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When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
A lively, revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era―and their dark legacy today.
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.
In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.
In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.
In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.
In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published June 18, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
January 13, 2024
First, as someone whose first political memories come from the 1992 election and surrounding events, I was really interested in this book. I'd also add that while scholarship about the 1990s is really now just starting, there had not been up to this point an analysis of the early 1990s and the changes that occurred. The shift from silent generation to baby boomer led government is a key factor for the ways in which America is governed, and the ensuing culture wars/political divisions throughout the decade.
The usual characters pop up here: presidential contenders, especially the losers of those contests, such as Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan's populist rhetoric has come more into focus with current events but Ganz does a great job looking at the surrounding context of his influence and message about the political discourse of the time. The analysis of David Duke was both useful and relevant, as I think he provided a template for some of the extremism that comes later.
Ganz's overarching message is that if we want to see where the metaphorical wheels come off, it has not just been in the past 10 years, or even this century. We have to see the late years of the 1900s as a bridge to the 21st in more than one way. We may not have recognized it at the time, but that is the power of history. The political tensions and divisions, along racial and socio-economic, as well as cultural, lines slowly developed into the "cold Civil War" as some refer to it today.
The usual characters pop up here: presidential contenders, especially the losers of those contests, such as Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan's populist rhetoric has come more into focus with current events but Ganz does a great job looking at the surrounding context of his influence and message about the political discourse of the time. The analysis of David Duke was both useful and relevant, as I think he provided a template for some of the extremism that comes later.
Ganz's overarching message is that if we want to see where the metaphorical wheels come off, it has not just been in the past 10 years, or even this century. We have to see the late years of the 1900s as a bridge to the 21st in more than one way. We may not have recognized it at the time, but that is the power of history. The political tensions and divisions, along racial and socio-economic, as well as cultural, lines slowly developed into the "cold Civil War" as some refer to it today.
June 22, 2024
I’ve been listening to Ganz on his movie/politics podcast, following him on social media, and reading his newsletter for a while, so I was jazzed when the book was announced and preordered it immediately. It came this week, and I devoured it. It started out in the first chapter, looking at the phenomenon of David Duke, and I was a bit worried that the whole thing would be based on these pocket biographies of people from the early 90s. It is partially that, but Ganz is able to weave a narrative from these people and their times to examine the period and its influence on today’s society – Trump being in the background but present. We get a lot of hits from Duke to Buchannan and Ruby Ridge (still mad the feds killed Weaver’s dog), as well as some more New York-centric pages in John Gotti and Rudy Giuliani.
One exciting thing for me was reading about this period as history. I was young when the events covered were happening, but I was a precocious child. I stole my dad’s Times and Newsweeks from the mailbox and read through them before he had a chance to, but I think I was missing a lot of historical context. I’ve gained it since, but it was something that took time, and this book covers the water hose of events that I was experiencing as I was coming of age and trying to see the world through adult eyes. I tore through this book as it was both familiar ground and fun to learn more about Perot’s background or dredge up the manufactured controversy about Murphy Brown’s out-of-wedlock child.
One exciting thing for me was reading about this period as history. I was young when the events covered were happening, but I was a precocious child. I stole my dad’s Times and Newsweeks from the mailbox and read through them before he had a chance to, but I think I was missing a lot of historical context. I’ve gained it since, but it was something that took time, and this book covers the water hose of events that I was experiencing as I was coming of age and trying to see the world through adult eyes. I tore through this book as it was both familiar ground and fun to learn more about Perot’s background or dredge up the manufactured controversy about Murphy Brown’s out-of-wedlock child.
Read
June 30, 2024DNF
I was looking forward to reading this because I wanted to see how the book matched my memories of this time period and my early days of forming political and social views.
As it turns out, I didn’t enjoy reading this as it was nothing I didn’t already know and it covered many of the characters in politics and beyond that I have never liked. This is not meant as an insult to the author, there may be many people who glean a lot of helpful information from the book. About all I can pass on is that the author makes a good case for Louisiana being a bellwether for our current situation in the U.S., and that’s not a good thing.
However, I am of the thinking that whatever we as a society are facing, it’s nothing new. We forget our history and regurgitate the same mistakes over and over again.
I see my own country as the rich white men who have from the very beginning treated America like their own exclusive country club, while the rest of us have been fighting for our rights and dignity, and always fighting against one another. In that respect then, warnings and analyses of recent history won’t change this paradigm.
I was looking forward to reading this because I wanted to see how the book matched my memories of this time period and my early days of forming political and social views.
As it turns out, I didn’t enjoy reading this as it was nothing I didn’t already know and it covered many of the characters in politics and beyond that I have never liked. This is not meant as an insult to the author, there may be many people who glean a lot of helpful information from the book. About all I can pass on is that the author makes a good case for Louisiana being a bellwether for our current situation in the U.S., and that’s not a good thing.
However, I am of the thinking that whatever we as a society are facing, it’s nothing new. We forget our history and regurgitate the same mistakes over and over again.
I see my own country as the rich white men who have from the very beginning treated America like their own exclusive country club, while the rest of us have been fighting for our rights and dignity, and always fighting against one another. In that respect then, warnings and analyses of recent history won’t change this paradigm.
June 29, 2024
John Ganz, author of the Substack Unpopular Front, has published his first book which explores the political culture of the early 1990s. Primarily focused on the years 1990-1992, Ganz weaved an engaging narrative of how various historical, economic, and cultural forces put America on a political trajectory that helps make sense of the current moment.
The end of the Cold War had a dramatic impact on domestic politics in America, bringing to bear forces that were suppressed and largely ignored since the 1940s. If Anti-communism was the glue that presented the semblance of bipartisanship of the mid-late 20th Century, the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed new paranoias, and eventually a new type of politics. Ganz focuses on several figures who were harbingers of things to come.
Ganz's writing skillfully combines biographical sketches, historical context, and intellectual underpinnings. Anxiety and anger over economic forces and demographic change were starting to shift attitudes of the white middle class. An early sign was the rise of David Duke, former Klansman and proud white supremacist, who gained the GOP nomination for Louisiana Governor. A lifelong misfit with antisocial tendencies, Duke emerged as a voice for struggling lower-middle class whites. Ganz deftly explains the corrupt political structures of Louisiana and connects Duke to the populism of 1930s figure Huey Long who also championed lower class whites and ran the state like an autocrat. Although Duke lost his bid for Governor, he predicted that if the economic fortunes of the white middle class continued to erode, his brand of politics would own the future.
Duke's reactive brand of populist and identity politics trickled their way into the 1992 election. The sitting President George Bush was riding the crest of the First Gulf War victory with a 90% approval rating until the economy went into a gloomy recession. Bush found himself challenged from the Right by Patrick Buchannan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon who specialized in red meat rhetoric. By the 1990s, he had turned against the dogma of free trade and championed a new isolationism. Buchannan raged against "elites" who fleeced hard working Americans and took up the culture war mantle, seeing traditional American values under attack everywhere from public schools to rap music.
Conservative politics were changing, starting to lean into a radicalism that had always existed, but was oozing into the mainstream. For many, William F. Buckley was the face of the Conservative Movement, founder of National Review and host of the TV Show Firing Line, where his witty repartee with fellow conservatives and the occasional liberal offered the image of genteel conservatism. Buckley also dismissed the John Birch Society, the Anti-communist organization fueled by conspiracy theories, from the Conservative Movement. But the ground underneath conservatism was shifting by the early 1990s, traditionalists, libertarians, defense hawks, and supply side economics were somewhat adrift in the post-Cold War world. Buchannan proudly called himself a paleoconservative, a radical rightist modeled on Franco and Mussolini.
Intellectual paleoconservatives loom large in the book. Samuel T. Francis and Murray Rothbard, one a white nationalist and the other an anarcho-capitalist, gave voice to the new currents. They despised the limited government mantra of the Reagan era. They hated democracy, Rothbard spoke of repealing the 20th Century and "breaking the clock" of democracy. Francis advocated for a strong state not unlike the Mafia, The Godfather was his ideal "right wing utopia." For Conservatives to win, they must champion culture above all else, a strange blend of confederacy worship and Anglo-Saxon fetishization. Francis identified the growth of militias and militancy in 1980s America as the first stirrings of a new culture war, a sign of people starting to wake up in the heartland.
Ganz explains how the farming crisis of the 1980s radicalized many whites in the Great Plains. A chapter on Ruby Ridge, the botched Federal raid on armed militants in Idaho that led to the loss of innocent life, becoming a cause celebre for antigovernmental forces spreading like wildfire. Economic displacement fueled the new militancy, often fueled by crackpot theories, xenophobia, and antisemitism. The 1992 candidacy of Texas mogul Ross Perot (another major character in the book), which captured the imagination of many by promising he could fix everything with smarts and hard work was a foreshadowing of Trump.
The central question of the book, in the words of Ganz:
We are still working to answer why the loss of faith in the old order has registered an intensified anti-egalitarianism rather than a renewed egalitarianism, why perceptions of public corruption and criminality have led to the open embrace of corruption and criminality rather than its rejection, and why discontent with the distribution of wealth and power has fostered closer popular identification with certain types of capitalism and capitalists (22).
Part of the answer lies in the lack of imagination of liberal politicians. Ganz never quite argues the notion but suggests it. It's in his critique of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. Governor of Arkansas, Clinton hammered Bush's economic policies while his folksy persona exuded charm and intelligence. But he was also temperamental and sensitive to criticism from the left of his own party, especially from the more progressive Jesse Jackson wing. Clinton liked the perks of being a statesman, he enjoyed rubbing shoulders with power brokers and celebrities a bit too much. His two terms as President saw him make many compromises with the Right on economic policy.
Ganz points out how the populists' movements on the Left such as Jesse Jackson's attempt to build a multi-racial working-class movement and Bernie Sanders championing social democracy never got their proper chance. The malaise of the Democratic Party, Robert Altman's TV series Tanner '88 is an excellent example, is another part of this story.
In a way, Trump is the main character in the book even though he only makes a few appearances in the chapter on 1990s New York City politics and the popularity of the gangster John Gotti. Trump's psychic connection with middle America did not happen overnight, he's like a Frankenstein the radical right envisioned promising to fix everything, stopping illegal immigration, casually endorsing conspiracy theories, talking like a mobster, famous for being famous, and promising retribution to all internal enemies.
With the 2024 Presidential election looming, the Right has their radical plans in place for Day 1. The world of a year from now would look ominously different. When the Clock Broke illustrates how the fringe becomes the norm due to economic and cultural forces. But even if the immediate existential crisis of democracy is averted this time around, the problem of wealth distribution will remain, and it will rest on the shoulders of those who believe in democracy to prove they are up to the challenge.
July 1, 2024
A valuable addition to the "How did we end up here?" (i.e. Trump, etc.) genre of books. Ganz's signature humor and sharp prose is on display here (though the content is unpleasant enough (David Duke, etc.) that it's hardly pleasure-reading. Focused on the early 1990s, the book is also well-structured in how its chapters move from one major figure/event to the next. It's definitely in the spirit of Rick Perlstein's important histories of the conservative movement (Nixonland, etc.).
June 30, 2024
(4.5 stars)
impressively interesting, insightful, and delightful. When the Clock Broke makes today make sense in new ways. Gantz does a great job mirroring our current political landscape through history without skimping out on the past but leaving the reader to largely draw their own conclusions. don’t worry about doing all the mental work though, because he also provides incredible insights along the way that really reframes the “how we got here” issue. spoiler alert: American politics has literally always been this frustrating and there’s no golden era to look back on when things were just better! it’s honestly comforting. this year i’ve been reading a lot of books about post WW2 american politics and this is by far the best one. (i’m excited to someday read a copy that isn’t missing pages and has all the pages ordered correctly).
impressively interesting, insightful, and delightful. When the Clock Broke makes today make sense in new ways. Gantz does a great job mirroring our current political landscape through history without skimping out on the past but leaving the reader to largely draw their own conclusions. don’t worry about doing all the mental work though, because he also provides incredible insights along the way that really reframes the “how we got here” issue. spoiler alert: American politics has literally always been this frustrating and there’s no golden era to look back on when things were just better! it’s honestly comforting. this year i’ve been reading a lot of books about post WW2 american politics and this is by far the best one. (i’m excited to someday read a copy that isn’t missing pages and has all the pages ordered correctly).
June 19, 2024
Very likely to be my favorite non-fiction book of the year.
July 14, 2024
The 90s have a nostalgic reputation for being the “Last Great Decade.” The Cold War was over. The economy was booming. Technology was improving rapidly and making lives easier, but there was just enough of it so that you didn���t feel always online. Pop Culture never felt more vital, everyone felt like they were watching the same TV shows and listening to the same music. The 1996 US Presidential Election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole is often called the least important election of our lives, an election where it didn’t really matter who won.
Since the 2004 Presidential Election, every election has been called “the most important election of our times.” In recent years, the language has gotten more combative, with elections being called a “Battle for the soul of the nation.” The electorate seems more polarized, more motivated by an intense dislike of the other side than in any conviction in their beliefs and principles.
What happened? Most people would probably say 911 kicked off a chain reaction of events that led us to this point. In hindsight, the 2000 Presidential Election might have been the election that mattered the most even though it didn’t seem like it at the time. In When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s John Ganz makes a persuasive case that the current politics of division and resentment can be traced back to the politics of the early 1990s. He profiles figures like David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, and uses the 1992 election as a backdrop.
Donald Trump is treated here almost like Voldemort in the first Harry Potter book (“he-who-must-not-be-named”). There are little mentions of Trump here and there, but you can tell Ganz was careful not to use him too much. A less confident writer would have been constantly adding in references to what Trump said or did at the time, but Ganz trusts his readers to get his message without needing to say it out loud. I think the main thesis of this book is that Trump is the perfect vehicle and spokesperson for a divisive brand of politics that predated him. He might not (almost surely doesn’t) believe everything he says, but he’s effective at synthesizing the beliefs of many people on the far right and packaging them in a way that appeals to a broad range of the electorate, parts of the electorate that would dismiss the David Dukes and Pat Buchanans as too extremist and intolerant. Trump’s destructive superpower is that he can take lies and build them into myths (which are stories and easier to spread) and nurture these myths (like Birtherism, QAnon, election fraud) until they metastasize into conspiracies. People will listen to lies, but they can mobilize around myths and conspiracies.
This is the best book I’ve read since George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America at explaining these “cracked-up” times.
Since the 2004 Presidential Election, every election has been called “the most important election of our times.” In recent years, the language has gotten more combative, with elections being called a “Battle for the soul of the nation.” The electorate seems more polarized, more motivated by an intense dislike of the other side than in any conviction in their beliefs and principles.
What happened? Most people would probably say 911 kicked off a chain reaction of events that led us to this point. In hindsight, the 2000 Presidential Election might have been the election that mattered the most even though it didn’t seem like it at the time. In When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s John Ganz makes a persuasive case that the current politics of division and resentment can be traced back to the politics of the early 1990s. He profiles figures like David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, and uses the 1992 election as a backdrop.
Donald Trump is treated here almost like Voldemort in the first Harry Potter book (“he-who-must-not-be-named”). There are little mentions of Trump here and there, but you can tell Ganz was careful not to use him too much. A less confident writer would have been constantly adding in references to what Trump said or did at the time, but Ganz trusts his readers to get his message without needing to say it out loud. I think the main thesis of this book is that Trump is the perfect vehicle and spokesperson for a divisive brand of politics that predated him. He might not (almost surely doesn’t) believe everything he says, but he’s effective at synthesizing the beliefs of many people on the far right and packaging them in a way that appeals to a broad range of the electorate, parts of the electorate that would dismiss the David Dukes and Pat Buchanans as too extremist and intolerant. Trump’s destructive superpower is that he can take lies and build them into myths (which are stories and easier to spread) and nurture these myths (like Birtherism, QAnon, election fraud) until they metastasize into conspiracies. People will listen to lies, but they can mobilize around myths and conspiracies.
This is the best book I’ve read since George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America at explaining these “cracked-up” times.
June 24, 2024
On a superficial level: of all the history books I've read in memory, this is by far the best prose read. Simply a joy to go through the thing word by word. 5 stars for that reason alone.
On a more substantive level: the argument of this book is implicit rather than explicit; certainly, it definitively demonstrates how so much of the early 90s "rhymed" with the concerns of today, and strongly suggests that this is due to institutional decay initiated by the neoliberal turn through the 1970s. The remaining questions are: 1) would you have been able to throw a dart at an "American history through time" poster and have been able to write the same book, or was there something distinct about the 1990s? and 2) what makes our present moment different from the 1990s, if all the things centrists worry about had already been there in the moment they look back to?
Re (1), I feel like Rick Perlstein's ouvre shows that you could do something similar with American political culture for most of the postwar period, although I feel less certain about other aspects.
Re (2), meditating on these themes raised my confidence that the issue here is primarily one of the decay or weakening of establishment institutions, or really any kind of institution. The two political parties, broadcast news, and sundry civil society orgs (the NAACP, labor unions, churches, and so on) had incredible gatekeeping power over their respective constituencies and an interest in a relatively stable, corrupt, consensual status quo. That's obviously neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but it marks a difference with today.
On a more substantive level: the argument of this book is implicit rather than explicit; certainly, it definitively demonstrates how so much of the early 90s "rhymed" with the concerns of today, and strongly suggests that this is due to institutional decay initiated by the neoliberal turn through the 1970s. The remaining questions are: 1) would you have been able to throw a dart at an "American history through time" poster and have been able to write the same book, or was there something distinct about the 1990s? and 2) what makes our present moment different from the 1990s, if all the things centrists worry about had already been there in the moment they look back to?
Re (1), I feel like Rick Perlstein's ouvre shows that you could do something similar with American political culture for most of the postwar period, although I feel less certain about other aspects.
Re (2), meditating on these themes raised my confidence that the issue here is primarily one of the decay or weakening of establishment institutions, or really any kind of institution. The two political parties, broadcast news, and sundry civil society orgs (the NAACP, labor unions, churches, and so on) had incredible gatekeeping power over their respective constituencies and an interest in a relatively stable, corrupt, consensual status quo. That's obviously neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but it marks a difference with today.
June 23, 2024
Superb, clear-eyed, frequently surprising if you think you know the history well already.
July 7, 2024
Crackling prose, compelling history. Best Trump explainer book so far….
June 21, 2024
A classic in the making. The connections of mob logic to racial resentment politics is THE lens to understand the modern political world. Just an exceptional work.
July 19, 2024
When the Clock Broke is the best kind of brain candy - I learned a lot while reading it, and the writing style was casual enough to make it all very entertaining and accessible.
As someone who grew up in the 90s, I was aware of a lot of the names in this book (vividly recall Ross Perot being mocked absolutely everywhere, even on Nickelodeon), but I was too young to understand the significance of their role in politics.
John Ganz does a masterful job of presenting these characters, putting them into the context of history, and letting the reader draw their own conclusions of the impact they had. A particularly strong chapter was one of the final ones, when he explored the oddly reverential feeling a lot of Americans have towards mob bosses. The idea that crime is acceptable, even admirable, when it is a certain kind of person committing the crime, is as relevant as ever - even outside of the obvious and unavoidable nods to Trump.
This was my ideal non-fiction reading experience - informative, eye-opening, and at times humorous. It is easy for many privileged millennials to remember the 90s as a simpler time, but this book does an excellent job of reminding us that there really are no "good old days" when you consider the experiences of the entire population.
As someone who grew up in the 90s, I was aware of a lot of the names in this book (vividly recall Ross Perot being mocked absolutely everywhere, even on Nickelodeon), but I was too young to understand the significance of their role in politics.
John Ganz does a masterful job of presenting these characters, putting them into the context of history, and letting the reader draw their own conclusions of the impact they had. A particularly strong chapter was one of the final ones, when he explored the oddly reverential feeling a lot of Americans have towards mob bosses. The idea that crime is acceptable, even admirable, when it is a certain kind of person committing the crime, is as relevant as ever - even outside of the obvious and unavoidable nods to Trump.
This was my ideal non-fiction reading experience - informative, eye-opening, and at times humorous. It is easy for many privileged millennials to remember the 90s as a simpler time, but this book does an excellent job of reminding us that there really are no "good old days" when you consider the experiences of the entire population.
July 23, 2024
Great, ridiculous read. Not a coherent Book so much as a compilation of Know Your Enemy episodes in essay form, but he’s really got it, by which I mean he gets it.
Read
July 19, 2024Finally I know the difference between a neocon and a paleocon
June 12, 2024
When the Clock Broke is an interesting look at the seeds that were planted in the late 80's and 90's that have grown to today's political chaos. We have people seeking national power (Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush), others seeking local power (David Duke and Rudy Giuliani), as well as fights between neoconservatives and the Paleoconservatives. Ganz does a fantastic job at not only looking at the figures but the political discourses around events as well.
January 7, 2024
Took a little bit to get going with background information and then a series of related chapters made the rest of the book a breeze. Perfect for anyone looking to find out how events in the late 20th Century connect to today.
Great way to spend January 6.
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.
Great way to spend January 6.
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.
July 22, 2024
A very smart and almost old-style political/intellectual history of the early 90s, with attention to people like arch-libertarian Murray Rothbard I'd heard of and essentially neo-Southern Agrarian (which means, more or less, the third coming of John C. Calhoun) Samuel Francis, whom I hadn't. Ganz's larger theme is the search for a compelling political and cultural message across the spectrum, though mostly to the right to far-right (not much on the left; like, what was Lenora Fulani saying? There was a die-hard in Ann Arbor during college who would pass out a Socialist paper that reprinted essays written by Daniel De Leon in 1906, all of which, we were assured, were absolutely relevant to today), all of whom sought to capture an increasingly despondent middle class, or "middle class" (worth exploring more thoroughly to what extent this was even a viable economic category, as opposed to a set of sentiments). He does not belabor the parallels to today, but they're obvious, whether David Duke's initial mobilization of white resentment, Pat Buchanan's slightly more subtle dressing-up of those feelings (he of course cites Molly Ivins's classic line about how his 1992 RNC speech probably sounded better in the original German), or Perot's ability to claim the populist mantle by energizing disaffected voters entranced by his get-'er-done spirit, who grew actively resentful when he was pressed to explain what exactly he would do as president. Great collage of Quayle v Murphy Brown and Clinton v Sister Souljah as competing right/left culture-war provocations, a comparison that had never occurred to me before, one of which didn't work and one of which did. (He also sneaks in a discussion of Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South, which he counterposes to Derrick Bell's famous essay "The Space Traders" as politically diametrically opposed fantasy resolutions of American racial problems, which I thought was fabulous.)
So we can read the period as an assembly of ingredients, essentially, for Trumpism--white anger that "their country" was being taken away by Others (amazing to see how bluntly people like Francis advocated for a return to, more or less, 19th-century social arrangements; I did not recall how avidly Buchanan defended the Confederacy and literally used "War Between the States" language); real discontent based on absconding opportunity (his setup for Randy Weaver's turn to far-right conspiracism is grounded in a sharp analysis of the despair of farm states in the 80s, and the alertness and alacrity with which fascists worked to render that despair ideological); and of course the strong-man desire for someone as verifiably batty as Perot, who comes across as the quintessential Bible Belt 60s entrepreneur, an inflexibly Christian martinet (1950s-type dress codes for workers, many of whom were ex-military, and a racist, homophobic corporate culture) who at once depended utterly on the government (his EDS empire was built on sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts with Great Society agencies) and grew more and more resentful of intervention in our sacred freedom.
The structure is also quite clever--chapter-length studies of major figures interspersed with narratives that cover central cultural and economic changes that then propel new figures into prominence and lead old ones to adapt or double/triple/quadruple down on their arguments. Maybe the best chapter is about John Gotti and 1990s New York, which, wow, talk about a boiling cauldron. The storytelling is excellent (and of course we get a bit about Trump, another river-crosser), but what really elevates the chapter is the closing section, where Francis and Rothbard theorize in similar terms about how great The Godfather is as a cultural model of traditionalist small Gemeinschaft culture--in other words, what America should be--and how bad the current Goodfellas is as a reflection of what America actually is. So that both renders the chapter a prediction of the future--which the book's closing lines tie the knot for--and puts the lie to these theories.
Clearly, the lesson of this period, as seems to be clear right now, is that a good number of people don't want to return to Francis's theorized 19th-century small-town culture, but nor do they want the technocracy Clinton heralded; they simply want a magic wand to be waved, to be promised that a Big Man will solve their problems and punish their enemies, who are Very Bad (to offer some thematically appropriate Random capitalization). An excellent, exciting, and also depressing book.
So we can read the period as an assembly of ingredients, essentially, for Trumpism--white anger that "their country" was being taken away by Others (amazing to see how bluntly people like Francis advocated for a return to, more or less, 19th-century social arrangements; I did not recall how avidly Buchanan defended the Confederacy and literally used "War Between the States" language); real discontent based on absconding opportunity (his setup for Randy Weaver's turn to far-right conspiracism is grounded in a sharp analysis of the despair of farm states in the 80s, and the alertness and alacrity with which fascists worked to render that despair ideological); and of course the strong-man desire for someone as verifiably batty as Perot, who comes across as the quintessential Bible Belt 60s entrepreneur, an inflexibly Christian martinet (1950s-type dress codes for workers, many of whom were ex-military, and a racist, homophobic corporate culture) who at once depended utterly on the government (his EDS empire was built on sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts with Great Society agencies) and grew more and more resentful of intervention in our sacred freedom.
The structure is also quite clever--chapter-length studies of major figures interspersed with narratives that cover central cultural and economic changes that then propel new figures into prominence and lead old ones to adapt or double/triple/quadruple down on their arguments. Maybe the best chapter is about John Gotti and 1990s New York, which, wow, talk about a boiling cauldron. The storytelling is excellent (and of course we get a bit about Trump, another river-crosser), but what really elevates the chapter is the closing section, where Francis and Rothbard theorize in similar terms about how great The Godfather is as a cultural model of traditionalist small Gemeinschaft culture--in other words, what America should be--and how bad the current Goodfellas is as a reflection of what America actually is. So that both renders the chapter a prediction of the future--which the book's closing lines tie the knot for--and puts the lie to these theories.
Clearly, the lesson of this period, as seems to be clear right now, is that a good number of people don't want to return to Francis's theorized 19th-century small-town culture, but nor do they want the technocracy Clinton heralded; they simply want a magic wand to be waved, to be promised that a Big Man will solve their problems and punish their enemies, who are Very Bad (to offer some thematically appropriate Random capitalization). An excellent, exciting, and also depressing book.
May 28, 2024
In only a few hundred pages John Ganz takes us on an epic journey to locate the origins of America’s current political chaos.
It’s the late 1980s, early 1990s in America.
Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush are scheming and maneuvering to grasp national power. David Duke in Louisiana, and Rudy Giuliani in New York City are seeking local power. Daryl Gates is refusing to relinquish his power as chief of the militarized LAPD. John Gotti is standing on courthouse steps in New York City, offering a different image of power. Rush Limbaugh is creating a power base with his radio show.
Americans are trying to make sense of an unfinished war against Iraq in Kuwait; Rodney King being beaten nearly to death by four LA policemen who later were acquitted, leading to a city-wide riot; the federal government’s murder of Randy Weaver’s wife and infant son on Ruby Ridge, leading to the full flowering of armed white Christian extremism; the assassination of Alan Berg, one of the flood of shock jocks who have taken over radio programming in the US; New York City police—instigated by Rudy Giuliani—rioting and storming New York’s City Hall in protest against the threat of civilian control.
And in the background, Donald Trump: on ABC News’s Primetime Live, ranting about Japanese investment in the US economy; on the Howard Stern show complaining about his marriage to Ivana; appearing before a House subcommittee while defaulting on his payments for his Taj Mahal Casino; reacting to the arrest of the Central Park Five by taking out a full-page ad in The Daily News–“What has happened to respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society, and the police for those who break the law?”; appearing on the cover of New York Magazine in a prizefighter’s stance, the magazine announcing “Fighting Back: Trump Scrambles Off the Canvas”; and when Philip Johnson, the world-famous architect, says to him “you’d make a good mafioso,” replying “One of the greatest.”
Accompanying this narrative (which I have only outlined here—the book of course goes much deeper), Ganz offers us another—I think more important—story.
He traces the emergence of a radical right-wing “paleoconservative”/”paleolibertarian” ideology. It’s a rage- and resentment-fueled ideology created in opposition not just to Enlightenment liberalism, “the ideology of Western suicide,” but even more forcefully against the neoconservatism that brought Reagan to power and that Bush was expected (but failed) to preserve and carry into the 1990s. Ganz provides capsule biographies of the key thinkers in its creation: Sam Francis, Joseph Sobran, and Murray Rothbard. Their goal is summed-up by these words from a speech by Rothbard (that also provide the title of Ganz’s book):
We shall break the clock of social democracy.
We shall break the clock of the Great Society
We shall break the clock of the welfare state.
We shall break the clock of the New Deal.
We shall repeal the twentieth century.
For Ganz, these thinkers “helped transform the party of Reagan into the party of Trump.” Thirty years later in America, as we listen to Trump’s plans for a second term, it does seem (to some of us) undeniable that the clock Rothbard posited really is broken.
Ganz’s epic shows that, though we see it only now, the clock broke before the Clinton impeachment, before Fox News, before hanging chads, before 9/11, before the web and social media, before the financial crash, before the Tea Party, before Trump was elected, before COVID.
No book I know of provides as satisfactory an explanation for the rise of Trump as Ganz does here.
Ganz leaves me wondering: could we have avoided our current national insanity if the political ambitions of these “clock breakers” had been taken seriously? If they hadn’t been dismissed as fringe players, as crazies?
I look forward to the reviews and podcasts that no doubt will try to take Ganz’s book apart. Don’t believe them.
Thank you Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for providing an advance copy in galley form for review consideration via NetGalley. Please note: Quotes taken from a galley may change in the final version.
All opinions are my own.
July 10, 2024
Well this is an incredibly interesting and timely book. On the surface, it's about many of the people in the headlines in the early 90s: Pat Buchanan (chap. 3), Rush Limbaugh (chap. 4), Ross Perot (chap. 5), Jesse Jackson (chap. 9): But where is really takes off is with a whole host of characters that people don't talk about very much these days: David Duke, KKK turned Republican (chap. 1), Daryl Gates, LA police chief (chap. 7), Randy Weaver [and Ruby Ridge] (chap. 11), and suggests that they are all aspects of an extremist/authoritarian right-wing. The general scheme is a combination of political and intellectual history. I'd say that on balance, the best bits are the intellectual history. For instance, when Ganz talks about Randy Weaver, he talks about the extremist pamphlets and propaganda that were available to Weaver in Iowa, before he left for Idaho. (And that chapter is also a very striking essay on how the agricultural economic downturn of the 80s and 90s drove Iowa rightward.)
The lightly-drawn / insinuated argument of the book is that the current situation is in many ways an extension/continuation of the racist/quasi-fascist discourse of the early 90s. By far the most important chapter is "Winter of Discontent" (chap. 2), which is about the paleo-conservatives, whose leading intellectual seems to have been Sam Francis. I had never heard of him. (And there are others: Clyde Wilson and Thomas Fleming, both still alive.) I asked a friend of mine who is an American historians, and Francis seems to be below the radar -- but with this book, I would say: Not anymore! In any case, Francis originates a critique of the elites / managerial class (pp. 262-3; kind of a right-wing C. Wright Mills?) along with a theory of revolution and taking over (derived from Gramsci). The 90s rhetoric sounded really current to the 2020s. It is hard for me to believe that Steve Bannon has not read a lot of Sam Francis in the original German [attempt at humor]. Another figure Ganz recovers that I actually did know about is Carroll Quigley, who was the historian that Clinton would quote, largely for the way Quigley thinks about hope and the future. What I didn't know is that Quigley was also taken up by the right-wing extremists (p. 289).
What else? The chapter on Jackson gets into the Sister Souljah drama (remember that?) and it's surprisingly nuanced showing how while Clinton was dog-whistling, there were a lot of ways that it would have made sense for Jackson to disapprove of Souljah as well.
I think this is a book where it pays to keep your eye peeled for surprise guests -- such as Trump, of course, but also Eric Adams (p. 341). I found that I had to look a lot of people up in Wikipedia as I was reading.
I'd give this 5 stars but I think it's lighter on its argument than it should be. Each chapter is mostly about one person, primarily, but the chapter titles are all quotations from various books so that it's not obvious that chap. 7 is about Daryl Gates and policing and LA politics. I had to keep my own little table of contents to remember where everything is. Also, there's a nice walk-through of the police riots against David Dinkins -- but it would have helped had Ganz referred to that as the "City Hall Riot" so I'd recognize more readily that he was talking about that whole mess.
Can't wait to see what Ganz does next.
The lightly-drawn / insinuated argument of the book is that the current situation is in many ways an extension/continuation of the racist/quasi-fascist discourse of the early 90s. By far the most important chapter is "Winter of Discontent" (chap. 2), which is about the paleo-conservatives, whose leading intellectual seems to have been Sam Francis. I had never heard of him. (And there are others: Clyde Wilson and Thomas Fleming, both still alive.) I asked a friend of mine who is an American historians, and Francis seems to be below the radar -- but with this book, I would say: Not anymore! In any case, Francis originates a critique of the elites / managerial class (pp. 262-3; kind of a right-wing C. Wright Mills?) along with a theory of revolution and taking over (derived from Gramsci). The 90s rhetoric sounded really current to the 2020s. It is hard for me to believe that Steve Bannon has not read a lot of Sam Francis in the original German [attempt at humor]. Another figure Ganz recovers that I actually did know about is Carroll Quigley, who was the historian that Clinton would quote, largely for the way Quigley thinks about hope and the future. What I didn't know is that Quigley was also taken up by the right-wing extremists (p. 289).
What else? The chapter on Jackson gets into the Sister Souljah drama (remember that?) and it's surprisingly nuanced showing how while Clinton was dog-whistling, there were a lot of ways that it would have made sense for Jackson to disapprove of Souljah as well.
I think this is a book where it pays to keep your eye peeled for surprise guests -- such as Trump, of course, but also Eric Adams (p. 341). I found that I had to look a lot of people up in Wikipedia as I was reading.
I'd give this 5 stars but I think it's lighter on its argument than it should be. Each chapter is mostly about one person, primarily, but the chapter titles are all quotations from various books so that it's not obvious that chap. 7 is about Daryl Gates and policing and LA politics. I had to keep my own little table of contents to remember where everything is. Also, there's a nice walk-through of the police riots against David Dinkins -- but it would have helped had Ganz referred to that as the "City Hall Riot" so I'd recognize more readily that he was talking about that whole mess.
Can't wait to see what Ganz does next.
June 12, 2024
You can also see this review, along with others I have written, at my new blog, Mr. Book's Book Reviews.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Mr. Book just finished When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz.
The book agrees with the two theses: American democracy is in peril and “democracy in America never fully existed in the first place … it has always been a national enchained by great inequalities and ruled by an unrepresentative system designed largely to keep those chains in place.” Ganz then used the early 1990s to make his case, with mixed success,
The book gets off to a strong start, in the introduction, when it argues that Reagan’s economic policies were nothing more than class warfare, designed to make the rich even richer, while the rest of the country was left behind.
The first chapter, on David Duke, was excellent. There was also plenty of good historical information on Louisiana to start off the chapter, and throughout it. A couple of chapters later, there was an accurate quote from a conservative magazine Chronicles, in February 1992 that admitted that liberals were “dead right” that “David Duke represents the logical culmination of the conservative resurgence of Ronald Reagan.”
While reading the first chapter, I was sure that this was going to be an A+ book, or at worst, an A. It is very rare that I come to that early conclusion and it doesn’t come to fruition. Unfortunately, this was one of those exceptions.
The rest of the book lived up to the promise of the beginning. There was a good discussion of Ross Perot’s business dealings and corruptions, although the eventual coverage of his presidential campaign wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. The chapter on the LAP and the unrest in Los Angeles was the best part of the book, other than the David Duke material. But, it also served as a reminder that this author was very capable of writing excellent material, but just not on a consistent basis in this book.
This was not, by any standards, a bad book. It just wasn’t one that was able to live up to the promise that it showed early on. I have to give it a B. NetGalley and Goodreads require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a B equates to 3 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews
Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 12, 2024.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Mr. Book just finished When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz.
The book agrees with the two theses: American democracy is in peril and “democracy in America never fully existed in the first place … it has always been a national enchained by great inequalities and ruled by an unrepresentative system designed largely to keep those chains in place.” Ganz then used the early 1990s to make his case, with mixed success,
The book gets off to a strong start, in the introduction, when it argues that Reagan’s economic policies were nothing more than class warfare, designed to make the rich even richer, while the rest of the country was left behind.
The first chapter, on David Duke, was excellent. There was also plenty of good historical information on Louisiana to start off the chapter, and throughout it. A couple of chapters later, there was an accurate quote from a conservative magazine Chronicles, in February 1992 that admitted that liberals were “dead right” that “David Duke represents the logical culmination of the conservative resurgence of Ronald Reagan.”
While reading the first chapter, I was sure that this was going to be an A+ book, or at worst, an A. It is very rare that I come to that early conclusion and it doesn’t come to fruition. Unfortunately, this was one of those exceptions.
The rest of the book lived up to the promise of the beginning. There was a good discussion of Ross Perot’s business dealings and corruptions, although the eventual coverage of his presidential campaign wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. The chapter on the LAP and the unrest in Los Angeles was the best part of the book, other than the David Duke material. But, it also served as a reminder that this author was very capable of writing excellent material, but just not on a consistent basis in this book.
This was not, by any standards, a bad book. It just wasn’t one that was able to live up to the promise that it showed early on. I have to give it a B. NetGalley and Goodreads require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a B equates to 3 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews
Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 12, 2024.
July 8, 2024
David Duke, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, John Gotti, Rudy Giuliani, Ross Perot: if you're under 50, you’ll likely recognize only one of these names (Giuliani). The rest of them faded from the scene. But before they faded, did make a scene! These performers on the public stage in the early 1990s are the leading “con men and conspirators” referred to in the title. And as the narrative centers around 1992, there’s a good deal about the incumbent president George H.W. Bush and (then) Governor Bill Clinton, who, along with Perot, vied for the presidency in that election year.
I have to admit I was around and generally politically informed at that time, but there’s a great deal of detail here that I knew little or nothing about. (My excuse was parenting two young daughters, an active law practice, and usual demands of family and private life in middle age.) But perhaps it’s better that I was somewhat ignorant—because reading about it in retrospect, it’s an ugly picture. And, also in my defense, why should I care about a nut from Louisiana who was a former Klan leader and neo-Nazi? Because he tapped into a significant part of the voting public in many places, at least until he self-destructed. Why should I have cared about a right-wing ideologue (Sam Francis) writing in some obscure right-wing publications? Well, perhaps for the same reason that one should have paid attention to the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, or Mussolini and Hitler, before their ascents to power. Why care about a brash talking guy (Buchanan) who’d worked for Nixon and Reagan, and who challenged Bush? Because he pushed the Republican Party further to the right, which included a renewed reliance on racial politics and anti-immigrant demagoguery. And why should I have cared about a New York mob boss like John Gotti as I was living life in serene Iowa City (with no inkling that I’d ever come to live in NYC)? It turns out that Gotti became a bit of a folk hero in the city, while the police were in nearly open revolt against Mayor Dinkins. (Dinkins was NYC’s first black mayor; the police then were overwhelmingly white, belligerent, and corrupt in many instances.)
Ganz explores all of these individuals and the whole of the American political experience at that time with extraordinary fluency and command of the facts. His prose works exceptionally well in his narrative. His narrative tour of a troubled time that we can see as a precursor to our current plight. And by the way, the final scene spotlights a loudmouthed publicity hound and mogul wanna-be from Queens and thereby portends future events.
Ganz’s book, along with other reading of late, has led me to adopt a new lens with which to view the arc of American history.
I have to admit I was around and generally politically informed at that time, but there’s a great deal of detail here that I knew little or nothing about. (My excuse was parenting two young daughters, an active law practice, and usual demands of family and private life in middle age.) But perhaps it’s better that I was somewhat ignorant—because reading about it in retrospect, it’s an ugly picture. And, also in my defense, why should I care about a nut from Louisiana who was a former Klan leader and neo-Nazi? Because he tapped into a significant part of the voting public in many places, at least until he self-destructed. Why should I have cared about a right-wing ideologue (Sam Francis) writing in some obscure right-wing publications? Well, perhaps for the same reason that one should have paid attention to the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, or Mussolini and Hitler, before their ascents to power. Why care about a brash talking guy (Buchanan) who’d worked for Nixon and Reagan, and who challenged Bush? Because he pushed the Republican Party further to the right, which included a renewed reliance on racial politics and anti-immigrant demagoguery. And why should I have cared about a New York mob boss like John Gotti as I was living life in serene Iowa City (with no inkling that I’d ever come to live in NYC)? It turns out that Gotti became a bit of a folk hero in the city, while the police were in nearly open revolt against Mayor Dinkins. (Dinkins was NYC’s first black mayor; the police then were overwhelmingly white, belligerent, and corrupt in many instances.)
Ganz explores all of these individuals and the whole of the American political experience at that time with extraordinary fluency and command of the facts. His prose works exceptionally well in his narrative. His narrative tour of a troubled time that we can see as a precursor to our current plight. And by the way, the final scene spotlights a loudmouthed publicity hound and mogul wanna-be from Queens and thereby portends future events.
Ganz’s book, along with other reading of late, has led me to adopt a new lens with which to view the arc of American history.
July 15, 2024
While this book is very well-written, vivid, and often funny, I'm not sure it really has an argument other than the general point that a lot of elements of Trumpism were prefigured in the early 1990s. These include: David Duke's white nationalism, Sam T. Francis' MIddle American radicalism, Pat Buchanan's revolt against the GOP establishment and his culture war, the weird cult of the criminal entrepreneur embodied by JOhn Gotti, the police-as-victims complex of Darryl Gates, and of course Ross Perot's eclectic outsider campaign. Ganz tells great mini-biographies of these and other figures, showing that there was a whole lot of anti-establishment discontentin the US that the end of the COld War seemed to worsen. Many were already starting to question neoliberal Reaganomics because of the maldistribution of its economic gains. At the same time, politics was becoming even more of a spectacle as talk TV and radio expanded and became even more crude. You can definitely feel moments in this book where you detect the forces that Trump eventually harnessed to win in 2016.
However, I would say this if you are looking for a rigorous argument, you should look elsewhere. This is more journalistic history, although it's good in that regard. There's not much effort to systematically think about why all this was happening in this period and what it all meant. A good historian could do a similar kind of analysis of crazy outlandish stuff/people in almost any time period; it doesn't necessarily prove anything, although it's hard to listen. I would add that for me, as a professional historian of American history, a good chunk of the book of old hat, told by historians like Andrew Hartmann, Nicole Hemmer, James Patterson, and others. I hope this book gets read wildly, and I will use the Francis and Buchanan parts for my own research, but beyond that I don't see it making a big impact among historians.
However, I would say this if you are looking for a rigorous argument, you should look elsewhere. This is more journalistic history, although it's good in that regard. There's not much effort to systematically think about why all this was happening in this period and what it all meant. A good historian could do a similar kind of analysis of crazy outlandish stuff/people in almost any time period; it doesn't necessarily prove anything, although it's hard to listen. I would add that for me, as a professional historian of American history, a good chunk of the book of old hat, told by historians like Andrew Hartmann, Nicole Hemmer, James Patterson, and others. I hope this book gets read wildly, and I will use the Francis and Buchanan parts for my own research, but beyond that I don't see it making a big impact among historians.
June 29, 2024
Sorry to say I come down on the negative side with this. Ultimately not sure Ganz’s book works for the scattered purposes it exists: part time-travelogue for elder Millennials to a time they barely remember (“can you believe how unhinged things were back then??? Crazy eh?”), explainer for The Current Moment/Trump, and wrt the penultimate chapter, a personal history of the screwy racism of the 1990s (and beyond) Big Apple. There are events he mischaracterizes (“I feel your pain” being widely lambasted), counternarratives he eschews (which, fair, it’s his wont as a polemicist), and when he’s focusing on the political philosophers and historians upon which his arguments rest, I mostly found myself wanting to read an intellectual history of *those* works, less an attempt to apply them to (narrowly tailored) current events in a grand explainer for how we ended up where we did in 2016. It’s lite-Perlstein.
All that said, Ganz is a crackerjack writer and his re-telling of the Republican myriad primary characters and forces makes for a dynamic reading experience. I just ultimately didn’t buy his examination of Gotti and the pop culture analysis of the two famous American mob movies (leaving aside Coppola and Puzo’s own overbearing criticism in the forms of Parts II & III) as a latticework for understanding MAGA. That aspect feels near and dear to his (and my) New Yorker heart, but would work better as a separate work or in a book of essays on 90s pop culture (which, as an avid listener to his podcast with Jamelle Bouie, I am certain he is more than capable of).
All that said, Ganz is a crackerjack writer and his re-telling of the Republican myriad primary characters and forces makes for a dynamic reading experience. I just ultimately didn’t buy his examination of Gotti and the pop culture analysis of the two famous American mob movies (leaving aside Coppola and Puzo’s own overbearing criticism in the forms of Parts II & III) as a latticework for understanding MAGA. That aspect feels near and dear to his (and my) New Yorker heart, but would work better as a separate work or in a book of essays on 90s pop culture (which, as an avid listener to his podcast with Jamelle Bouie, I am certain he is more than capable of).
July 13, 2024
Ups and downs. Having been a young adult during this time, I remember most of the names and events in the book. Having been in grad school during this time, I remember most of these names and events as fairly remote headlines, buffoons, late night jokes and parodies, and scandals.
The most interesting thing about this book is seeing the seeds and saplings of right-wing extremism, conspiracy theories, anti-government, white grievance, white racial panic, economic hollowing out, and inequality that continued to grow and flourish and exert their poisonous effects in the post-Obama era.
I did get tired of the “mini biographies” approach in which each trend is explored through the life of a notable individual. It’s readable, but feels increasingly formulaic as the book goes on.
It’s also male-oriented to a degree that feels downright retro. The only woman who receives sustained attention in the entire book is “Sister Souljah,��� the young Black activist who was amplified and vilified in the media in ways that allowed Clinton to look like just the right amount of racist for moderate white voters and just the right amount of anti-racist for moderate Black voters. The narrative is depressing though because it made me realize I don’t know anything at all about Sister Souljah, beyond how she was scapegoated in the media as a flash in the pan icon of Black radicalism and “look how dangerous and crazy rap music is.” The author barely quotes her, just quotes mainstream press scolding and maligning and whitesplaining her.
The most interesting thing about this book is seeing the seeds and saplings of right-wing extremism, conspiracy theories, anti-government, white grievance, white racial panic, economic hollowing out, and inequality that continued to grow and flourish and exert their poisonous effects in the post-Obama era.
I did get tired of the “mini biographies” approach in which each trend is explored through the life of a notable individual. It’s readable, but feels increasingly formulaic as the book goes on.
It’s also male-oriented to a degree that feels downright retro. The only woman who receives sustained attention in the entire book is “Sister Souljah,��� the young Black activist who was amplified and vilified in the media in ways that allowed Clinton to look like just the right amount of racist for moderate white voters and just the right amount of anti-racist for moderate Black voters. The narrative is depressing though because it made me realize I don’t know anything at all about Sister Souljah, beyond how she was scapegoated in the media as a flash in the pan icon of Black radicalism and “look how dangerous and crazy rap music is.” The author barely quotes her, just quotes mainstream press scolding and maligning and whitesplaining her.
June 1, 2024
Review of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s”
By: John Ganz
Available June 18/2024
Disclaimer: Please note that I received an Audio ARC from NetGalley and Macmillan Audio, in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
⭐⭐⭐☆☆
John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke” delves into the political and social chaos of the early 1990s, exposing America’s internal conflicts during a period of supposed triumph.
The book delves into the tensions of race, society, and economy that drive conspiracy theories and radical movements. Ganz demonstrates how these issues contribute to the current polarization and extremism, highlighting the impact of the past.
“When the Clock Broke” is an average book that didn’t captivate me, which is unusual for this type of literature. I can’t explain why I didn’t connect with it, but I hope you find this book an intriguing read. It’s filled with valuable insights, so it might be right up your alley.
By: John Ganz
Available June 18/2024
Disclaimer: Please note that I received an Audio ARC from NetGalley and Macmillan Audio, in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
⭐⭐⭐☆☆
John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke” delves into the political and social chaos of the early 1990s, exposing America’s internal conflicts during a period of supposed triumph.
The book delves into the tensions of race, society, and economy that drive conspiracy theories and radical movements. Ganz demonstrates how these issues contribute to the current polarization and extremism, highlighting the impact of the past.
“When the Clock Broke” is an average book that didn’t captivate me, which is unusual for this type of literature. I can’t explain why I didn’t connect with it, but I hope you find this book an intriguing read. It’s filled with valuable insights, so it might be right up your alley.
July 10, 2024
Unlike many of the young journalists and historians currently converging on anything hinting of the so-called alt-right, resembling as they do so many deep sea dwellers sustaining themselves on a corpse that has finally decayed the point where it has sunk to their level, Ganz’s approach to understanding these ideas and figures is tempered by that moral surrender (or at least suppression) common to any writer worth reading, allowing him to imagine this creature as it was when it was sentient. (Though the main theory of this book, that the ideas generated by these figures are taxonomically linked to the Trumpian Right, is I think a bit too skeletally academic: more a case of convergent evolution than direct ancestry.) Ganz displays the capacity not merely to have held these specimens at arms length until he could give a serviceable description, but to have been pleasured by the encounter in the first place: I was amused to find myself defending Bill Clinton against some too-restrictive characterizations, while simultaneously enjoying watching Sam Francis and Murray Rothbard, that atrabilious troll and undaunted imp, roam without editorial harassment.
That said, his politics do occasionally become a warping influence: the chapter on the LA riots reads like an extended take on the old joke “cops are unnecessary, and so late to show!” while his portrait of David Dinkins might well have been quarried exclusively from digitally fossilized NYT Op-Eds still guardedly hopeful of a presidential run.Yet I think it should be clear to any fair reader that this book, following as it does from sound inquisitorial promptings, has captured quite a bit about this micro era that, as far as popular histories go, seems to have been overlooked.
That said, his politics do occasionally become a warping influence: the chapter on the LA riots reads like an extended take on the old joke “cops are unnecessary, and so late to show!” while his portrait of David Dinkins might well have been quarried exclusively from digitally fossilized NYT Op-Eds still guardedly hopeful of a presidential run.Yet I think it should be clear to any fair reader that this book, following as it does from sound inquisitorial promptings, has captured quite a bit about this micro era that, as far as popular histories go, seems to have been overlooked.
June 26, 2024
This book's strength is also its weakness: it reads like someone doing an impression of one of the Rick Perlstein books about the rise of the modern US right. Perlstein blurbed it, which I guess keeps him from suing for such an obvious aping of his style?
In any case there's an opening here -- Perlstein's books end with Reagan and this one comes in after that. It's an engaging retelling of the initial setbacks of the 1990s crackpots who now look like the vanguard of the Trump era. Like any Perlstein book, it is roughly structured around a presidential campaign, and sells the story by weaving insider political maneuvering into a high-velocity account of the current events driving the zeitgeist in the general public. I felt like I already knew most of the characters here, which took some of the oomph out of it. Nonetheless, the basic thesis was pretty compelling.
In any case there's an opening here -- Perlstein's books end with Reagan and this one comes in after that. It's an engaging retelling of the initial setbacks of the 1990s crackpots who now look like the vanguard of the Trump era. Like any Perlstein book, it is roughly structured around a presidential campaign, and sells the story by weaving insider political maneuvering into a high-velocity account of the current events driving the zeitgeist in the general public. I felt like I already knew most of the characters here, which took some of the oomph out of it. Nonetheless, the basic thesis was pretty compelling.
July 7, 2024
Did you ever wonder what the politics and society of your country were like at the time of your birth? Well, Ganz answers that question quite handily for me.
You'd think that winning the Cold War and success in the Persian Gulf would put America in a happy mood. Unfortunately, the economy is in dire straits, and the reigning Republican Party is tearing itself apart as reactionary forces emerge in the form of such figures as David Duke and Pat Buchanan. Ross Perot appears out of nowhere to assault the political establishment as a would-be billionaire populist.
New York erupts in riots, while Los Angeles literally bursts into flames. And the last man standing, the Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, builds a centrist presidency that papers over but does not defeat the underlying problems that exacerbates this kind of extremism.
Interesting to see that the past can be prologue...
You'd think that winning the Cold War and success in the Persian Gulf would put America in a happy mood. Unfortunately, the economy is in dire straits, and the reigning Republican Party is tearing itself apart as reactionary forces emerge in the form of such figures as David Duke and Pat Buchanan. Ross Perot appears out of nowhere to assault the political establishment as a would-be billionaire populist.
New York erupts in riots, while Los Angeles literally bursts into flames. And the last man standing, the Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, builds a centrist presidency that papers over but does not defeat the underlying problems that exacerbates this kind of extremism.
Interesting to see that the past can be prologue...
July 21, 2024
The book premise is really interesting, but my problem is with the execution. The stories in the book don't feel very connected, and it feels like the author tries to shoehorn a segue at the end of a chapter to create a flowing narrative. Why insert a few pages on Rush Limbaugh at the end of your chapter on the contrasts between Buchanan and Duke? It just feels a little too spoonfed.
And I think the worst offense in the book was that the facts and trivia felt like they were ripped straight out of Wikipedia. I understand that this book covers a wide range of topics, and I don't expect the author to be an expert on everything covered but if I find all the little trivia you included about people in the book on Wikipedia, it feels a little lazy.
And I think the worst offense in the book was that the facts and trivia felt like they were ripped straight out of Wikipedia. I understand that this book covers a wide range of topics, and I don't expect the author to be an expert on everything covered but if I find all the little trivia you included about people in the book on Wikipedia, it feels a little lazy.
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