When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked up in the Early 1990s, John Ganz, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30.

The first decades of the 21^st century in American politics have not been quiet. All this chaos has made the 1990s seem tame in comparison. The political writer John Ganz sets out to dispel this false sheen of stability, normalcy, and optimism, however. In his debut book, When the Clock Broke, he focuses on American politics and culture as the post-Cold War era dawned – and dismantles the idea of America’s 1990s as a Belle Epoque. Ganz sees the 1990s populist challenges as a dry run for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. The ‘con men’ and ‘conspiracists’ failed to win power, but their ideas kept fermenting. The centre held – barely.

With his portraits of thwarted ambition and simmering resentment, Ganz admirably picks up the torch of historian Rick Perlstein, who offers a generous blurb. Perlstein’s debut chronicled Barry Goldwater’s crushing 1964 presidential defeat that laid the groundwork for modern conservatism, and he followed the political right’s transformations through to Reagan’s victory in 1980. Ganz focuses on the ‘losers,’ arguing that nationalist populism’s setbacks in the 1990s planted the seeds of 21^st century triumphs. He does not definitively argue that any particular figure or movement should be seen as a forerunner to Trumpism. What he succeeds is in reminding us that the 1990s were anything but a sleepy, self-satisfied time.

Just look at the fate of President George HW Bush. In Ganz’s account, the president from 1989 to 1993 appears as a hapless avatar of the status quo, standing athwart post-Cold War history yelling ‘Stop!’ This republican in the Roman sense, a ‘high WASP’ born to ‘the senatorial class,’ saw the presidency as ‘simply the last step in the cursus honorum of ascending offices.’ Ganz captures the irony that the far right’s paranoid obsession – Bush’s rhetoric of ‘New World Order’ – was fundamentally about stability and continuity. It promised more NATO and more trade deals – the old order for a new era.

‘What added to the weirdness of the time is that it should have been a moment of triumph,’ Ganz remarks. Instead, Bush was challenged by populists on all sides – first in the Republican primary by religious nationalist Pat Buchanan, then in the general election by third-party candidate Ross Perot, an eccentric billionaire promising protectionism. Bush’s re-election campaign in 1992 floundered and failed.

Ganz hones in on America’s right-wing figures dissatisfied with the Reaganite status quo and the globalised world coming into being. These included Perot, Buchanan, and David Duke, the neo– Nazi whose campaigns for senator and governor of Louisiana prompted countrywide panic. Political campaigns in the early 90s provide the frame for Ganz’s story, but his aperture is far wider than mere electioneering. Rather than a tightly linked causal narrative, When the Clock Broke functions as a series of psycho-biographies and philosophical meditations: Louisiana as breeding ground for radicals old and new; the conspiratorial underbelly of the Vietnam POW movement; and New York’s Italian gangsterdom as fuel for populism.

In Ganz’s telling, it was no accident that Louisiana dabbled in extremist politics in the 1990s. After all, the Bayou State had long been a ‘hothouse or petri dish for inchoate fascism.’ During the Great Depression, Governor Huey Long had created a de-facto dictatorship based on vast public works spending, political patronage, and outright violence. Long’s brand of radically redistributive politics – ‘Every Man a King’ – had nationwide appeal, outflanking New Deal liberalism. Long was assassinated in 1935 as he contemplated a primary challenge to President Franklin Roosevelt.

By the 1980s and 90s, Louisiana was suffering from many features of post-Cold War American society earlier and more intensely than elsewhere: ‘racism, poverty, stark wealth disparity, environmental fallout, neglected infrastructure, a suddenly vanishing industrial base, systematic corruption, elite self-dealing, political cynicism, and the people’s loss of faith in their representatives.’ Ganz describes the state’s political culture as akin to the Catholic rhythms of sin and repentance. In its freewheeling atmosphere, ‘an acceptance of nearly open criminality in politics’ leads to ‘shame at overindulgence and a turn towards renunciation… Mardi Gras followed by Lent.’ Thus the ‘apparently contradictory forces of corruption and populist antiestablishment indignation become embodied in the same political figures’ so that ‘the reformers are rogues, and vice versa.’

Into this atmosphere, David Duke erupted as a political phenomenon. He attacked welfare, crime, and excessive population growth in the ‘underclass’—he once proposed sterilizing women who had children while on the dole. Seemingly nothing could dampen his supporters’ enthusiasm. Not photographs of him parading in Nazi uniform, not his role as Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, not his peddling of Mein Kampf, not widespread tax evasion, and not condemnation by national Republicans. He won local office, and then secured the Republican nomination for senator in 1990 and governor in 1991. Duke’s 1991 loss came at the hands of the comically corrupt Democrat, Edwin Edwards. Bumper stickers featured the slogan, ‘VOTE FOR THE CROOK – IT’S IMPORTANT.’

Even as a loser, Duke retained influence. Pat Buchanan became one of the only prominent Republicans willing to ‘co-opt the insurgent.’ Although his challenge to George HW Bush in the 1992 presidential primary failed, even Bush tried to absorb some of the nationalist and evangelical energies of Buchanan’s ‘culture war.’ The defeated Buchanan had in turn learned from Duke in mounting his own populist challenge. He laid out a strategy for his fellow Republicans: ‘take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles,’ and adopt those which are ‘Middle Class, meritocratic, populist, and nationalist,’ including militarizing the Southern border and using executive orders to fight ‘reverse discrimination’ against Whites.

Ganz’s tale focuses not only on elites. It also devotes considerable space to the intricacies of labyrinthine conspiracy theories, notably the dark side of the popular Prisoners of War/Missing in Action movement. The POW- MIA cause, in Ganz’s telling, becomes something of a stab-in-the- back myth for America’s disaffected post-Vietnam right. Our troops were never defeated, only betrayed, lost, abandoned. It was commonplace to hear claims, without evidence, that that many hundreds of American soldiers were left behind in Vietnam. Some wilder voices claimed thousands were there – some of them enslaved to mine gold in Laos. This ‘nationalistic cult of the undead’ spawned grifters who launched harebrained mercenary expeditions into Southeast Asia, returning with ‘soldiers’ remains’ that ‘turned out to be chicken bones.’ Ronald Reagan embraced the POW-MIA movement, coddling all but its most fringe figures. In going down these rabbit holes, Ganz shows us how thin the line between seeming respectability and conspiracist derangement. He sees such moments as evidence of an dangerously porous boundary between mainstream conservatives and the radical fringe.

In Ganz’s unsettling final political portrait, that boundary breaks down almost entirely. Here Ganz focuses not on a political ‘loser,’ but on a man once admired as ‘America’s Mayor’: Rudy Giuliani. He first gained prominence as a prosecutor crusading against organised crime, making ‘the longest journey in the world’ from ‘the outer boroughs’ squat, humble dwellings’ to ‘the adamantine canyons of Manhattan.’

What is more novel is Ganz’s vivid retelling of Giuliani’s role in the 1992 ‘mutiny’ by the New York Police Department. After New York’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, began scrutinising police practices such as hog-tying prisoners, some 10,000 policemen (two-thirds of the total force) went rogue in the heart of Manhattan. Drunken officers yelled slurs at a Black city councillor, harassed motorists and punched journalists. Giuliani addressed a riled-up crowd with growing zeal, denouncing reformers as ‘forces of evil’ and criticism of police as ‘Bullshit.’ The mob roared its approval. The unrest was labelled a ‘fraternity keg party gone amok,’ and more ominously as ‘the first riot stimulated although not quite incited by a former United States attorney.’

In the aftermath, Giuliani’s career seemed tarnished beyond repair. Yet one year later he defeated Dinkins to become New York’s mayor. Ganz argues that Giuliani had tapped into a source of real power. Both party establishments had lost the plot. Theirs was a bloodless vision, gradual reform towards some bland utopia, a story without grip. In his masterful final vignette, Ganz weaves together Giuliani’s career with the trial of gangster John Gotti and mafia cinema. He builds to a crescendo, declaring: ‘[The crowd] didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit. The institutions had failed, the welfare state had failed, the markets had failed, there was no justice, just rackets and mobs: the crowd didn’t want the G-man dutifully following the rules, and it didn’t want to be part of the ‘gorgeous mosaic’; it wanted protection, a godfather, a boss…’

Ganz presents a kaleidoscopic intellectual and cultural history of the various milieus that spawned forebears and fellow travellers to Trump’s campaigns. Rick Perlstein’s political histories are essentially biographies, orbiting around some totemic figure: Goldwater, Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan. But in Ganz’s account, the central icon is almost entirely off-stage. Or rather, he is waiting in the wings to descend his golden escalator. This subtlety lets Ganz’s work avert the tortured analogies of much Trump-era political history, though rendering the book something of a patchwork.

Ganz’s narrative leaves America, and the reader, uneasy. Bill Clinton, the winner of the 1992 presidential contest, triumphed over an incumbent fatally weakened by populist challenges. The New Democrats’ triangulating, pro-globalisation liberalism merely put a lid on the simmering cauldron. The weirdos went down in defeat, but their paranoia and resentment had ‘captured the public imagination more than staid figures of reasonable authority.’ The culture war would rage on in ever more vicious forms. For the cynical climbers and true believers of Ganz’s tale, politics is not gentle progress. It is power, prophesy, even poetry. Pat Buchanan, the architect of that culture war, was exultant despite his electoral loss. ‘All is changed,’ he crowed, ‘a terrible beauty is born.’