Quietly, modestly, appropriately, June 12 just passed as the centenary birthday of the late former President George H.W. Bush. Bush, or “Poppy,” as his eldest son and successor WASP-ishly called him, was one of the 20th century’s ignominious few one-term presidents, an embodiment of the “Eastern Establishment” that has largely exited the global stage. As the (at least rhetorical) architect of a “new world order” now violently teetering, he is a pretty easy punching bag for the thought leaders of the Republican Party he once led.
But if today’s vanguard right observed this anniversary at all, it wasn’t to spike the football but to voice a strange, almost regretful ambivalence: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help but [feel] a little teary-eyed when I reflect on George H.W. Bush as a man, regardless of policy issues,” conservative iconoclast Sohrab Ahmari wrote on X. Another conservative writer, while admitting how Poppy and his ilk’s “old-fashioned liberalism opened the door to the cultural chaos of the latter half of the 20th century and their own demise,” lamented that “they were a sort of solution, those people. Bush was a war hero; it was his country to fight for, after all.”
The essay that quote is drawn from was published in the American Conservative, the paleoconservative journal founded by Pat Buchanan, Bush’s onetime co-worker in the Reagan White House turned ideological nemesis and opponent in the 1992 Republican presidential primary. If it seems strange that a magazine founded by a figure who set out to demolish the Last WASP Standing’s legacy of globalist hegemony now feels a twinge of nostalgia for it, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by the writer John Ganz provides some well timed and erudite historical connective tissue.
Ganz is a popular Substack writer and essayist whose book expands on a 2018 argument made in the Baffler that “the world we live in already happened in 1992.” The familiar elements are all here: Ross Perot’s out-of-nowhere steamroller of a third-party presidential campaign, the hateful violence of the Los Angeles riots, David Duke, Ruby Ridge, Arsenio Hall, Buchanan’s thundering, eschatological speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Ganz gives these familiar signifiers new life not by mapping modern political arguments or values onto them but by holding his nose and immersing himself in the effluvia of the confused era before America fell into a brief, Fukuyaman slumber.
A Hegel fan, Ganz understands the events consigned in our popular imagination to a pre-Trump “past” as both cause and effect of the historical forces that create shocks such as Donald Trump’s election. In the era he chronicles, as now, the Right was in the revolutionary driver’s seat: The working class, gutted after 12 years of neoliberal Reaganomics, was politically disempowered and uniquely receptive to Buchanan’s nativist economic and cultural appeal. Although eventually channeled away from the caustic Buchanan to the more technocratic (and bizarre) Perot campaign, an amorphous, culturewide spirit of rebellion against the liberal status quo fueled episodes such as Duke’s Louisiana gubernatorial campaign, the public outpouring of sympathy for Randy Weaver and his family after the Ruby Ridge incident, and the outrage at John Gotti’s conviction for murder and bribery, among other things.
The cast of characters will be familiar to not just modern political history buffs but to anyone who’s opened a newspaper in the past decade. Rudy Giuliani transforms in a few short months from an “Untouchables”-style white-collar crusader into a cheerleader for 1992’s violent, ugly NYPD riots. White supremacist intellectual Samuel Francis, while not quite a headline-maker, has enjoyed a revival on the right of late and here plays a major role in fueling Buchanan’s terms-setting primary campaign. And yes, Trump, at his arguable nadir as a businessman, surfaces repeatedly to cheerlead various reactionary causes, most notoriously the conviction of the Central Park Five.
Ganz’s light treatment of Trump himself goes a long way toward making When the Clock Broke by far the most readable, entertaining, and genuinely enlightening of the glut of books promising to “explain” his rise. This is not another entry in the “economic anxiety vs. racism” debate. He understands the 45th president as the vessel for a long-brewing, complicated reactionary movement, not its scheming driver — and therefore puts him in proper context for the moment, as a persistent yet somewhat pathetic cultural gadfly. Any intelligent reader who has lived through the 21st century can connect the dots, and Ganz’s respect for the reader is palpable in the book’s lack of pedantry.
It helps that the writing is both fleet and rigorous, sweeping and exacting, funny and deadly serious. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when a jacket blurb compares the author to Garry Wills, one can safely assume that the writer of said blurb owed the book’s author a major personal favor. This book falls under the other 1%.
Its climactic and best chapter is “The Mosaic,” a study of the racial violence that roiled New York City contemporaneously to Gotti’s trial and the birth of Giuliani’s political career. Ganz, who has written extensively on the affinities between right-wing politics and organized crime, cites an essay by libertarian pathbreaker Murray Rothbard about The Godfather in which Rothbard described its moral universe as preferable to that of liberal democracy. Rothbard admiringly recounts a scene in which one mafioso uses a noxious racial slur by way of outlining his ethics, leading to a typically dry, gutting rebuke from Ganz: “Rothbard misremembers the scene,” Ganz writes. “The Don in question is not rejecting dealing drugs as such, he’s saying they should just deal them to Black people, and he does not use the n-word.”
There’s no spoiling this book: The forces of reaction Ganz studies are ultimately divided and defeated in the 1992 presidential election, leading to, at least at the presidential level, a resurgence of Atlanticist liberalism that manages to survive and birth the Iraq War’s disastrous neoconservative adventure. The magic of When the Clock Broke is, really, anti-magic. It disenchants readers who otherwise would have been tempted to view the 1990s through the lens of Bill Clinton jollily blowing his saxophone and not the millions of voters who supported Perot and his quixotic POW/MIA cult; those who, inspired by Weaver, attended their local gun show and found themselves with a copy of The Turner Diaries; those who thought that Gotti himself might not have made such a bad presidential candidate.
Those people did not go away, and when they returned to the political scene they did so with a vengeance. One 1992 milestone not recounted in the book is an encounter between an early web browser and a young University of Illinois undergraduate named Marc Andreessen, subsequently inspired to develop his own browser, Netscape. Netscape’s blockbuster 1995 initial public offering arguably created the modern venture capital system, as well as the fortune Andreessen now wields as the head of the Andreessen Horowitz fund. Andreessen Horowitz invested in Twitter, Facebook, crypto firm Coinbase, and an additional and almost uncountable number of digital technologies that have democratized our media and economic landscape. Once a Hillary Clinton supporter, Andreessen is now a notable critic in Silicon Valley of President Joe Biden and the author of a decidedly right-leaning tech manifesto.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In the 1990s, the dyspeptic cast of characters Ganz resurrects could easily fade into the cultural background once their moment passed, sidelined by a persistent monoculture. That’s no longer true, thanks in large part to the communications revolution unleashed by Andreessen and his cohort. In that light, the Buchananites’ strange new respect for Poppy and the world he left behind, and that they have inherited, isn’t so strange. Bush proudly embodied the post-World War II liberal consensus, becoming the most powerful man in the world as its pure, if awkward, avatar. Today’s Right believes it is the vanguard of a revolutionary force poised to remake the world just as American liberals did after the cataclysm of World War II. They see themselves as taking on Bush’s paladinic mantle, in their own way, playing a flattened digital-first society to their advantage.
By cutting through the cliche and cultural memory surrounding 1992, Ganz reconnects the Right’s history with its fractured, extremely online, often ahistorical present. When the Clock Broke is therefore essential for anyone who seeks to understand not just right-wing politics in the 21st century but the revolutionary social undercurrent that’s enabled them to rise and threaten the liberal international consensus.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
