This is the reason

Here’s another terrific essay from John Ganz, whose Substack deserves your support. In it, Ganz takes on Ross Douthat’s equivocating crypto anti-anti-Trumpism (a lot of that going around), which suggests that some sort of “post-liberalism” of the conservative Catholic variety may be a more effective way of fighting Trumpism than saying a bunch of mean things about how Trumpists are basically fascists.

First, Douthat:

Unlike Ganz, confident in a very specific antifascist narrative, I don’t think we actually know which form of contemporary politics is the most dangerous or destructive for the long term. And we certainly have no idea what form of politics — a renovated and renewed liberalism, a more humane and serious post-liberalism, an unexpected marriage thereof — is going to see us through this crisis or build something on the other side.

Ganz’s response:

To me, it is another evasion. We can see now very clearly what the more dangerous and destructive form is. And it has no logical bearing on the moral question at hand: is this regime, in the here and now, detestable? That some future crimes might be committed does not make a crime today any less of one.

Abstractions without principles are mere euphemisms. All these phrases: “post-liberalism,” “national conservatism,” etc., etc., are just ways to paper over what’s happening in the here and now: rampant lawlessness, cruelty, and corruption. They allow people to avoid using their judgment about what’s in front of them. More to the point, they are essentially lies. I want to quote another part of that same Arendt essay, which has to do with the breakdown of judgment.

Ganz then quotes from Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.”

…what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened. It is true that many of these people were quickly disenchanted, and it is well known that most of the men of July 20, 1944, who paid with their lives for their conspiracy against Hitler, had been connected with the regime at some time or other. Still, I think this early moral disintegration in German society, hardly perceptible to the outsider, was like a kind of dress rehearsal for its total breakdown, which was to occur during the war years.

Ganz again:

Yes, intellectuals may not be able to bend great social forces to their will, but they are ultimately responsible for the judgments they make. To judge the present as anything less than obscene is to contribute to the obscenity. Post-liberalism means nothing.

Ganz’s observations remind me of the tremendous concluding passage of Eichmann in Jerusalem, about how, when facing radical evil, obedience and support are ultimately the same thing:

“You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the
greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never
acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had
never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel
guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not
very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation and conscience that could be proved
beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and
that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are
equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or most all, are guilty, nobody is. This is
an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don’t
understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and
Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because
all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the
newfangled notion of `collective guilt,’ according to which people supposedly are guilty of, or feel
guilty about, things done in their name but not by them – things in which they did not participate
and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an
objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have
been an excuse for you.

“Luckily, we don’t have to go that far. You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the
potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had
become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior
or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an
abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done.
We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of
your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told
your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point,
willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would
ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of
argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the
organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore
actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics
obedience and Support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not
wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations –
as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not
inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to
want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”