The Eruption of the New Right
On John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke”
Eric Hobsbawm has noted that the Soviet Union saved Western capitalism two times. The first time was when the USSR defeated Nazi Germany. The second time was that by displaying an alternative political-economic system to the rest of the world, the USSR compelled the West, and specifically the US, to reform its institutions. The reforms of the Civil Rights Movement, for instance, were adopted in part due to the Johnson Administration’s concerns about Third World countries watching African American children being fire-hosed by the police in Alabama. With the end of the Cold War, the US lost its only major ideological competitor and thereby, the argument goes, its rationale for maintaining its global reputation. Indeed, the first years following the end of the Cold War were less characterized by triumphalism than malaise, violence, and economic decline.
Focusing on this era of disillusionment, John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke is a well-written, thoughtful, and enjoyable tour of early 1990s US political culture. Constructing his history largely from primary sources, Ganz assembles from scratch the feel and ideas of a moment in which an inchoate paleoconservative movement briefly came to the surface before resubmerging—a Friendster, if you will, long preceding the Trumpian Facebook. The chapters are centered on figures including David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh, with close examinations of less well-known paleo thinkers including Samuel Francis and Murray Rothbard, all of whom advanced political careers from the ruins of an ideologically exhausted GOP and a zeitgeist characterized by racist fear and paranoia, economic anxiety, and anger at the impotence and corruption of the status quo. By the end of the book, we’ve seen Buchanan systematically appropriate Duke’s platform after the former Grand Wizard received 55 percent of the white vote in his 1991 gubernatorial election, the rise and fall of Ross Perot’s third-party presidential campaign (which for stretches was leading both Bush and Clinton), and the growing influence of radio shock jocks like golden-voiced misogynist extraordinaire Howard Stern. The writing is also frequently funny, as we learn, among other things, that David Duke authored under two pseudonyms a sex guide for women, counseling readers on the glory of fellatio. More broadly, Ganz’s descriptions are perceptive and attentive to the relationship between individuals and their historic settings, as he connects Duke, Buchanan, Limbaugh, et al.’s right-wing populist nationalism to the country’s broader socioeconomic and demographic transformations. The prevailing sense of malaise and pessimism in the country is keenly depicted in chapters on the Los Angeles of Daryl Gates’ LAPD and the New York City of John Gotti, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump, great cultural and political history that brings to mind Jefferson Cowie’s outstanding history of the 1970s, Stayin’ Alive.
Connecting the fleeting and marginalized “lightning” strike of 1992 to the delayed “thunder” of Trumpism, Ganz argues that Trump represents a “crystallization” of Duke and Buchanan’s racism, Perot’s “billionaire populism,” and Gotti’s ruthless but charismatic mob boss. Trump is a man for our time because, unlike, say, Theodore Roosevelt or FDR, Trump is not interested in eliminating corruption but in marshalling it for the well-being of his constituents. We’re all in Chinatown – or Tammany Hall—now, and Trump is a powerful if necessarily sullied protector and provider. These, at least, are the semiotics, which are no doubt significant in helping to explain why so many millions of people love a crooked, rich narcissist.
At its best, the book succeeds in describing the early 1990s, which can sometimes appear as an incoherent blur of cliches, in its historic context, identifying it as a discrete moment with distinctive character and significance. Ganz does not engage in the projection of contemporary nostalgia, although it admittedly is hard to not be nostalgic about the last pre-internet era, one in which we reliably met up with friends without having to text them a dozen times, had days (instead of hours or minutes) to respond to a message on our answering machines, could browse in bookstores or enjoy coffee shops without interminable piped-in music, or observe and even talk to strangers without competing with the illuminated for-profit screens hypnotizing them. Ganz avoids this presentist trap, assembling instead a brief interregnum that was characterized by alienation, anger, depression, and violence, one in which Nirvana broke into the mainstream – an event chronicled in the aptly named 1992 documentary, 1991: The Year Punk Broke.
As enjoyable as the book is as a history of the early 1990s, the idea of a Trumpian prehistory does introduce questions. If we’re looking through US history for examples of rightwing xenophobic populism like that of the Trump movement, why settle on 1992? After all, Richard Hofstadter wrote his famed “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” describing the right’s nationalistic obsession with Freemasons, Jesuits, Communists, and others, during the Goldwater campaign. John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, which chronicles a lonely and angry society riven by racial antagonism, was written in 1960, and Greg Grandin’s recent End of the Myth identifies Trump as the inheritor of a legacy that is as old as the country.
Ganz makes his case in part by relying on close readings of the writings and speeches of Rothbard and Francis. Ganz contrasts their paleoconservatism, or populist nationalism, with the exhausted mainstream conservatism of the George HW Bush Administration. The paleoconservatives less sought to “conserve” what they saw as the decadent and compromised husk of the in-government GOP than to forcefully overthrow it along with the whole New Deal regime, radically restoring an America that had been lost not in the 1950s “happy days” but in the 1920s, if not the 1800s. Here too, though, this form of violent restorative conservatism was not new and, as Corey Robin has showed, is characteristic of conservatism in general. The ostensibly genteel and prudent Republican leaders of Eisenhower and Bush Sr., that is, were an ephemeral exception proving the rule in which conservatives since the time of Burke have been fanatical and violent nuts. Although Eisenhower famously told his brother that the GOP would commit political suicide if Ike were to go after the New Deal, a party built as a loyal opposition to the New Deal regime was never built to last.
We could also look at the problem of periodizing 1992 from the other direction. If 1992 was the lightning strike preceding the delayed thunder of 2016, how are we to understand the events between 1992 and the emergence of candidate Trump in 2015? For instance, where do we situate the eruption of anti-government right-wing militias in the mid-1990s, California’s 1994 anti-immigrant Proposition 187, or the fanaticism of the GOP following the 1994 Gingrich revolution? The Gingrich-led House detested the opposition party in general and Clinton in particular, which might seem ironic considering that Clinton, while proclaiming that “the era of big government is over” and abandoning Keynesianism à la François Mitterand and other world leaders, “triangulated” the GOP’s positions on welfare, trade, and criminal justice. While this centrist appropriation was designed in part to placate, as Clinton put it according to Bob Woodward, “a bunch of fucking bonds traders,” reduce the divide between the parties, and secure Clinton’s reelection, it naturally enough led the GOP to deposit its political winnings and move even further to the right to go for more. It was here in the mid-1990s, long before the Obama Administration, that the GOP began characterizing the other party as illegitimate as such. For two hundred years preceding Clinton, only one president had ever been impeached, and it was for arguable treason following the Civil War. The 1990s GOP saw fit to impeach Clinton for committing perjury while denying a sexual affair.
And then there was the 2000 election, which, unlike the failed “coup” of 2020, was in fact a successful coup. Before there was 6 January, there was the Brooks Brothers Riot, and, of course, George W. Bush v. Gore, a stunningly flagrant, unsigned and unprecedented, partisan ruling. And this was followed by the emergence of the vigilante border patrol Minutemen of the George W. Bush years, two failed catastrophic wars, and a disastrous federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Bush, it is sometimes difficult to recall, was despised by liberals and his party indeed appeared broken by the end of his presidency. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote in 2008:
In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.
These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on…
Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.
When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”
Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.
“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.
The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped.
The George W. Bush Administration also almost single-handedly discredited the then-hegemonic, domestically bloodless, neoconservative branch of the party, as seen in the ferocious rightwing revolt after Bush attempted to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, after which the president was undressed, humiliated, and never forgiven by the right. More symbolically, by the 2008 election there appeared a bumper sticker inverting the GOP ticket to say: “PALIN, mccain.” Indeed, Trump might have appropriated some of the rhetoric of Duke/Buchanan, but he most resembled the etiquette-busting, bull-in-a China-shop style of Palin. By 2016, millions of voters were ready for a new politician, one who out of practical necessity borrowed the Republican party label but distanced himself (rhetorically at any rate) from the country’s disastrous wars and promised to restrict immigration and protect the safety net. But while the former stances might align Trump with the paleos, the latter stance would horrify those who demanded to “break the clock” on the welfare state. And then there is Trump’s fervent support for Israel. Pat Buchanan, it is safe to assume, would not have moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
Ganz is nevertheless careful not to suggest that the eruptions of 1992 led mechanically to the Trump White House, and he has acknowledged the role of contingency elsewhere, asserting in one interview, for instance, that Trump could only have come about following Obama. And, to be sure, the conservative media was exceptionally hostile to Obama, while the GOP congressional intransigence that began under Clinton only intensified under Obama, with the McConnell-led Senate radically expanding obstructionist tactics such as the party’s use of the filibuster in a failed attempt to make Obama a “one-term president.” But the lesson of Obama is nevertheless ambiguous. While there was undoubtedly a racist backlash to the first African American president, there was also, it is often noted, a small but significant number of two-time Obama voters who, having given up on Obama’s promises of “Hope and Change,” grew disillusioned and voted for Trump the Wrecker. That is, it is unclear which had more of an effect on opening the way for Trump: the first African American president leading to the racist backlash against progress, or the false promises of progress leading to the delegitimization of liberal politics.
In either event, the notion of a Trump presidency would have been unthinkable in previous eras regardless of the political culture and its resentments. Trump may have launched his formal political career via the Birther Movement, but he only attained the Republican nomination because of his popularity with Republican primary voters, an achievement that would have been impossible in the pre-primary era before the 1970s and would have been far less likely in 1992, when the party elite was stronger and had a greater role, primaries notwithstanding, in determining the party’s nominee. The diminishment of the party leadership was apparent in the Obama era (the Democratic leadership strongly supported Hillary in 2008), when Congressman Joe Wilson angered the Republican party leadership by yelling “You lie!” during an Obama address to the Congress. Although Republican leaders forced Wilson to apologize, Wilson had the last laugh as his stunt led to a massive haul in campaign donations from around the country, both exposing the party’s weakening control over campaign financing and incentivizing future partisan theatrics in the name of independent fundraising, an art that Trump, more than perhaps anyone else, has mastered.
And Trump of course had the excellent fortune of facing off against one of the least popular candidates in presidential history in Hillary Clinton, a condescending and remarkably tone-deaf status quo candidate, in a year of global anger and resentment (on election night, a stunned Bill reportedly paced the floor repeating the word “Brexit”). And Trump still lost the popular vote by three million!
In discussing the Trump phenomenon, it can be easy to forget that the system permits in practice precisely two options for expressing our political discontent and hopes, and that there exists a thriving political-economy of an intensifying media spectacle industry that is increasingly difficult to escape. As CBS CEO Leslie Moonves remarked in 2016, Trump is “damn good for CBS.” The dramatic assassination attempt on Trump, and his defiant response, evoked the final scene of Robert Altman’s Nashville. Though in the film, it is the industry itself that must go on after the assassination attempt, as the star is carried off the stage and instantly replaced by a newcomer. Trump, unique among modern politicians, is the show. And we are bombarded unendingly by panicked breaking news alerts and breathless social media hysterics, encouraging a perpetually alarmed and increasingly exhausted societal paralysis amid infinite clicks, a great proportion of which revolve around the threats, jokes, and comments of Donald Trump, his supporters, and the fevered reactions of those attempting to defeat him. 1992 was a significant moment, as Ganz effectively shows. But whether or not the seeds of Trumpism are to be found there, they germinated closer to home.