During the Trump administration (at least at the beginning), I experienced a new political sensation. It wasn’t anger or disappointment over policies, something I’d long grown accustomed to. The only word I could describe it was ” Humiliation It’s such a shame we’re ruled by such cheap charlatans. In my lifetime, many people have held power who were hideously stupid and greedy, and many who seemed fundamentally decent have engaged in the kind of professional and public deception that pervades public life. But those with neither talent nor morals, whose vices didn’t serve any ideological agenda, who didn’t try to make their lies convincing, and who didn’t seem to aspire to mediocrity, were an unwelcome novelty. How did our republic come to be at the mercy of such buffoonish amateurs?
When the Clock Broke: Con men, conspiracy theorists, and the collapse of America in the early 1990s. Instead, I asked: Why did it take so long? John Ganz studies current and past far-right intellectual trends. Unpopular Front The newsletter, The Age of Ganz, tells the story of American public life from the end of the Cold War to the first months of Clinton’s presidency, focusing on the cynics, cranks, and defeated candidates of that era. This period may now seem like the beginning of America’s “unipolar” world hegemony and long economic expansion. But Ganz guides us to the gritty, nuanced political and cultural trends that gathered beneath that triumphant surface and then erupted with surprising frequency. It was the era of David Duke, Rush Limbaugh and the “shock jocks,” Pat Buchanan; of racist local politics and riots in Los Angeles and New York, of militia movements and domestic terrorism; of the eccentric third-party candidate who briefly topped the polls and, after a great deal of self-sabotage, still won nearly 19 percent of the vote. In Ganz’s telling, this is a strange dry run for our own time. History repeats itself, but only for the first time as a farce.
Our main guide through Ganz’s house of horrors is the rather obscure former Senate staffer and right-wing columnist Sam Francis. While mainstream conservative intellectuals touted the themes of Enlightenment liberalism – free trade, rights-based legal reasoning, and an internationalist orientation in foreign policy – Francis turned to nationalism, searching for motifs of blood and soil in the cacophony of American history. He described his imagined constituency as “middle-class American radicals,” who were threatened economically by the decline of industrial jobs, demographically by immigration and black birth rates, and culturally by a government and major institutions that ignored or openly despised their “values.” He didn’t see himself as a conservative at all, but as a revolutionary seeking to fundamentally change the social order from within.
Francis’ devilishly insightful commentary, along with that of the equally eccentric Murray Rothbard, serves to connect Duke’s stunning appearance in Louisiana to Buchanan’s 1992 primary against George H. W. Bush. Duke, Buchanan, and eventually Ross Perot broke from Republican orthodoxy on trade, immigration, and a cautious embrace of the civil rights revolution toward a new synthesis that would later be called “populism.” Ganz situates other stories of the era around this political trajectory, a story that remains eerily familiar today.
Loneliness was widespread. No one knewIncels” But rejected and outraged men found that by speaking on the radio they could gain power they did not have in real life. Radio’s culture of disembodied freedom was a precursor to the jokey rhetorical violence that thrived online. (Limbaugh was fired from an early DJ job for playing the Rolling Stones’ misogynistic fantasy “Under My Thumb” too many times.) Declining local economies provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and extremist movements. Police brutality burst into the public sphere, sparking new calls for accountability and a backlash defending the immunity and privileges of the “thin blue line.” People hated and distrusted the major parties and their candidates, so Perot created a personality cult around his unpolitician persona and vague policy platform. Trust in civil society had fallen so much that John Gotti, a cheesy, weakened type of mob boss, became a cult hero during his trial for murder and racketeering. Crowds cheered the beatings of protesters against presidential candidates. Starting with Duke, the far-right began to embrace Russian nationalism.
Hindsight always allows us to find parallels and portents to current events, but it’s not just surprising recognition that Ganz is looking for: he describes deep continuities in American political and cultural life.
Ganz’s project is part of a growing field of revisionist history on the American right. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Collapse of the American Consensus Since then, scholars and writers have been looking beyond presidential candidates and mainstream publications to tell the story of the modern right, and modern America, from the perspective of its lesser-known intellectuals, movement organizers, and lesser-known donors. (I came across Ganz’s paper on the early ’90s on a podcast.) Know your enemyan encyclopedic look at the American right.
The backlash against Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and the achievements of the civil rights era has long been treated as central to the restructuring of American politics from 1964 to 1984 and the collapse of the New Deal coalition that had dominated the previous three decades. But by turning to figures who were, and still are, more than a rung below the everyday consciousness of liberal intellectuals, these new histories paint a fuller picture of the swirl of trends, anxieties, and changes that connected intellectual and grassroots movements to the electoral turmoil of the time. Racial backlash was important, but it was only part of a larger, strange story of a society lost its way and those who offered its salvation.
In 1992, one of them was Bill Clinton, who, for all his flaws, When the clock breaks Clinton was a more talented man than conventional history remembers. After a crushing defeat by the Democrats and an unfortunate fall to third place in the polls, Clinton played to the fears and hostility of the time and successfully slowed Francis’ “middle-class American radicals” from decisively turning the Republican Party against him. Clinton’s appeasement tactics have long been condemned by liberals. But a world in which the Democrats ceded the center of restless and resentful American life to their enemies might have been worse than the one that followed. Two lopsided victories, a booming economy, and a sustained decline in violent crime gave Republican populism a spurt of momentum, setting the stage for Barack Obama to become the first Democrat since President Franklin Roosevelt to win consecutive popular vote majorities.
The political urgency of reading the air and doing what is necessary to win in adverse circumstances is one of the lessons of the early 90s. But Ganz’s book mainly emphasizes another: that the shadow areas of the national psyche are never fully suppressed or finally healed. As everything changes, from the post-Cold War militia movement to the John Birch Society of the 50s and early 60s to the KKK and nativist Black Legion of the 20s and 30s, they remain, continuing to say more or less the same things about the same real or imagined threats to home and blood and soil, lives and reputations. No matter how false the history, how irrational the resentment, how fraudulent the cure, their stories will always have a vast potential audience. And even their own buffoonery is not always powerful enough to stop them.
