The Decade That Mangled the American Right

“It’s rodeo time in Folsom, Louisiana,” intones correspondent Judd Rose over footage of a man riding a bull. “The night is black, the crowd is white, and the rhetoric is red hot. All eyes are on glib, glamorous David Duke, the Robert Redford of racism.” The camera pans to Duke as he addresses the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe in equal rights for everybody,” he says. “But when I say that, I mean white people, too!”

Duke was the lead story on PrimeTime Live, ABC News’ flagship current affairs program, on November 2, 1989. These were boom times for the former Klansman, who was approaching the zenith of his national fame. In his past: a stint as the grand wizard of the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; pseudonymous authorship of a number of direct-mail self-help books that included Finders Keepers, a guide to sex and romance for modern women (“Sooner or later, if you truly want to drive your man wild in bed, you should bring him to climax by fellatio”); his ejection from the Klan, partly as a result of his vanity (he once opened a Klan leadership conference topless) and compulsive womanizing (“He was seducing all the wives,” a fellow Klansman later recalled); a string of plastic surgeries that included a nose reduction, a chin implant, and chemical peels to remove wrinkles around his eyes; a growing knack for dismissing racist comments from his past as “satire”; a history of tax evasion. In his future: runs for the U.S. Senate and governorship of Louisiana. Both of these tilts at public office would end in defeat, but they helped forge a path for the union of small government conservatism with white supremacy while bringing the politics of racial resentment more fully into the mainstream.

If you’d told viewers watching PrimeTime Live on that night in late 1989 that the program featured a serial womanizer and narcissist with a patchy tax record, gift for verbal evasion, and overblown sense of his own attractiveness who would one day become president of the United States, most would probably have assumed you were talking about Duke. But that distinction fell to one of the show’s later subjects: “The United States is being ripped off in spades,” griped Donald Trump in a story about Japanese investment in the U.S. economy. A week after the program aired, the Berlin Wall came down. The United States appeared triumphant; a decade of deregulation, liberal piety, and late-night pizza in the West Wing beckoned. But the fractures revealed by Duke’s brief efflorescence never healed. It would take another quarter-century until they found their ultimate champion on the national stage.

How did we get from there to here? How did Trump, a figure of faint ridicule in the closing decades of the last century, become the defining figure of the American right in the opening decades of this one? For historian John Ganz, it’s impossible to answer these questions without understanding the early 1990s—an era when the smug meliorism of the Reagan years broke down, the kooks and cranks of American political life came in from the fringes, and a feral spirit of paranoia and rage threatened to take up permanent residence in the body politic. The significance of these years has not been fully computed, writes Ganz in his new history of the era, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. This period, while “out of joint with the two eras of—at least superficial—prosperity and optimism that preceded and followed it,” he proposes, “may feel more familiar today.” The early ’90s were a time when “America felt itself to be losing out: losing its dominant place in the world, losing the basis of its security and wealth, and losing its sense of itself.”

The parallels between today and the era of grunge and gangsta rap may not seem immediately obvious. If the present moment has a restless, in-between feel to it—if the neoliberalism of the past half-century is on its way out, while the precise identity of its successor remains unclear—it might invite closer comparison with the 1970s. This, after all, was the last time that the United States underwent a major regime change, the “pivotal decade” (as historian Judith Stein once called it) when stagflation, energy scarcity, and social disorder combined to kill Keynesianism, to kneecap labor, and legitimize the despotism of the market under which we still live today.

But When the Clock Broke makes a convincing case for paying closer attention to the early 1990s. In Ganz’s account, the 1992 election was a transition point, announcing the first major rumblings of discontent with the post-1970s policy consensus: Challengers to the established order questioned welfare restraint, deregulation, and deference to the private sector on foundational questions of economic management and resource distribution. As the national mood soured, the two-party system received its strongest challenge in nearly a century; civil unrest exploded across the country’s biggest cities; and radical voices, especially on the right, grew in popularity.

Though the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama years saw a return to the political status quo ante—the finance-first policy preferences, like the wars, continuing unabated through boom and bust—the problems driving the civic skittishness of the early 1990s never disappeared. Nor did the appeal of those voices offering radically divisive, even violent, solutions to those problems. In Trump, the frothers and fire breathers of the far right who tried and failed to penetrate the deepest centers of American power in the early 1990s at last found their ideal messenger.

Trump, writes Ganz, represents a “crystallization of elements that were still inchoate” in the early 1990s, and he’s succeeded in turning the Republican Party over to the “politics of despair” that blighted that earlier era. When the Clock Broke’s thesis is not exactly that the 1990s gave us the Trump presidency—not in any literal or mechanistic sense, at least. It’s that the right-wing radicals of that era provided the foundation, as much in style as in content, for the shock of 2016 and the four-year carnival of xenophobia, anti-democratic provocation, and paper towel–tossing insensitivity that followed. David Duke, paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, shock jock Rush Limbaugh, New Right pamphleteer Sam Francis, election bomber Ross Perot, and mob boss John Gotti: These men walked so Donald Trump could run.

America’s anti-liberal traditions stretch back far deeper than the 1992 election, as Ganz acknowledges with nods to the prewar America Firsters, McCarthyism, the civil rights antagonism of Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, and the George Wallace campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. There’s also an illuminating digression on Father Coughlin, the popular Depression-era ­antisemitic radio host, and Huey Long, the Louisiana populist (or “Louisiana’s Hitler,” as one newspaper described him at the time) who won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1932 and briefly threatened to take the White House before his assassination in 1935. But the 1990s are the focus, if only for the sheer breadth of the insurrection that emerged against the conservative political establishment and the staggering inability of the old order’s defenders to understand the rebellion from below.

When the Clock Broke takes its title from a speech that the economist Murray N. Rothbard delivered in early 1992. Rothbard, like many of the figures who populate Ganz’s narrative, did not fit in in the courtly world of mainstream postwar Republicanism, dominated as it was by Cold War hawks, the lapsed liberals known as neoconservatives, and the cosmopolites of William F. Buckley’s National Review. He was antiwar, anti-state, and anti-equality. His extreme libertarianism extended to the belief that federal lighthouses should be privatized, making him an oddball within a conservative movement still enamored, even under the supposed strictures of Reaganite “small government” thinking, of the power and extravagance of the public purse. Rothbard gave his speech at the second annual meeting of the John Randolph Club, an alliance of Buchanan-aligned paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians named after a Virginia congressman and planter who once declared, “I love liberty; I hate equality.” Buchanan, rising in the polls for the Republican primary against George H.W. Bush, delivered the keynote, but Rothbard, introducing him, was the real star. Calling for a strategy of “right-wing populism”—“exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational”—that could “short-circuit the media elites, and reach and rouse the masses directly,” Rothbard Bannonishly declared it was time to “finish the job” started by the Soviet Union’s demise and purge America of the “soft Marxism” of liberalism: “With Pat Buchanan as our leader, 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.”

A few weeks later, Buchanan claimed 40 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary—which, given his opponent was the sitting president, felt as good as a win—and hailed the “little rebellion” that had swelled into a “full-fledged middle-American revolution,” vowing: “We are going to take our party back from those who have walked away and forgotten about us.” He didn’t, of course. Bush ended up winning the nomination fairly comfortably. But the clock had been broken: From that point on, right-wing demagogy—with its insensitivity to feelings and contempt for decorum—represented a viable route to national attention.

Ganz writes about the right’s trolls and brawlers with an unusual perceptiveness. Though politically he’s the opposite of his subjects, there’s a certain affinity between them in matters of style. Ganz, a self-taught historian who began writing about the far right in the early years of the Trump presidency and operates a lively political Substack called Unpopular Front, is perhaps best known as a briny eminence of the discourse, the online debate about politics and culture that unfolds every day on Twitter. If you type Ganz’s username and the word “fuck” into the search bar on Twitter, you gain instant access to a scroll of profanity and verbal belligerence of biblically entertaining proportions. It’s not hard to understand why such an abrasive writer might have been drawn to the story of pugilists like Buchanan and Gotti, who grew up scuffling in the streets and kept the fight going into middle age.

The distrust of institutions that gripped the country in the early 1990s traced its origins to the crises of the 1970s: the Watergate scandal, the humiliation of Vietnam, the doomerism and malaise of the Carter era. When Ross Perot launched his third-party bid for president in 1992, posturing as a bashful Caesar forced into action by the depth of popular disgust with the clubbiness of the Beltway elites, haters of the establishment found a leader they could live with. The irony of Perot’s rise is that he owed much of his success to the state. He became the go-to “computer guy” of the Nixon White House, and his various data management businesses—including, most notably, Electronic Data Systems, a corporate autocracy in which the men’s haircuts were short, beards were banned, and the few female employees were not allowed to wear pants—grew rich through the 1960s and 1970s as favored processors of the Great Society’s Social Security Administration. Perot rode the technological and financial waves of post-1960s America—General Motors bought EDS in 1984, then bought out Perot’s shares for $750 million two years later—while staying, essentially, unchanged: His slightly parted “wash-and-wear” haircut was done by the same Dallas barber for 20 years. Texan, puritanical, erratic, and fabulously rich, Perot forged a political brand fusing a folksy appeal to prelapsarian Americana (Norman Rockwell, he once told The Washington Post, “painted what I strived to be”) with macho bigotry (opponents and critics were often denigrated as “sissies” or “limp-wristed,” and during the 1992 campaign Perot said he would not include any homosexuals in his Cabinet) and the brute example of raw wealth. He was Trump, in other words, without the hush money, the chemical glow, or the sleaze.

He was also, like Trump, deeply paranoid, and it was suspicion about the machinations of the state in one area in particular that made him a national figure in the 1980s: the governmentwide failure to find and repatriate the thousands of American troops supposedly missing in action but still alive in Vietnam. “I have one mission in life,” Perot declared, “and that’s to get to the bottom of the POW-MIA situation.” Ad campaigns, rallies, and fundraising drives followed, and in 1982 Perot, with support from celebrities such as Clint Eastwood and William Shatner, financed an expedition led by Vietnam veteran James “Bo” Gritz to Laos to locate missing American service members. “Perot positioned himself as a messianic figure in this nationalist cult of the undead,” Ganz writes. “Here was a man who could overcome the traitors who had left America’s warriors behind, rescue the captives, and redeem the nation’s sense of loss and humiliation.” The 1982 raid ended with Laotian forces chasing Perot’s men out of the country and Gritz stripping down to his underwear to cross the Mekong into Thailand, where Thai authorities promptly arrested him.

The expedition was an operational failure but a cultural success: In the years that followed, Hollywood released a string of films—Uncommon Valor starring Gene Hackman, Missing in Action with Chuck Norris, and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood Part II—inspired partly by the missions mounted by Gritz and other self-declared rescuers. That Perot’s efforts came to nothing did not matter. He had won the most valuable commodity of all: the nation’s attention. For Perot, as for Buchanan, the most important thing was to be spoken about, and he exploited this profile to launch his run for the presidency. That run, like his many bids to bring home the POWs, ended in defeat, but it provided a useful template for anyone wishing to mix personal wealth, contempt for the political establishment, and religious veneration of the military into a bid for the White House. The man untouched by fashion initiated a stylistic revolution in presidential campaigning: Perot showed that, in the cable TV era, vibes always trump policy detail.

If Perot’s challenge to the two-party system caught fire, it’s partly because much of the country was already ablaze. Ganz dwells on the violence that erupted across the country’s biggest cities, L.A. and New York in particular, in the early 1990s, locating its seed in the collision of the recession with the reactionary politics of civic authorities. In the early 1990s, paranoia—about the motives of the state, about political correctness, about America’s changing demographics, about cultural encirclement by the left—was not the exclusive province of the Dallas software mogul. It was also an obsession across the police system, which leaned right and white. Under the leadership of Daryl F. Gates, the LAPD became a petri dish of brutality and open racism. Gates, protégé of the man who invented the notion of a “thin blue line” between order and criminality, implemented a paramilitary vision of the police force, in which superiors would “categorically refuse to let officers look like flower children,” as he later wrote, and under which the ultimate goal was to “wipe out” low-income neighborhoods struggling with drugs and crime. This culture of callous inhumanity saw squad cars regularly record messages like “I almost got me a Mexican last night” and “Sounds like monkey slapping time,” and eventually led to the beating of Rodney King, touching off the citywide riots that left 63 dead, 2,383 injured, and 12,000 arrested. Gates’s LAPD “became the de facto center of white power in L.A.,” Ganz writes.

Racial supremacists in other parts of the country were not so blessed with institutional support. White rage may have been woven into the fabric of government on the West Coast, but across the sparsely populated Plains states it took on a more atomized and extreme form. The plight of Randy and Vicki Weaver—radical anti-government white supremacists whose family homestead in remote Idaho became the site of an FBI siege in 1992, resulting in Vicki’s death and Randy’s arrest—became a cause célèbre among the extreme right. It also brought exposure, on the national stage, to the Weavers’ core belief in the existence of a “vast, tyrannical state intent on crushing white Christian Americans,” according to Ganz. The siege at Ruby Ridge, as it came to be known, was both a great propaganda victory for the far right and a symbol of the forces driving alienation and political polarization across the country.

The Weavers began as “sturdy heartland folk” but became radicalized in response to a number of important structural shifts in culture and the economy. The high-interest-rate, high-debt economy of the Reagan era decimated the agricultural industry in which Randy once worked; mechanization killed farm-town America’s sense of community (“The sense of fellowship is gone, replaced by machinery,” one longtime farmer lamented in the 1980s); and the deregulation of media markets gave birth, via cable TV and talk radio, to a bewildering new chorus of eccentrics and zealots ready to push Reaganism’s malcontents in ever more fanatical political directions. The gateway to the conspiracy literature and Aryan Nation propaganda that the Weavers later consumed was the cable evangelism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club. But it could have equally come from a figure like Rush Limbaugh, who became the “voice of Middle America”—beamed out to 11 million listeners on 450 stations—at a time when industrial decline, the cult of privatization, and a much-discussed national epidemic of loneliness created what one observer called a “vast underground of discontent” beneath the “calm surface of American life.”

Mainstream American society, Ganz writes, had stopped providing the Weavers and others like them “with a plausible story: army service was demoralizing, the churches had nothing to say to them, materialism could not fill the gap, and all around them were signs of decay.” Economic misery, the loss of “third places,” and the emergence of a new media landscape that was looser, more salacious, and less boringly adult than in previous decades: These, as much as anything to do with the actual substantive core of right-wing radicalism, were the driving forces behind the apprehension, fear, and unease that gripped the United States in the early 1990s. The popularity of those giving voice to the rage and confusion of the era, as well as those offering solutions to it, grew.

When the Clock Broke reads most powerfully as an account of how America fell out of love with the ideology of the civics lesson and embraced the political darkness. Emblematic of this turn is the contrast Ganz draws between Rudy Giuliani, the technocrat attorney grasping toward victory in the 1993 New York City mayoral election, and John Gotti, the dapper and charismatic mob boss who controlled the powerful Gambino crime family from what the book calls “the white ethnic Heimatland” of the outer boroughs. Gotti became a national folk hero following his 1992 trial for murder and racketeering, and his cultural rise prefigured, in Ganz’s view, a deeper collective yearning for a kind of primal, unbound authority that Trump—and rather less successfully, ­Giuliani himself—would later use as the basis of his political identity:

When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority than the type Giuliani had represented up to that point. It didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit. The institutions had failed, the welfare state had failed, the markets had failed, there was no justice, just rackets and mobs: the crowd didn’t want the G-man dutifully following the rules, and it didn’t want to be part of the “gorgeous mosaic”; it wanted protection, a godfather, a boss, just like the undertaker at the beginning of The Godfather. Gotti was not really a figure of revolt and anarchy at all, he was a symbol of order, the old order that many longed for still, an order more real and deeper than the law, upheld by brute power.

Amid this brimming cast of characters, the real protagonists of When the Clock Broke are the thinkers who gave white rage shape and form, a coherent sense of political direction: not only Rothbard and Buchanan but also writers like Sam Francis and Joseph Sobran. Their growing influence was a feat of words—Rothbard, Francis, and Sobran were all prolific writers with regular columns in the right-wing press—as well as networking: Francis, Sobran, and Buchanan convened for a monthly dinner outside of Washington, D.C., for a decade from the early 1990s. Sobran, a Roman Catholic traditionalist employed as a senior editor at National Review, had a flair for flouting the orthodoxies of mainstream conservatism: He was a consistent critic of both Israel (the pro-Israel New York Times, he felt, “really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update”) and the “globalism” that led the United States into the Gulf war. He also felt that, with the Soviet threat dispatched, “we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.” Buchanan and Francis shared this conviction. The real trouble with popular rule was the people, especially those who came from somewhere else: During his 1992 primary campaign, Buchanan famously called for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to stem the flow of new arrivals.

Anti-Israel, antiwar, anti-democratic, sharply critical of Reaganomics, and acutely conscious of the social devastation wrought by what’s now known as neoliberalism, these thinkers distinguished themselves as much by the unpredictability and ecumenism of their politics (a splash of xenophobia here, a dash of anti-corporate cod socialism there) as by the theatricality of their rhetoric. Francis, the intellectual inspiration behind the New Right of the self-styled “Middle American Radicals,” emerges from When the Clock Broke as the great prophet of the age. He saw that the type of politics he and his collaborators were advancing could have no truck with the establishment. “The New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one,” he wrote. The Middle American Radicals for whom this New Right claimed to speak, though in practice mostly white and working class, were “less an objectively identifiable class than a subjectively distinguished temperament,” in which feelings of resentment, exploitation, and suspicion of established authority freely mixed. Excluded from power both formally and culturally, this new movement could only take back the country, Francis felt, through rejection of the politics of civility, a clean break with free-market fundamentalism, and the embrace of raw executive power. He spoke of putting “America First,” a “new nationalism” that could defeat globalism, and the far-right quest for “cultural hegemony.” To contemporary ears, the recipe may sound familiar. This was Bannonism in the days when Steve Bannon was still an investment banker and aspiring film producer.

Even amid the far right’s setbacks of the early 1990s, Francis saw the successes to come. Reflecting on the Buchanan campaign after its suspension before the inevitable renomination of Bush, Francis wrote that Buchanan “may not be The Terminator, but he can still be the Godfather of a new political and cultural movement that can leave Mr. Bush’s party where it lies and take back our country.” Throughout Ganz’s account, what’s most striking is how utterly sure the founding fathers of Trumpism felt of their ultimate victory. Whether via a reverse-Gramscian long march through the cultural institutions or a successful bid for the White House, Francis, Rothbard, Sobran, and co. never appeared to doubt that history would vindicate them in the end.

One of Ganz’s strengths as a historian—a quality he shares with Rick Perlstein, another great explorer of the excesses and recesses of the reactionary mind—is that he takes the far right seriously as an intellectual movement. He’s also skilled at bringing the thinkers he discusses into conversation with the culture that surrounded them. In one of the book’s more surprising passages, he shows how closely Rothbard and Francis engaged with the canon of the modern American mob film, and how the contrast between The Godfather and Goodfellas offered a powerful binary to explain the country’s decline. Goodfellas, Rothbard felt, represented capitalist society as distorted by “our leftist culture,” which eroded traditional authority structures while enabling street violence; Francis saw The Godfather as the tragic story of a man’s doomed bid to maintain the rule of family, patriarchy, and tradition amid the rootless calculation of modernity. Both men pined for the return to a social order built on The Godfather’s Machiavellian regime of hierarchy, fraud, and force.

When the Clock Broke has none of the high-handed snobbery and contempt that blinded earlier histories of American conservatism to the enduring vitality of the right’s most extreme elements. (In 1964, Richard Hofstadter, at the time the preeminent historian of the U.S. right, derided these elements as representatives of a “paranoid style in American politics.”) To the extent the book conveys any scorn, it’s reserved chiefly for George H.W. Bush. The forty-first president emerges from these pages as the era’s true American idiot, a hapless patrician who “possessed the ditziness of the high WASPs” and none of the wit to meet the temper of the times. Ganz lovingly distributes a catalog of Bush’s most memorable face-plants across the book’s pages. We see the commander in chief vomiting in the lap of the Japanese prime minister; we see him pilloried in the press after going to a J.C. Penney on a “man of the people”–style trip to buy socks, and again after declaring himself “amazed” by a new supermarket scanner at a National Grocers Association convention (“Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed,” announced the headline in The New York Times); we see him bizarrely bringing up repairs to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport on a trip to L.A. to console first responders injured in the 1992 riots; we see him fleeing a rally in Panama after accidentally getting tear-gassed (“It’s been a very good trip, with the exception of the tear gas,” a White House spokesman later declares).

What we see less of, beyond one brief and brilliant excursus on the intellectual history of Clintonian centrism, is the maneuvering of the liberals who went on to occupy the White House for 16 of the 24 years between 1992 and the election of Trump. The political elites responsible for the economic program that sowed today’s misfortunes are mostly absent from Ganz’s account, whose dutiful paragraphs on deindustrialization, free trade, and job losses never really identify the political agents behind the country’s drift into stalled productivity and chronic inequality. Financialization, the rise of shareholder capitalism, globalization’s boom-bust cycle of hot money and sudden stops, the ungodly policy marriage of austerity for wage earners with abundance for asset owners: On these equally important drivers of the country’s post-Reagan economic and social malaise, When the Clock Broke has little to say.

These are, perhaps, churlish criticisms. There’s a limit to what a single book can do, even one as vividly drawn as this. But When the Clock Broke gives us no real guide to why Trump succeeded where the far-right strivers of the early 1990s failed. Nor does it help us understand the evident electoral limitations of Trumpism, the enduring appeal of liberal stability and “business as usual.” In the decade of Seinfeld and Srebrenica, the United States cracked up. The themes that Perot, Duke, Rothbard, Francis, Buchanan, and all the rest played on during that time are remarkably similar to those evoked by Trump today: a seething sense of national humiliation, the claim to speak for those left behind by progress, the urgent pledge to “take the country back” from the wokes and weaklings driving it to ruin. American culture, then as now, seemed full of “strange dreams and troubled cries,” Ganz writes, but solutions to this social misdirection have proved elusive. A politics of resentment makes sense when those advancing it are out of power. Whether it can also work in today’s United States as a durable politics of government—for more than one term, at least—has not been tested. In November, the electorate will have its say on the matter—though not, one imagines, for the last time.