At the start of the 1990s the United States had won a convincing, if not exactly stainless, victory over the Soviet Union, its chief geopolitical rival on the political Left. With fascism on the Far Right crushed by an unholy alliance of liberal democracies and Communist states decades earlier, American liberalism was the only game left in town. U.S. officials now had the chance to prove they could assume leadership of a unipolar world and guide it safely into the new millennium. As anyone familiar with recent history knows, U.S. leaders failed spectacularly. The 1990s ended with fraught debates about blowjobs in the Oval Office and a bipartisan fit of deregulation. The 2000s began with domestic terror attacks, forever wars waged on spurious grounds, recession, and a sinister slide back to authoritarianism at home and abroad.
John Ganz’s sharp and engaging new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, chronicles the first years of this dismal and confusing epoch. Ganz is the author of the well-regarded Unpopular Front Substack, which is best known for its erudite fiskings of Far Right bloviation. His readers might have expected Ganz’s first book to be yet another progressive explainer on the MAGA world and how to confront it. So the book he wrote instead—a history of the late 1980s and early ’90s—might seem like a strange pivot. But, in fact, there is a deep symmetry between Ganz’s online writing and When the Clock Broke. In his telling, we’re now harvesting the dark fruit of seeds sown in the nineties.
Ganz opens his book with an introduction titled “The End,” where he describes his book as a “history of the losers: candidates who lost their elections, movements that bubbled up and fizzled out, protests that exploded and dissipated, writers who toiled at the margins of American life, figures who became briefly famous or infamous or were forgotten.” These particular “losers” were united by a shared conviction:
Sensing that America as they knew it was in peril, they hoped to recast American democracy around the “negative solidarity” of knowing who you hated or wanted to destroy: this system would be based on domination and exclusion, a restricted sense of community that jealously guarded its boundaries and policed its members, and the direction of a charismatic leader who would use his power to punish and persecute for the sake of restoring lost national greatness. In a period when some said that ideological struggle was irrelevant and that even history itself had ended, they looked for inspiration among the ideological ruins of earlier times: nationalism, populism, racism, antisemitism, and even fascism. In the words of one: they wanted to “break the clock” of progress.
In many ways these frustrated figures were motivated by two equally powerful and toxic motivations. The first was the paranoid feeling that the country was under threat by enemies within and without: invading immigrants, criminal gangsters who’d seized control of the streets and the airways, feminists who had seized control of the universities and banished Aristotle to make way for bell hooks, and, of course, Hilary Clinton. They were also motivated by the anxiety that too much success was making America soft. Bereft of wars Great and Cold, U.S. politicians had nothing left to do but caretake an empire of capital, presiding over systems that the Right itself insisted must be all but naturally self-regulating and self-correcting. On the surface, these two motivations might appear contradictory: on the one hand, hysteria about creeping existential threats everywhere; on the other hand, disappointment that there was nothing to fight about anymore. But Ganz suggests it was precisely the narcissistic anxiety of the latter that fed the former. If there were no more nuclear-armed Marxist-Leninists to vanquish, one could safely focus on the rot of postmodernism on campus—fight a battle of bromides in defense of “Western civilization” and against Howard Zinn books.
Ganz’s book proceeds both chronologically and thematically. Because of the book’s wide scope, most readers will find some chapters more interesting or informative than others, though they are all deeply researched and beautifully written. The often caustic tone of Ganz’s Substack newsletter is surprisingly muted here. There is plenty of irony and melancholy humor, but little open malice.
My own favorite chapters concern policing in Los Angeles and Pat Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns. The former details the truly HBO-worthy story of the militarization and feudalization of the Los Angeles Police Department, the build-up to the Rodney King riots, and the fallout from both. The central figure is LAPD chief Daryl Gates, who appears as a cross between a Guillermo del Toro villain and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Ganz describes Gates as “friendly, soft-spoken, and well-liked” but “internally brimming with wounded pride, anger, and ambition fueled by his family’s descent into poverty during the Depression and his Irish dad’s turn to alcoholism.” Gates followed in the footsteps of Chief “Whisky Bill” Parker in insulating the LAPD from political accountability, even as he encouraged a draconian crackdown on drugs and crime in Black and Latino communities. The predictable result was an explosion of violence, protest, and rioting to the tune of N.W.A’s “Fuck the Police.” Faced with the consequences of his poor decision-making, Gates did what any red-blooded American would do: complain that soft liberal politicians were punishing him for doing his job. Perhaps inevitably, he wound up a talk-radio host.
The Pat Buchanan story is quintessential Ganz; foregrounding a once-famous talking head and political also-ran to show how much he anticipated the future. Buchanan sensed that the biggest political gap in the United States was actually to the right of Ronald Reagan (in whose White House he had served as a communications director). He ran a primary campaign centered on building a wall on the southern border and waging a “culture war” on behalf of middle America against the “new class” of liberal elites. As Ganz notes, one of the paradigmatic innovations of right-wing discourse around this time was recognizing that right-wingers could frame liberals as elitist while carefully making sure they never, ever came across as attacking big business. While Buchanan lost the nomination in 1992 to the moderate George Bush Sr., he used his closing speech at the RNC to rail against “Clinton and Clinton” and call for “religious war” against the “most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” The Bush campaign thought it was a disaster, but as Ganz points out, the crowd loved it—a grim sign of things to come for the party of Lincoln.
What comes across in both these stories is how the crisis of identity and purpose characteristic of the 1990s brought out many of the county’s worst instincts. In particular, the yearning for a strange kind of order—not rational liberal proceduralism, but something raw and decisive: the kind of order that might require cutting a few corners, scapegoating a few foreigners, shooting first and asking questions later. Commenting on the American Right’s strange reverence for (white) gangsters, Ganz notes how many people “didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit...it wanted protection, a godfather, a boss, just like the undertaker at the beginning of the Godfather.” They say a cynic is just a disappointed idealist. When the Clock Broke is the story of how America turned cynical at the very moment when its ideals seemed to be in the ascendant. Instead of the end of history, we got the beginning of an ugly epoch we’ve yet to recover from.
When the Clock Broke
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
John Ganz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
, $30 | 432 pp.
