Reviews

Richard Beck

On reading the right

Lucien Samaha, Untitled (LAX-0174-10) . 1988, archival inkjet print, color negative film, aluminium frame. 15 3/4 × 10 1/2". Courtesy of the artist, The Wig, Berlin, and Schiefe Zähne, Berlin.

John Ganz. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.

Less than a year into Donald Trump’s first term as President, the political commentator and historian John Ganz began to produce the writing that now appears on his Substack, Unpopular Front. A 2017 post, titled “Libertarian ‘Democracy Skepticism’ and the Pathological Self,” elaborated on a Washington Post op-ed Ganz had written about the influence of libertarian social and political thought on the Trump-supporting alt-right.…