Did the Early 1990s Break American Politics?

As concerned as he is with describing the conditions that produced these demagogues, Ganz is equally deft in characterizing their individual personalities. Duke is “caught between his desire for publicity and mainstream acceptance and his infatuation with the secretive underworld of extremism,” a doomed position neatly reflected in his pseudonymous side gig publishing pornographic literature that an aide calls “too hard-core for the right wing and too soft-core for the perverts.” Limbaugh—“a square with a flattop, he liked being the guy playing the records more than he liked the records”—is a shy introvert in person whose inner confidence emerges only in a broadcasting studio. Perot, the corporate welfare profiteer turned populist,

had one foot in the future and one in the past. On the one hand, he was a double throwback: there was all the mythological Americana, the cowboy and Western imagery, the Texas accent, the folksy idioms, the Norman Rockwells. He was also a throwback to another, more recent past, a past in contradiction with the America of self-reliance and rugged individualism but increasingly the source of its own nostalgia: the postwar regime of industrial prosperity, economic security, and corporate paternalism.

Each of these men, in his own way, is a grasping outsider thirsty for adulation and status commensurate with new money. The patrician George H.W. Bush, introduced early as a politician profoundly out of step with the times, makes for a perfect foil:

Bush did not aspire to the presidency out of a sense of political passion; his ambition was for a successful career befitting a person who was quite literally of the senatorial class: it was simply the last step in the cursus honorum of ascending offices. He had no interest in the permanent campaign of his predecessor, the “Great Communicator”: he was the representative of a class bred to govern, not to lead. Its predominance was taken for granted. He had been happiest as leader of the nation’s Super Secret Club for Privileged Boys, the Central Intelligence Agency, and he took with him the clichés and behavior of a bureaucrat: everything was a contingency, a particular case to be reacted to and then managed competently—“prudent” was one of his favorite words, as Dana Carvey’s famous Saturday Night Live send-up of the president highlighted with glee. He possessed the ditziness of the high WASPs: a love for games, toys, and practical jokes; he spoke in non sequiturs and inside or private gags. It was difficult, even for him, to know what he really meant sometimes.

No wonder, then, that Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign was “totally bereft of ideas, direction, or meaning,” thereby creating an opening for candidates who had all of the above. Though Bill Clinton is not a central focus of the book, Ganz does explore the ideas that shaped Bush’s successful Democratic challenger. Clinton, we learn, studied at Georgetown under a professor named Carroll Quigley, the author of Tragedy and Hope, a 1,300-page argument for a secular Puritanism that defended social responsibility against 1960s counterculture excesses. Quigley’s ideas peppered Clinton’s “New Covenant” campaign rhetoric and were also popular with the latter-day John Birchers who supported Perot, and who passed around bootleg copies of Tragedy and Hope at gun shows.

Pat Buchanan, who challenged Bush in the Republican primary, certainly wasn’t lacking in ideas either. In the writings of Samuel Francis and the speeches of Buchanan closely informed by them, Ganz sees the intellectual roots of what Paul Gottfried first termed “paleoconservatism,” which developed in reaction to the more cosmopolitan (read: Jewish) neoconservatism embraced by the Reagan administration. “If the neocons held up mid-century New York as the height of U.S. civilization, the paleos wanted to go much further back: to the 1920s at least, and preferably back to the nineteenth century, to the world before Lincoln and the Civil War,” Ganz writes. “The paleo aesthetic was American Gothic: white-sided Presbyterian and Congregational churches in small towns; stern, industrious folk; farmers, homesteaders, and frontiersmen.” During the Reagan years, the paleocons Russell Kirk and Joseph Sobran charged the leading neocons, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, with “dual loyalty” over their fervent support for Israel; the neocons returned fire with charges of antisemitism, while William F. Buckley made an awkward attempt to broker peace between the conservative factions. In the 1980s, these battles unfolded in the pages of small-circulation magazines like Buckley’s National Review, but in 1992 they would also play out electorally with Buchanan’s failed but damaging primary challenge to Bush, during which he articulated the case for a “new nationalism” that would “put America first”—language that would be echoed by Francis in the campaign’s wake

Francis, as Ganz discusses, also took a particular interest in the Mafia as an American cultural archetype—as did Murray Rothbard, another right-wing thinker that Ganz spotlights (Rothbard’s 1992 pledge, “We shall break the clock of social democracy,” inspired Ganz’s title). Both Francis and Rothbard reacted to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, released in 1990, by contrasting its sordid rendering of the mob with the quasi-feudal, honor-and-loyalty-bound society portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier Godfather films. “While The Godfather was essentially a right-wing utopia, Rothbard believed the assault on property and persons in Goodfellas reflected the actually existing liberal dystopia of street violence,” Ganz writes. Similarly, “Francis thought the famiglia in The Godfather stood for an earlier, more wholesome and integrated social form fighting to keep itself intact in an American culture that threatened to dissolve it.”

The widespread fascination with mob culture in both its idealized and debased imaginings, Ganz argues, is also the cultural context in which a real-life mob boss like Gotti could become a folk hero to many New Yorkers—to the point where Rudy Giuliani, who built his early career on prosecuting mobsters, would ultimately co-opt the style (and, years later, the criminality) of Italian American wiseguys in his bid for political office. It’s also the context in which another tough-talking vulgarian from the outer boroughs—one who did more than his share of business with mafiosi—would find a receptive national constituency on the right.

When the Clock Broke ends rather abruptly in 1993, just past Clinton’s inauguration as president after having won a mere 43 percent plurality of the popular vote (Perot won an astonishing 19 percent, the highest total any third-party candidate has received since 1912). Surveying the national landscape, Ganz gives us a sort of montage of what his antiheroes were up to at the dawn of the Clinton era. We see Perot plugging a new book inveighing against NAFTA, which Clinton would sign into law the following year with Republican support and considerable Democratic defection; we see Francis speaking at a Buchanan-affiliated event and drawing explicit inspiration from the way Adolf Hitler and the Nazis regrouped after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Finally, Ganz checks in on Donald Trump, a recurring minor character throughout the book, who by 1993 was reeling from bankruptcies. We listen in on Trump as he meets with the aging, fascism-influenced architect Philip Johnson to discuss a potential redesign of the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. After listening to the future president’s inimitable bluster for a while, Johnson tells him, “You’d make a good mafioso.” To which Trump replies, “One of the greatest.”

It’s a hell of a kicker, and Ganz is confident enough as a writer not to feel the need to explain it any further: He trusts us to get the punch line. We already have been, and perhaps once again will be, governed by a mobster of historic proportions, albeit one more in the Goodfellas than the Godfather mode. Everything Ganz has shown us about the United States of the early 1990s—the fraying social fabric, the deregulation of talk radio, the far-right insurgency against the Republican old guard, the radicalized angry white men—would eventually culminate in the presidency of Donald Trump.

Ganz’s story is compellingly told, with a sharp eye for detail and for unexpected connections, and his implicit argument is largely persuasive, yet one might still quibble with his decision to stop where he does. Without a brief discussion at the end of what happened during the eventful 23-year gap between the end of his book and Trump’s election in 2016, the reader is left wondering why it would take another generation for the toxic political trends of the early 1990s to coalesce in their now-familiar form.

The future War on Terror, for instance, is briefly hinted at in the concluding overview of 1993, when Ganz notes that “a group known as Al-Qaeda” detonated a bomb at the World Trade Center in a vain attempt “to send one tower crashing into the other, bringing down both skyscrapers in the process. It seemed an outlandish and impossible goal: the bomb had barely damaged the building.” It’s a clever way to indicate that a lot more history is going to unfurl between then and now, but it also allows the book to avoid arguing anything more specific about that history.

To be sure, anyone reading this book is likely to recall the major developments of recent decades and would also be able to draw their own connections to the world we currently live in. Indeed, a number of well-regarded recent works of popular history have already traced the rise of Trump to the aftermath of 9/11 (Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror), to the 2008 financial crisis (Adam Tooze’s Crashed), and to the racist backlash against Barack Obama’s presidency (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power), to say nothing of the widely discussed failures of the Hillary Clinton campaign or the much-debated role of Russian election interference. And so it is understandable why Ganz would instead seek explanations in an era further removed from recent news cycles. Still, without a little more about how his subjects and their political projects fared during the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama presidencies, we are left to speculate on whether the seeds planted during the George H.W. Bush years were inevitably going to blossom into the Trump presidency, and whether there was anything that Americans might have done in the interregnum to avoid that outcome.

As we confront a potential Trump restoration, this question isn’t merely academic. As Ganz convincingly demonstrates, Trump represents a constellation of reactionary forces that emerged at the supposed end of history—but history never ends, and what comes next is up to us.