Unpopular Front

2 days 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.

6 days 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.

1 week 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.

2 weeks 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.

2 weeks 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.