I Read Richard Beck's Article in n + 1 About Democrats (More or Less) Aloud to My Parents

It took four hours but it was worth it

(See writing class info at bottom of page folks)

(Also I wrote this before we bombed Iran. It’s no less relevant.)

I Read Richard Beck's Article in n + 1 About Democrats (More or Less) Aloud to My Parents

A few weeks ago I read a portion of my n +1 story “Pirates of the Ayahuasca” in the magazine’s offices in Brooklyn. Several other people who had written essays for the current issue read too. Participants were requested to read only 500 words each and I was pleased when it came to pass that each of them actually followed directions because writers often like to read for too long and no one needs that.

Everyone’s reading was great. I am happily making my way through all the stories in the issue.

I was in particular drawn to Richard Beck’s essay “Fret, Hedge, React,” on John Ganz’s book When the Clock Broke. This book profiles a collection of conservative figures active prior to Bill Clinton’s 1992 election who Ganz feels set the stage for Trump’s election wins in 2016 and 2024.

Some of these people you may have heard of: Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan, Rudy Giuliani, David Duke. Some of them — like Murray Rothbard, the source of the book’s title, from a 1992 speech in which Rothbard said, among other charming things “We shall break the clock of the welfare state, we shall break the clock of the Great Society”— you may not have heard of.

I read Beck’s article on what was to be a long, drawn out subway ride from the reading to the Upper West Side. (This parenthetical is skippable. The G and the 7 came right away. The sign on the Uptown 2 platform said there was one coming in five minutes. This quickly became three minutes. But then three minutes stayed at three minutes for a long time. I don’t know how long. Long.) A bright spot: I tucked myself into a nice safe portion of platform where I was in no danger of being tossed onto the tracks to read Beck’s article, a hearty 8500 words, the same length as my own.

I read it in about an hour, which is a little better than a skim. You can probably digest my essay in about 45 minutes, but his is much denser material. Give yourself the time. Read it. It’s good. Here is a tweet with a quote from our friend Richard.

Beck does not believe Ganz’s book delivers on its promise to actually explain how we got from these crazy mofos to Trump, another crazy mofo. He acknowledges that the book is “entertaining,” and allows “It would take a special churlishness to deny the similarities between Trump’s rhetorical style and that of the right-wingers who populate When the Clock Broke.” However, and I am being reductive here, he points out that just because we have this unhinged openly offensive inconsistent nonsense-spouting guy in office and that other men using similar language, with similar ways of being, also calling themselves Republicans, have come before him, to offer them as an explanation for Trump is facile. Not only is it facile, it is facile disguising itself as complicated and deep. Worst of all, Ganz avoids looking at the entire two party political system (which includes the Democrats!!!) which has done more to get Trump in office than anything else.

“For a work of history, When the Clock Broke is frustratingly reluctant to advance explicit historical arguments...Ganz doesn’t explain how all these “losers” he describes with so much wit and fluency eventually managed to produce one man who won big and came to dominate the country’s politics, succeeding where so many others had failed. He never even tells us whether the figures he discusses had any connections with Trump — social, commercial, or otherwise. And he doesn’t explain why, if the country had “cracked up” and the Republican Party was adrift by 1992, it took another quarter century for Trump’s rise to become possible.”

Beck suggests that Ganz might have examined some other things like:

“NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W. Bush, the 2000 election, September 11, the war on terror, the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, the legalization of gay marriage, the presence of the Minutemen on the country’s southern border, the rise in mass shootings, Occupy Wall Street, Senator Mitch McConnell’s lengthy effort to enable minoritarian rule by packing the courts with right-wing judges, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, or Citizens United.”

I saw Beck’s project with Ganz and his book to not be just or even primarily about Ganz and his book but a way to say, hey, look progressives, I know you’re obsessed with the right, and there are all these books and podcasts about the right and how we must understand them to see where we are today, but maybe you should spend more time or any time at all looking at what’s in front of your face, which is that the Democrats have moved to the right. They haven’t done so because they are “hapless idiots,” they have done so because the Democratic base is getting richer and richer and the shit they care about is not the shit you fantasize that they care about. They ignore progressive policies because they don’t consider progressive support useful. Also, much of America under Trump looks like America under the Democrats.

Trump is awful, but maybe he won because he wasn’t an incumbent and it was a bad year for incumbents all over the world. Trump is awful but his policy on the genocide in Palestine takes up where Biden left off. Trump is awful but the Democrats started the crackdowns on the universities. Trump is awful but what about the American two-party political system? Trump is awful but he was elected president and the absolute panic that we will never have a Democrat president elected to the office again is overblown.

Again, while this essay is explicitly about Ganz’s work, Beck’s task is to look at Ganz as an example of progressive liberals who spend a lot of time fixating on Trump, and delighting in the often most granular aspects of the spectacle of the right, and very little time looking at what the Democrats have done to enable him in broad daylight.

I finally arrive at the entire point of my story, which is much shorter than the lead up. I stayed with my parents on my visit east for a mere seventy two hours, and we spent no less than four and a half of them reading this essay aloud. This was a more or less forced activity. My mom was a pretty good sport but she got mad a few times because she thought I wasn’t listening to her, but I was, but mostly I was busy trying to get through an 8500 word article in n +1 before I left.

My dad was visibly annoyed that the article took so long to read. He kept scrolling down and saying “jesus how much more of this thing is left” and “this is very dense,” with a chiding shake of the head.

But I would not give up. I have been trying to explain this shit to my parents for so goddam long and as indignant as I am about it I can’t explain it all very well. After all, this isn’t my beat. My beat is doing ayahuasca. But like Elizabeth Warren herself, I “persevered nonetheless!”

I now feel satisfied I have said absolutely everything I can to my parents why I don’t care about Democrats anymore and I think there is nothing useful in their project. Immediately after finishing the article, I felt that I actually made some inroads. I don’t know if this is true. I am sure they will go back to watching PBS news — which is garbage, you might as well watch a load of laundry through the machine door —but it won’t be my fault.

Thank you, Richard Beck, for your hard work. Through you, I have said my piece to my parents, and I shall rest. No more arguing. No more pleading. “It’s in the article,” I will say from now on. “You read it once, go read it again.” Also I am not being entirely fair to my parents. They did listen and pay attention and they did not give up either. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for letting me use you as comic foils.

Subscribe to n + 1. Trump tried to DOGE them! Also read Richard’s book, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. I just got it.

I LEAVE YOU WITH THIS, FROM HIS ARTICLE.

writing class !

“write it off”

I’m v close to full but might have a spot or two

Here is the information:

I want to give subscribers a chance to get on the list for a class I’m teaching starting this Thursday the 26 of June at 4pm CA, 7 pm East Coast.

The class will focus on writing and, more importantly, revising an essay about something you’re wrestling with — the issue could be strictly personal, or it could be more political/global — and want to put behind you or get clarity about.

It’s been my experience that I don’t really know what I’m thinking about something until I have written about and then edited a story to the point where everything is as clear and eloquent as it can be, and any person could read and understand it. The editing is the important part. When you focus on something with the objective of making it good and readable it loses its power to randomly and annoyingly haunt you. You wrestle with it deeply, and then it is over, or at least takes on a different, new, less exhausting form.

My email is sarahpetersmiller@gmail.com. If you are interested in such a class, which will be four sessions and have a sliding scale from $350-$600, let me know.