JVL chats with John Ganz author of Unpopular Front on Substack. Their wide-ranging conversation started with a discussion about the Jeffrey Epstein case—not just what the controversy of the Epstein “papers” means for the Trump coalition, but the deeper questions about what the Epstein story reveals about class, trust, and the conspiracy mindset. They they turned to a discussion about democracy and citizenship, with a detour to talk about the Confederacy and the ways that oligarchic, racist thinking survived after the defeat of the slave feudalism in the Civil War. Also discussed: JD Vance, Peter Thiel, conspiracy thinking, and who could possibly take the mantle of MAGA leadership after Trump departs from the scene (Donald Trump Jr.?).
From Ganz:
Exciting to see John Ganz with JVL. I would pay $100/year to hear these two bounce ideas off of each other on a regular basis.
Excellent discussion. I too had a blind spot about the centrality of race, and how the past isn’t even the past. I thought that America’s advancements during the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s were here to stay and instead I have to accept the reality that we are backtracking on our rights.
We're backtracking on everything—science, medicine, education, knowledge, civility. That so many chose this because "oh he won't be so bad" makes me see red.
Fury runs through my veins.
i can hear dana from erie colorado
What is the name they say at 39:20? Transcript says "Rav K. Judo."
I almost skipped this due to Epstein overload. So glad I didn't. Just signed up for John's Substack and I see some meaty offerings! Amazing how the Confederacy managed to glue together oligarchs and dirt farmers and is doing it again today.
Really good conversation. It made me think that although there’s a hatred of the “elite”, and an envy of the “rich and famous” there’s also an escapist fascination with them that shows itself in the popularity of TV shows and films about people richer and more successful. Like “Dallas”, to go back a bit, or James Bond, or any number of others - there has always been a huge appetite for vicariously enjoying wealth and its manifestations - fast cars, big houses, powerful people. Trump seems to have a reality show host’s ability to understand all of that, to be the golden escalator to that world while at the same time echoing the voices that say they despise that which has a magnetic draw for them. That’s part of the obsession with Epstein - it’s a “Dallas”-like world of ostentatious wealth, with the addition of a salaciously disgusting secretive component that feeds nicely into being explained by conspiracy theories - the additional thrill of contributing to the script of this odious soap opera.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this question: as a not-very-political person, it seems like we are moving/have moved into a political structure where elections and law are almost irrelevant. The platforms on which we used to discuss our values and the “how” of running a country seem to be ignored and unenforced. The government/money just do whatever they want. So it seems almost foolish to continue publishing, voting, marching, donating to legal fights, if the ones in power are just laughing at us. They do whatever they want to amalgamate more power and $ for themselves. I mean, who needs to make 60 billion MORE dollars in a month???
From a practical perspective: does voting and legislating still matter? Have we reached the point where pouring money and energy into legal and electoral fights is just a distraction from what is actually being implemented at top levels?
What do you recommend citizens should do to try and get their voice heard? Are there systems still in place, functioning, to represent us?
Because practically speaking: if the only thing that matters is force now - financial and military - what can we do?
JVL, this was a great conversation with John Ganz…I feel at times like I’m back in school and working on a poly sci/history/sociology degree with so much meaty Bulwark content! I learn a lot from other commenters too. Thank you for finding these wonderful folks to bring on the Bulwark.
Heather Cox Richardson on her podcast yesterday (7/17) expressed great concern about the development of the definition of citizenship not being based on the idea of America, and said it’s not getting enough attention…specifically mentioning Vance’s blood and soil related speech.
I find it interesting that Sarah is so much more on board with the potential Epstein conspiracy than JVL is. I would have reversed that if I’d had to guess. It’s kind of amusing. I’m enjoying Sarah’s enthusiasm so much!
Very interesting conversation. I appreciate that you two stepped away from breathless speculating about the Trump drama of the day to look at the bigger picture. I’m glad that you spotlighted the historical impulse towards an oligarchy which perpetually strives to limit human rights to only some people.
Regarding John's discussion of "race" and how people perceive fitting in the GOP's world, it is due to their ability to make them perceive the targets as "other" because Trump and the GOP discuss the target's traits as amorphous like a zodiac writer does with references such that anyone can take it as applying to themselves.
John is spot on! Trump and the GOP got into power and were allowed to act to destroy our liberal order because of the rot in the American electorate. These reprehensible voters prized wealth and selfishness above all else. The Confederacy won. It is that simple.
Such an enjoyable, informative conversation! Thanks!
Love this interview. Put all my historical information into a frame work
Trump is more likely to show more serious signs of dementia, he will die years after it's obvious.
It was as great to see and hear the two you together. The recording had no sound issues.
Smart conversation. The Confederacy comparison is apt — only, it’s worse? Imagine if instead of seceding,Jefferson Davis & Co. ran the federal government.
If you enjoyed John Ganz he has a podcast with Jamelle Bouie of the NY Times Opinion called Unclear and Present Danger Podcast where they talk about movies from the 90s and how they relate to politics of those days.
This sounds fascinating and I'm going to check it out right now!
They actually do two podcasts together. The second one is on Patreon and goes beyond the purview of the original podcast focus on the 90s. Both make for great listening.
Is there a way to get these SS chats in podcast format? I feel like these sometimes show up under Bulwark Takes, sometimes not.
Yes!!!!!!!! A lot of these You tube conversations are so great. Don't see why the audio can't go into Bulwark Takes. I'm a listener in the car and it's really exposing me to new people.
There is no reasonable chance that people are or will be anywhere close to being a non-racist nation. Animals such as us are wired to be suspicious, fearful, or worse.
Does “flexible’ mean ‘lie’?
Maybe maybe he actually started feeling remorse and guilt, but also maybe he knew that his life in the outside would not be a part of the same social class - and because he would ‘fall out of a window’ from the 10th floor.
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Don Jr and Eric pretty much seem to be morons with no charisma. That could limit their possibilities as political heirs.
I'm thinking about this distinction y'all draw between being American qua blood and soil vs. qua ideas. It seems basically accurate and, choosing between the two, the second definitely seems open to more people. What struck me though is this question of if everyone gets to claim those ideas in the same way.
Maybe an example will help get at what's concerning me. I've been thinking about Zohran Mamdani and the way the "globalize the intifada" language has defined him for so many people. In a lot of ways his campaign was the precise sort of kitchen-table issues campaign Democrat centrists have bee telling us we need to run to beat Trumpism. I didn't like a lot of his policies, but it's hard to argue he wasn't laser-focused on affordability. I don't remember him ever using the phrase "globalize the intifada" in the campaign, and while he certainly was critical of Israel's actions when asked, he also bent over backward to emphasize their right to exist alongside their obligation to abide by international laws. But a lot of people have been absolutely relentless in this push to get him to denounce the phrase. At the time I found myself wishing he would. I personally find it antisemitic. And it did feel racist. I can't imagine a Zachary Meloni from Williamsburg get the same treatment. But he's a brown-skinned, Muslim immigrant, and that felt like it locked him out of a certain political archetype.
Here we're talking about politics, but I worry the same thing applies to civics. Rumeysa Ozturk placed a lot of faith and trust in American ideals like freedom of speech when she signed on to that editorial. It was pretty patriotic to act like she could safely take a public stand. But the current administration showed her that protection was wrong, and her relying on those democratic virtues didn't give her the protection it would someone like me (white, American-born, etc.).
I like this idea anyone can become American by shaping their lives around ideas like tolerance, democracy, cooperation, hard work, however you want to put it. But it seems if you can't also tie in to the blood and soil thing, that may not be enough in an increasing amount of peoples' eyes. Well, I say increasing; I wonder these days if it wasn't always that way.
Great conversation, and great new Substack to watch out for! Thanks for introducing us to John Ganz, JVL. :-)
The confederacy may have officially died, but all the wealth and power is still in the hands of the same families today. Jess Piper has a great Substack on what it’s like in the rural south under these neo-antebellums
Fascinating conversation- thank-you!!
Great show! John Ganz made a lot of interesting and fresh points. Hard to get a word in edgewise, eh JVL? But seriously - a great guest! I want to know how he referenced Aristotle, so I'll definitely be looking that up.
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Great guest! I could have listened to him all day.
I disagree with Mr Ganz.
“I wish her well” I believe is a veiled threat.
This is awesome, I have been a paid subscriber to John for a few years. Great stuff
Re citizenship and Thiel/Vance, how would that work with African-Americans? Scrap the 14th Amendment? How would that work with Hispanic-Americans who can trace their families back to California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico or Arizona before the end of the Mexican-American War? Scrap the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildalgo? Then there's Native Americans, so finish the ethnic cleansing which began with the Trail of Tears?
IOW, maybe there's some way to exclude Asians and Africans whose ancestors were never slaves in the New World from even residency in the US, but other than by deliberate ethnic cleansing it's difficult to see how a whites-only republic could work.
It wouldn't require anything more than an English-language adaptation of Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, redefining citizenship and rights on racial and ethnic grounds. That obviously would require massive constitutional changes, but I don't think that anyone in this administration would be bothered by that on any grounds except the amount of effort and force required.
Those kind of racial laws naturally can go hand in hand with an extermination program, but not necessarily. Rather than the Nazis, they could use the Gulf States as their model, where the majority of the people who live there are non-citizen helots who are only there to work.
I suppose this SCOTUS could find a way to square such a statute with the 14th and 15th Amendments since the Constitution doesn't define citizenship.
It'd be more trouble handling inconsistencies between what'd satisfy citizenship requirements for white people if there were additional conditions for nonwhite people. That pesky equal protection clause would just have to go.
With respect to your 2nd paragraph, why not copy the model of a supposed democracy? That is, Japan and the Chōsen-seki.
Great conversation. This is simply the perpetual conflict and contradiction in American history. You see it in the writings of some of the founders - Ben Franklin (paraphrased): everybody is created equal, but only certain persons are best equipped culturally/racially to exercise democratic freedoms. Namely, Anglo Saxon Protestants. Anglo saxons have freedom in their blood, and Protestants believe in decentralized authority. That’s how they squared the circle of enlightenment ideals with the reality of race and class hierarchies. New versions of this emerge at any point at which the hierarchy is under threat. Or, more terrifying, the democratic ideals are totally abandoned when presented with a choice between democracy and the racial-hierarchical society.
I have said before and will say again: (many) Americans will gladly abandon their self interests, capitalism, and democracy itself if any of those things get in the way of white supremacy.
Re "Anglo saxons have freedom in their blood, and Protestants believe in decentralized authority. That’s how they squared the circle of enlightenment ideals with the reality of race and class hierarchies" there are two different types of Anglo-Saxons in the colonial period.
Historian Colin Woodard has named eleven different regional cultures in North America ("American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America"). Seven of the eleven were founded by Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Two of those were founded by two different types of Anglo-Saxons who were opposed to each other (from https://familylocket.com/merging-dna-and-history-american-nations-by-colin-woodard-part-2/#:~:text=Along%20with%20the%20Tidewater%20and,most%20liberal%20of%20the%20nations):
"Yankeedom" - Belief in the importance of education, debate, and coming to a consensus . . . shunned hierarchy and instead created a government system of rotating power (selectmen) . . . idealists whose sense of righteousness helped them create a more equal society
"Deep South" - settled by the second sons of Barbadian slaveholders. Equally as hierarchical as "Tidewater" but mostly without much of the noblesse oblige of the latter, the founders at the top of the Deep South’s hierarchical society were the most brutal of 17th-18th century enslavers.
The white supremacy of the Deep South was nothing like the white supremacy of Yankeedom which is the home of abolitionism. The ideals of the Declaration come from the educated class of Yankeedom where 90% were literate and educated Tidewater plantation owners like Jefferson. Blood and soil idealism did not.
This is the divide in our history: All men are created equal (liberalism), vs blood and soil (illiberalism).
Great book, I loved it. Anyone who is interested in this aspect of regional differences should read it.
Yes! There is not ONE American culture. I told my conservative friend this when I first read the book in 2021 and he balked at that.
No sound issue
Thank you for introducing me to Ganz. I want to know more about his academic background cause he knows his history and his sociology. I'm following him!
There was so much good in this that I can't pick out a favorite quote.
Same here
i have been reading Eric Fromers book about reconstruction. i feel today is a mirror of that time.
Neither Thiel nor Musk is a “true American.” Both are foreign born hoping to impose their native- failed feudal aspirations on their adopted country. There is a complex sociology and psychology there that is different from the MAGA sociology and psychology. Money and infotainment are strong links, but i think teasing apart the differences is very important to our real understanding and, probably, moving forward.
Samuel Alito has creepy and un-American obsessions. Adrian Vermeule. And plenty of Thiel's Valley acolytes are USA-born. Every Musk fanboy I’ve had the ill fortune to work with (at my last job, a SpaceX launch was on a big screen at the office so everyone could watch) was American.
Not as if this were the 1st time elite Republicans believed they could con the rubes to alter society and government to those elites' liking.
BINGO on the centrality of race in this country, JVL. (I admit to a similar blind spot until 2016.)
I appreciate you admitting your blind spot. In public!
The interview with Chris Cillizza wasn't posted here. I had to head over to his Substack to catch up on the baseball talk I missed tuning in late.
John Ganz's book When The Clock Broke is fantastic.
Thx for the tip. Put on hold at my library.
I like John Ganz. He seems to be thinking in broad terms like I do, gelling his ideas into a point of view that’s not distracted by the minutia of hot button news. Like HCR, he’s steeped in a particular relevant historical era that has important parallels and lessons for America today. I’m going to subscribe to his SubStack, not only to gain more from his point of view, but to learn more about the history of fascist regimes. One problem I have in listening to him is that he casually throws out terms that, I assume, bear on fascist history but that I don’t know the first thing about.
To hit on a point that came up about 34-35 minutes into the cast, Ganz and JVL discussed what it would take to regain democracy from Trump World. That’s a pretty cynical point to just accept as the basis for the ensuing conversation. While I think the American electorate is used to and needs an apparently dynamic candidate to rally around, I don’t think a specific person is necessary (yet) for democracy to be reclaimed.
Ending with an opinion that I have often expressed in my SubStack comments, we just need the vast silent majority to continue its awakening. Learn. Discuss. Vote.
I've gone into a deep dive on fascism since I saw the BBC documentary, "The Rise of the Nazis." The most highly regarded book on the history of fascist regimes is Robert Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism" (2004). It's very good.
Thanks for the recommendation!
You are welcome!
We are a Republic. Democracy is an aspect.
Here's how I see it, Carole. We were founded as a republic but over time we became a democratic republic. The Constitution gave the states the authority over elections. Soon after after the Constitution was ratified, the states started giving voting rights to white men without property. New Hampshire was the first, in 1792. By the Age of Jacksonian Democracy, beginning with Jackson's election in 1828, most states removed the property restriction for voting. Then Black men were given the right with the 15th Amendment, women with the 19th.
Great conversation JVL! Thanks! I’m smarter after watching this.
Not to go down a science rabbit hole, but do YOU understand gravity! Albert Einstein spent almost 9 years working on General Relativity which defines what gravity actually is.
I am in the middle of reading Fever in the Heartland about the Klan's attempt to take over national politics a century ago and the degree of resonance with certain aspects of the current situation is.....high. I'm starting to consider to what extent the ICE masks are basically the same as pointy hoods, especially once ICE becomes populated predominantly by folks for whom the masked kidnappings were a selling point.
Yikes I hope you are wrong!
I feel like we are speed running the early 20th century
When the powerful throw secret feasts, they always leave crumbs. Epstein’s “papers” aren’t just receipts. They are scripture from the temple of rot.
This dialogue between JVL and John Ganz does what real citizenship should do. It names the forces behind the curtain and dares to call oligarchy by its real name. Not just power. Not just wealth. But the machinery of erasure dressed in country club etiquette.
Conspiracy culture isn’t a glitch. It’s the soundtrack of empire when it wants the peasants to blame ghosts instead of CEOs.
As for Junior stepping up to lead? That’s not a torch being passed. That’s a vape cloud of mediocrity chasing the ghost of a dynasty that never was.
Let the archives stay open. Let memory stay sharp. Let the truth rot their illusions.
Really interesting conversation. This could've gone on a lot longer.. just a deep dive.. thank you.
Like many others I ignored the whole "Epstein" thing. Due to health issues I couldn't follow the news til the last year. I heard the conspiracy theories and just tuned it out. Now that I learned the extent of the harm done to so many victims I became interested
Trump is a caricature of a guilty man. For once his base sees beyond his lies. He is talking way too much about this like a guilty man. I never really thought he was guilty of this set of crimes until now. His complaining and transparent faux outrage makes it obvious he is very worried. This may not amount to much in the end but it is fun to watch.
I am so tired of conspiracy theories, especially the antivaxers. Way to make our expected lifespan 40 years again. Is that the goal?
I have the same history re the Epstein scandal… I have learned a lot more, especially from the podcast interviews with the Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown, who dug into Epstein’s empire when she became enraged about the lack of justice for his many many victims with his house arrest/sentence the first time around. Her research resulted in his second arrest.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article221957120.html
I understand why the MAGA folks are so fixated on Epstein, though MAGA was fed a pack of lies by Trump and his enablers and it’s come back to bite them.
The thing is…to the extent that we had a “ruling class” that ruling class was taught to serve others. There was at least a surface level (if not deeper) commitment to responsible leadership. That seems so missing with MAGA.
👍🏼 can hear!
We need to make space in this discussion for the deeper impacts of colossal shifts in the psychological sense of self and group identification that is underway. So far even the best analyses ignore the psychological fact that the bounded ego-inflated self of Modernism who engages in transactional relationships is unsustainable in the hyper-connected rapidly shifting social context. I wish we had better ways of including the fact that crazy-making dehumanization is becoming intolerable to a generation raised to believe they have agency and become enraged when they realize they don't. Everyone is not going to have a podcast.
Some were very happy he killed himself. Taken off suicide watch so he could do it?
Excellent. Thank you for introducing me to John Ganz. I've got a lot to think about now.
The Volk and the billionaire elites are essential components of the authoritarian’s hold on power. He needs both Cletus & Bezos and is in power because of this alignment of those seemingly antithetical interests. Thanks to Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen for really driving this home.
Thanks for pointing out the work of Ruth Ben-Ghiat. She is here on sub stack and I have subscribed.
the two people i've been reading religiously for the last year or so in one podcast! The Great Convergence has arrived (and I kinda suspected it in a few triads). Now I just have to find 40 Minutes.
Grown-ass adults have been reduced to tears trying to do the math on how long it will take.
Listen at 1.5x!
Discounting the Epstein situation is foolish. If trump wasn't in it or being paid to hide it, the docs would be released. You have a person serving 20 years for being Epstein's gal Friday and you throw it aside as nonsense. I'm disappointed in your opinion. I'll pass on the rest of this talk.
This was such a great conversation. I learned so much and it has my synapses firing thinking about our reality right now.
JVL, you should read Ganz's book as soon as you can. It's fascinating and its prescience is being realized in real time.
Hi from al
As ubiquitous as the Epstein conspiracy was to the Trump movement, I actually don’t recall Trump talking or using the Epstein thing specifically against democrats as much as those others around him since 2016 etc
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