The Nasty Nineties

 

"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." 

Those were the words of economist and, what author John Ganz calls, "the leader of the paleolibertarians," Murray N. Rothbard in a 1991 speech, which both presumably gave Ganz the title for this book but also exemplifies the incendiary style and politics of the individual characters and social movements whose rise Ganz recounts. in this enthralling accoutn of the early 1990s.

John Ganz is a journalist and podcaster, and his book is When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), with a 2025 Postscript.

I remember the 1990s well. I spent half the decade in ministry in a foreign country, but I retained personal and family links to New York the whole time. So I do remember the increasingly weird world of the U.S in the 90s, and in retrospect I can readily trace the through line to where we have ended up now. But neither I nor anyone I knew could remotely foresee quite where it was all leading!

It's all in the book, however, which portrays the aftereffects of the collapse of the post-war social contract and the shattering of American society in the aftermath of the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. The book describes the clock-breaking characters and political movements in all their drama and apparent weirdness - David Duke, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Ross Perot, the L.A. Riots, the Gulf War, Rudy Giuliani, Bush vs. Clinton, Randy Weaver and, John Gotti, to name some of the highlights. The surface stability some of us may still fondly remember from that era barely managed to disguise - and in hindsight the disguise is now completely gone - all the increasing individual and group alienation and accumulating resentments that accompanied increasing economic precariousness and social isolation, all of which would over the long term redound to the ultimate benefit of Republican demagoguery. Both Clinton's notional Democratic solidarity and Bush's preppy establishment conservatism would prove to be temporary and inadequate responses to the angry America of non-stop culture war.

In his Trump-era Postscript, Ganz says he based his book "on an intuition that the disparate phenomena I catalogued were actually reflections of a single underlying phenomenon," which he calls "the politics of national despair." His book, he claims, "did not and cannot predict anything," but he hopes "it will continue to illuminate what happens."