John Ganz's When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

Reviewed by Kevin Canfield

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

John Ganz’s enlightening first book focuses in part on far-right politicians who ran campaigns based on enduring myths, the most pernicious of which maintains that tens of millions of white American Christians—not a few of whom own guns—are under constant threat, their way of life imperiled by urban liberals, labor unions, undocumented immigrants, tenured academics, racial minorities, and anyone who doubts that the Bible is the literal word of God. In this way, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s is a group portrait of the decade’s “losers,” as Ganz puts it, the reactionary blowhards and ballot-box no-chancers who couldn’t stop Bill Clinton from winning the presidency in 1992. 

But if elections are periodic skirmishes in a struggle that spans generations, “loser” is a provisional label, one that, alas, doesn’t fit the lesser-known, long-haul-minded white nationalists who round out this book’s cast. Writing for and editing ultraconservative magazines, these were the opinion-shapers who built the ideological framework that supports today’s most prominent populist demagogue. 

None of these relatively obscure men imagined that their eventual standard bearer would be Donald Trump, who for his part has almost certainly never read a word written by any of Ganz’s subjects. But as this book makes clear, there’s little doubt that the once and potentially future president is speaking their language when he promises to vanquish effete leftists and recover “lost national greatness,” Ganz writes. 

Such a restoration would require an attack on time itself, argued Murray Rothbard, the conservative economist whose 1992 screed provides Ganz with his book’s title. Instead of the expansive social welfare programs adopted by Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Rothbard sought something more retrograde. “We shall break the clock of social democracy,” he wrote. “We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state.” The ultimate goal, he continued, was to “repeal the twentieth century.” 

This, it appears, is what’s at stake in November’s American presidential and congressional elections, which helps explain why When the Clock Broke is garnering the kind of attention political nonfiction rarely gets. Over the summer, Ganz sat for long interviews with name-brand pundits, wrote about his dining habits for a popular food blog, and was the subject of a feature in Interview magazine, alongside TikTok personalities and nepo babies. The coverage is the product of a simple truth: in a publishing category with lots of lightly-researched diatribes that make obvious points about Trump’s infinite sleaziness, Ganz is someone who has bracing things to say about the ground on which the Republican nominee stands. 

Ganz’s book is an effort to understand what historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed “the paranoid style in American politics,” a revanchist kind of thinking that blames the country’s decline on decadent forces conspiring to destroy the white American nuclear family and install in its place a world government run by—oh, take your pick here—the United Nations, George Soros or Beyoncé. This is only a slight exaggeration of a certain brand of American political lunacy, as will be evident to anyone who spends even five minutes watching Fox News, America’s top-rated cable news network and home to demented theorizing about coverups engineered by “leftists” (e.g., Barack Obama isn’t American, Joe Biden isn’t alive, Kamala Harris isn’t Black—these and other gems have received a shocking amount of airtime on Fox). 

Like Rick Perlstein, the author of revelatory histories of American political conservatism, Ganz is a man of the left who recognizes the value in connecting dots across eras, following strains of thought as they develop, mutate, and in Trump’s case, seize control of a major political party, fundamentally alter its trade and foreign policies, and run the government like a mafia racket. Overseas leaders seeking meetings with the president quickly recognized that their case would be helped by staying in one of the $10,000-a-night suites at Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel. According to congressional investigators, foreign governments spent $7 million at Trump-owned businesses during his four-year term. 

If nothing else, Trump is proof that many millions of Americans don’t care if there’s a disconnect between a candidate’s actions and his words, as long as those words are used to create a sense of what Ganz, invoking an idea developed by Hannah Arendt, calls “the ‘negative solidarity’ of knowing who you hated or wanted to destroy.” This malignant form of unity inspired another of Ganz’s subjects—a journalist named Samuel Francis—to enumerate the far-right’s enemies in a 1992 essay. 

“The cultural identity” and “demographic existence” of his people—white archconservatives—was under attack by “massive immigration, a totalitarian and anti-white multiculturalist fanaticism (and) concerted economic warfare by foreign competitors,” Francis wrote. In response, he hoped that a “Middle American Revolution”—again, white—would reassert itself as “the real masters of the house are ready to repossess it and drive out the usurpers.” This is a textbook example of identity politics, which the right pretends to abhor yet utilizes to great effect, capitalizing on the anger and alienation of the white working class.

Ganz’s perceptive analysis is a reminder that Republicans—the self-declared party of family values, which is currently headed by a man, Trump, who this year was convicted of making illegal hush money payments to a porn star—can be powerfully pragmatic. 

Why do Trump and Republican presidential candidates win despite, as happened in 2000 and 2016, garnering as many as 2.9 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents? Because Republicans spent years funding lobbyists and electing legislators determined to defend a wildly unfair voting system, which, for instance, gives North and South Dakota, with their combined population of 1.6 million, twice as many senators as California, home to 39 million people. Why, in a country where polls show that most people support a woman’s right to an abortion, was this right recently struck down as federal law? Because the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and other conservative advocacy groups have spent 50 years grooming “strict constructionist” jurists who, when appointed to the bench by Republican presidents, uphold antiquated interpretations of statutes drafted during the country’s infancy.  

Likewise, to read Ganz’s book is to be confronted with the fact that 21st century American politics are, even by the not so lofty standards of the 1990s, extraordinarily stupid. By most accounts, Dan Quayle—an Indiana politician who served as vice president from 1993-97—was an intellectual pushover, chosen for the job because the Republican party needed to shore up voter support in the Midwest. How dumb was Quayle reputed to be? The serious-minded Ganz doesn’t pursue this question, but David Letterman fans will remember that Quayle became one of the late-night host’s regular punchlines. From Letterman’s top 10 reasons why a Quayle presidency would be a success: “Would not seem like brainy egghead when visiting nation’s injured professional wrestlers.” 

Even Quayle, though, was capable of rhetorical inspiration. When it emerged that Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire who ran for president in ‘92 and ‘96, had hired “private investigators to snoop on competitors,” Quayle “started to call him ‘Inspector Perot,’” Ganz writes. This clever reference to Agatha Christie’s fictional Inspector Poirot was likely the work of Quayle’s speechwriters, but it signaled to voters that the candidate respected—or at least knew that he had to feign respect for—their intelligence. 

Trump, of course, respects nothing, and he has degraded language and humor alike. His one-liners are now objectively embarrassing. Lately, he’s tried to get laughs by adding a letter to the name of the woman running against him. Thus does Democratic nominee Kamala Harris become “Kamabla.” For some reason, a man who married three women with names ending in “a”—Ivanka, Marla, Melania—can’t spell or pronounce his opponent’s somewhat similar name. The clear implication is that Harris, a woman of Indian and African American heritage, doesn’t really belong. To judge by the recent footage of Trump’s crowds, even his most sycophantic supporters can barely muster a laugh as their hero test-drives his new insults. 
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There might seem to be few figures worthy of admiration in this book, but allow me to nominate the anonymous family of five that makes a brief appearance in a late chapter. These, plainly, were people who knew how to respond in kind to the decade’s political discourse. During the 1992 campaign, George H.W. Bush, the incumbent Republican, briefly traveled by train, trying to connect himself in the public imagination with history’s more popular presidents. “Along the way,” Ganz writes, “a couple and their three children dropped their pants and mooned Bush’s train as it rolled by.” American heroes, all five. 

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​Kevin Canfield's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cineaste, Film Comment and other publications. He lives in New York City.