The 1990s Were Worse Than You Remember

Review of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

In mid-January 1992 — as the USSR lay in ruins and Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge to the incumbent president George H. W. Bush was gaining steam — the economist and Cato Institute cofounder Murray Rothbard addressed the second annual meeting of the paleoconservative John Randolph Club. In his remarks, Rothbard touted the growing alliance between the libertarian and paleo movements and underscored the need for a robust “right-wing populism” to destroy the “soft Marxism” of American liberalism.

“With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us,” Rothbard exclaimed as he barreled toward the end of his speech, “we now know that it can be done. 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.”

This “furious coda” to Rothbard’s address inspired the title of John Ganz’s important and engaging new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Through a nuanced exploration of the chaotic and contentious political landscape of the early ’90s, Ganz provides something of a prehistory of Trumpism — or a “prehistory of the American fascist movement,” as Ganz described it in a recent interview with the Baffler.

Ganz covers a lot of territory here — from a brief yet productive engagement with the theories of Antonio Gramsci to careful and compelling analyses of the POW/MIA movement (a “nationalist…