to convince their readership that Sharpton and other black leaders were essentially black Goebbels and black antisemitism was a five-alarm fire. Do they really have such short memories?

Obviously, the point here isn’t Sharpton’s views on Jews, but his goal of achieving racial balance in the workplace, a position that he shares with Bannon, and presumably Ganz. I could’ve used Ibram Kendi to make the comparison instead, and it wouldn’t have changed the meaning. Talking about Sharpton’s history of antisemitism is besides the point, and evidence that Ganz is playing a kind of word association game as he frantically types away rather than carefully focusing on essential issues.

Setting aside Nazi Sharpton, Ganz’s main argument is essentially that attempting to understand why conservatives make Nazi salutes, or defend those who do, amounts to excusing such behavior.

Let me try to put this is in terms conservatives might understand. Supposing you were an anticommunist, and you invited an ex-communist to lecture about the evils of communism, and in the course of his lecture, he goes, “Now, of course, I reject Stalinism, but the regrettable excesses of Comrade Stalin can be explained due to the necessity [emphasis added] of fighting the White Terror and protecting the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” you might not ask him back. Maybe he’s not the right guy for that job, because he’s rationalizing exactly what you are meant to denounce.

Yet I never said that Nazi iconography or imagery was “necessary” to fight back against the left! It’s right there in the last sentence, where I write that it “is a method of communication that was almost certainly never productive but under current conditions has become truly grotesque — and should have no place in public life.” Nazi salutes are bad today, they were bad yesterday, and they will be bad tomorrow. Defending them is also bad, and no one should do it. Yet there is nothing wrong with trying to understand a phenomenon. Ganz happens not to like my explanation, because it contradicts his own narrative, which is that conservatives are all fascists and this is all anyone needs to understand. But I hope he would acknowledge that there are at least some conservatives who do not admire the political programs of Hitler or Mussolini, but nonetheless defend or perhaps even engage in racist trolling. If such people exist, is it not perhaps worth understanding their motivations, and trying to convince them that taboos on fascist iconography should be maintained?

The analogy to justifying Stalinism further fails because even if I did say making Nazi salutes was once necessary, that’s quite different from saying mass killings were once necessary. In other words, I wrote an article arguing we should try to understand why certain people make Nazi salutes. Ganz said he would explain what was wrong with this by making an analogy to someone saying that mass killing was necessary.

If I were a rightoid, or Ganz, I would accuse him of lying right here. But I generally don’t think people who make bad arguments that fall apart under logical scrutiny are in most cases consciously trying to deceive their readers. After all, if Ganz was good at logic, he would support free markets instead of socialism. Smart people with honest intentions can make really dumb arguments when they’re blinded by ideology and hate. And few people are as ideological or as hateful.

If you want to make a more fitting comparison to my article in The Free Press, you might point to someone who was a former communist but remained left-wing getting a platform to explain what draws people to their old ideology. This happens all the time, and is completely unremarkable. Think of names like Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, and more recently Christopher Hitchens. Even Barack Obama discussed his flirtation with Marxism in Dreams from My Father, though to be fair he never wrote deranged essays like I did. Then again, I was never president.

Understanding what makes rightists behave as they now do was my motivation for writing the article, but Ganz has a different theory. It’s the same reason that anyone on the right does anything: because they’re a Nazi. As he put it on Twitter: “Hanania's position is, Nazi salutes are an obstacle for Nazi policies.” If you’ve been following my work, and it doesn’t appear that Ganz has, you probably just spit out your coffee. There’s a good chance I’m to the left of Ganz on immigration, when restrictionism is by far the number one priority of the far right across the globe. I can list my other non-fascist positions – pro-gay marriage, abortion rights, contempt for the idea that the state should be used for collectivist purposes – but, really, immigration should be enough.

It’s fine if Ganz doesn’t want to subscribe to my newsletter. But if he feels compelled to talk about me all the time, it’s a sign of intellectual laziness that he has not developed a basic understanding of my positions. I searched on X, and he’s mentioned my name in 11 different tweets. On his Substack, I appear in 7 different articles. He mentions the thesis of The Origins of Woke a few times, but there is little indication that he is aware of a single position I hold on practically any issue that is not related to the subject of the book. This is because to Ganz, right-leaning writers are not people with ideas that can be engaged with, but different varieties of bigots and haters whose statements and views are useful to understand only to the extent that they serve his larger narrative.

Ganz makes a longer case for my supposed Nazism.

Shouldn’t we ask how “denazified” is Hanania, really?… In the very piece, he admits that he still believes in race science, albeit coded with euphemisms again: “important role that heredity plays in human affairs.” Hanania believes that “wokeness” is the result of Civil Rights law, which he would like to be rolled back. He wrote a whole book about it. In Weiss’s London speech, she enumerated a number of “sacred values,” including, “That we are all created in the image of God and it is that—and not our ethnicity or our IQ score—that gives us our worth and that makes us all equal.” That is not a value that Hanania holds, who openly and stridently believes that IQ and race determine human worth.

I do indeed believe in heredity and oppose civil rights law. I don’t believe that race determines human worth, although I would say that IQ is one factor that goes into the calculation. Is this the definition of Nazism? Can it have nothing to do with what you think the role of the state should be? Or your attitude towards nationalism? Can you be anti-nationalistic, anti-racist, and anti-state and be a fascist? Maybe Ganz would say yes, that opposing civil rights law is all you need, a sufficient even if not necessary condition. But that would mean that he has a very strange definition of fascism.

In other articles, Ganz acknowledges that libertarianism is distinct from nationalist authoritarianism. But he’s only interested in libertarianism in the context of its willingness to form alliances with more objectionable kinds of rightists. You would think if he hates fascism, he would be looking for ways to break these two factions of the right apart? Like maybe not lumping both of them into the same bucket and declaring them all enemies that need to be crushed?

The point here isn’t to convince Ganz that I’m a good guy and we should be friends. He seems like a deeply unpleasant person, though unlike him I can appreciate the ideas even of individuals I don’t like when they make compelling or even simply entertaining arguments. Ganz is correct about much of the right today, particularly young people into “edgy ideas,” which are usually just a mask to give an intellectual gloss to sadistic and hateful impulses. You should read him for his insights into these people, while appreciating the irony of him having a lot more in common with them than many of us he considers to be fascists.