Alas, the ’90s were not quite as uneventful as Fukuyama predicted they would be. In a new history of the end of history, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” the journalist John Ganz shows how a country robbed of its external enemies turned inward and devoured its own. Pundits are fond of characterizing Donald Trump’s political career as “unprecedented,” but in fact he is amply precedented, as Ganz demonstrates in this wry and engaging account of the former president’s crooked and crankish forebears.
“History, as the cliché goes, is written by the winners,” Ganz begins, “but this is a history of the losers.” The losers include such simultaneously risible and menacing figures as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, thinly veiled white supremacist and all-around reactionary Pat Buchanan, and kooky populist maverick Ross Perot, all of whom ran for president in 1992. The resultant election cycle was a circus, but it was also a warning that the establishment ignored at its peril, with disastrous — if delayed — results.
The era’s would-be demagogues were able to gain traction because history was far from over for most of the country. While elites congratulated themselves on winning the Cold War and went on conducting bureaucratic business as usual, the working classes suffered. Eight years of Reaganomics had yielded catastrophic inequalities. “The average income for 80 percent of American families declined between 1980 and 1989, while the top fifth of Americans saw an increase of nearly 50 percent,” Ganz writes. Meanwhile, jobs that had been mainstays for much of the population were rapidly vanishing: Manufacturing work was disappearing in the wake of deindustrialization, and white-collar administrative positions were hardly more viable. Throughout middle America, family farmers struggled to compete with big agriculture.
The rejects of what President George H.W. Bush rather menacingly termed the New World Order felt betrayed by their leaders. “Across the country” in 1992, Ganz writes, “polls showed discontent with all options on the table in the primaries.” There was Bush, a disappointingly milquetoast incumbent, and Bill Clinton, a liberal Rhodes scholar and the darling of Washington society. Unsurprisingly, Clinton’s victory did not quell the rising tides of resentment and disaffection. Alienated from the centers of power and hungry for scapegoats, working-class White Americans concocted conspiracy theories and railed against “multiculturalism” and “political correctness.” The inflammatory jingoism that followed — first in the lead-up to Clinton’s presidency, then during the ensuing decades — was no surprise to anyone who was paying attention. Unfortunately, few liberals were.
Devotees of Ganz’s pugilistic writing on Substack may be surprised by the restraint he displays in his first book. “When the Clock Broke” is a work of narrative history that is comparatively light on confrontation and polemic. Instead of insulting his adversaries (which Ganz does well, and often deservedly), he turns his hand to character studies that double as deft exercises in political critique. In one characteristically astute passage, he paints a telling portrait of the first President Bush as “bred to govern, not to lead. … He had been happiest as leader of the nation’s Super Secret Club for Privileged Boys, the Central Intelligence Agency, and he took with him the clichés and behaviors of a bureaucrat.”
Ganz is also strangely silent on the question of Trump. Even when the parallels between past and present are most glaring, Ganz leaves his readers to make them out. Still, even though its claims about present-day America are largely implicit, “When the Clock Broke” is leagues more insightful on the subject of Trump’s ascent than most writing that purports to address the issue directly. The 45th president’s aggrieved nativism is less confounding, if no less alarming, when it is treated as part and parcel of a long-standing American tradition.
Of course, some of the fixations that gripped the country in the early ’90s — for instance, fear of Japanese hegemony — seem almost quaint in retrospect. But other talking points remain uncomfortably familiar. Both Duke and Perot cast themselves as victims of the mainstream media’s bias against conservatives and free thinkers. “It’s like the establishment is closing ranks to prevent an independent from coming through,” Duke told a newspaper when asked why he was so unpopular with the press. One pro-Duke flier characterized him as “a modern David versus the Goliaths of money, power, media, and political corruption.”
Buchanan, by far the most influential and ominous of Ganz’s subjects, anticipated the worst of the MAGA cult when he spoke of a “new nationalism” and proposed to build a wall at the border. It was he who first popularized the term “culture war” (“cultural war” were his exact words) and who most loudly shouted the isolationists’ old rallying cry: “America first!”
Perhaps most recognizable, enduring and damning was a new political style, a brazen commitment to courting scandal and spectacle. If the elder Bush was a staid technocrat, more comfortable working behind the scenes, Ganz’s flashy new populists thrived in the spotlight: They were performers first and politicians second.
“Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it,” Saul Bellow wrote near the start of his 2000 novel, “Ravelstein.” This is a principle that Duke, Buchanan and Perot grasped with a vengeance. Like today’s MAGA Republicans, they were tolerated, even indulged, by liberal journalists precisely because they were so irresistibly outrageous. Those who think Trump is uniquely absurd have forgotten Duke’s sex jokes and nervous outbursts of giggling, or the die-hard Perot supporters who “sculpted an eight-foot plaster of paris bust” of their hero.
These unlikely candidates may have been ridiculous and buffoonish, but they were sinister nonetheless. Bush and other respectable fixtures of the GOP had long flirted with “racial resentment and animus,” Ganz writes, but at last they were beginning to realize that they “could not control it.” Mainstream Republicans had miscalculated, unleashing dark forces they were no longer able to contain. They feebly extolled decency and civility as the fringes, and then the center, of their party crept toward extremism.
Opponents of the far right have an unfortunate tendency to caricature it as a coalition of hapless fools, incapable of mustering ideas and therefore beneath serious consideration. Ganz knows better than to take this condescending and intellectually dishonest approach. Instead, he tackles reactionary belligerence with appropriate rigor (and appropriate moral scorn): He understands that Trumpian zealots and their political ancestors are part of a movement like any other. Some of them are feckless opportunists, but some are thinkers with a coherent, if repugnant, ideology — an ideology they have been openly preaching for decades.
In 1992, the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard did not bother to conceal his agenda when he ranted to a crowd at a conservative club: “With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. … We shall repeal the 20th century.” The writings of the white-supremacist columnist Samuel Francis, longtime contributor to the far-right publications Chronicles and the Washington Times, are another case in point, and Ganz is wise to read them carefully. The right, Francis suggested as early as 1992, was in need of “a political formula and a public myth that synthesize the attention to material-economic interests offered by the left with the defense of concrete cultural and national identity offered by the right.” Trump’s success with just such a formula was a long time coming. To predict the end of the end of history, all we had to do was listen to its prophets.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 420 pp. $30
