John Ganz

Freelance Writer at Freelance

dottore, ingegnere, avvocato When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s — out now from @fsgbooks

Articles

Time Off

3 weeks ago | unpopularfront.news | John Ganz

Starting later today and until May 7th, Unpopular Front will be on vacation! I often make these announcements and then end up writing newsletters anyway, but this time I’d really like to not work — at all. I’ve taken basically no time off since the release of my book last year. Although this vacation was planned for a while, it’s also timely since I’m not exactly enjoying my job at the moment. As I wrote a few weeks ago on Twitter, it’s both too awful and too easy.
Trump et le fascisme historique. Nous devons affronter la réalité !

3 weeks ago | gaucheanticapitaliste.org | John Ganz

La nature du trumpisme – et le type de régime que Donald Trump pourrait installer – sont l’objet de nombreux débats. Entre apparence d’une nouveauté radicale et recyclage de théories et principes de l’extrême droite historique, comment peut-on envisager le rapport de Trump au fascisme historique ?
John Ganz on the Books of Donald Trump

3 weeks ago | thenation.com | D.D. Guttenplan |John Ganz

Hold the powerful to account by supporting The Nation The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week. Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts.
Kautsky's Fable

3 weeks ago | unpopularfront.news | John Ganz

Karl Kautsky’s “Ultra-Imperialism” may be the worst-timed article ever written. In the September 1914 issue of his party’s theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit, the German Social Democratic Party’s chief theorist—“the Pope of Marxism”—argued that a massive war was not the necessary outcome of competition between the great powers.
Trump's Art of the Book; Rethinking Sam Francis; Class Dealignment?; Another Visit from the Bond Squad

1 month ago | unpopularfront.news | John Ganz

This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. If you are not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, I ask you to consider signing up: This newsletter is totally reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. At 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks. And it’s still less than the “recession special” at Gray’s Papaya — $7.50 for two hot dogs and a drink.
Apocalypse Delayed?

1 month ago | unpopularfront.news | John Ganz |Max Read

Three months ago, speaking to Quinn Slobodian and , I proposed that the market might be the only remaining form of rationality and therefore the only thing that we might be relying on to temper Trumpian madness. Now, as a person whose scattered thoughts on economics are shaped by the traditions of Keynes and Marx, this is not a particularly hopeful idea. I don’t happen to think the rationality of the market is very rational at all.
Globalism? In this economy?

1 month ago | unpopularfront.news | John Ganz

It’s long been my contention that you can understand Trumpism as the synthesis of two ideological currents, which were long dormant and marginal in the American political scene, and then came roaring to prominence. One is radical libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism, articulated most fully in the thought of Murray Rothbard, and the other is national populism, represented by the writings of Samuel T. Francis.
Donald Trump’s Long Con

1 month ago | thenation.com | Charles Leerhsen |John Ganz

Books & the Arts / April 7, 2025 Dog Eat Dog The books of Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s Long Con His trilogy of books published in the 1980s and 90s offer a vantage point into the president’s craven and cruel worldview. Ad Policy Donald Trump and Roy Cohn at a press conference.(Getty) This article appears in the May 2025 issue. It’s arguably a waste of time to read Donald Trump’s books. In the first place, he didn’t write them; they weren’t even written by the same ghostwriter.
Le Pen goes down; "Beggar-thy-Neighbor;" the end of Exorbitant Privilege; Pro-Tariff industry, Wladimir S. Woytinsky

1 month ago | unpopularfront.news | John Ganz

This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. A huge piece of news that got obliterated in the tariff apocalypse: the conviction of French far-right politician Marine Le Pen. I refer you as always to Arthur Goldhammer’s essential commentary: The RN, taking a leaf from Trump’s playbook, will of course attack the “weaponization” of the judicial system.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Free Trader

1 month ago | unpopularfront.news | John Ganz

One of our country’s worst commentators on politics, Batya Ungar-Sargon, recently compared Trump to a “21st century FDR” since he is supposedly trying to help out the working class. This is, of course, totally absurd. I cannot say if Trump is the anti-Christ, but I can say with some certainty that he is the anti-FDR.