When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and how American Cracked up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz. Macmillan, 432 pages.

In contemporary America, the main political divide is not ideological but between those who trust institutional authority and those who don’t. In When the Clock Broke, author John Ganz seeks to strike a blow in favor of the institutions. The book received fawning reviews from the sort of people who write op-eds about “democratic norms,” but to more skeptical readers this meandering narrative fails at its goal. At its heart, this is another example of an author writing the book, “What is wrong with conservatives? Racism.” Presented as a “prehistory” of our era, it is more accurately the history of how Bill Clinton was elected with an unenthusiastic plurality in 1992 and, far from “cracking up,” mainstream politics held control of both parties for another 24 years.

When the Clock Broke is an informal contemporary popular history, a genre that is often enjoyable as long as the writer is insightful, witty, and a talented prose stylist. Ganz is none of those things, but he does have the occasional good line, such as writing that George H. W. Bush “reached a height of bad taste that only the well-born can hope to attain.” To his credit, the book is well researched and draws together a wide variety of interesting sources, with great passages from intellectuals, politicians, and other public figures. However, in doing so Ganz draws attention to his own mediocrity by creating a contrast between himself and the much more talented and insightful writers he criticizes, such as Samuel Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Murray Rothbard (the inspiration for the title).

In the first sentence of the introduction, this history of Clinton’s victory is described as “a history of the losers.” Despite the subtitle, few figures in it are con men, and many, at worst, had the same job as Ganz: selling writing that reinforces the audience’s fears about others in society. Further, the book says little about conspiracists until the part about the POW/MIA issue, which did gain attention with zany claims. Perhaps the subtitle is the fault of the publisher; Ganz puts it better when he writes, “oddballs, cranks, and even crooks captured the public imagination more than staid figures of reasonable authority.” This brings up one of the most frustrating parts of the text: Ganz repeatedly shows the ways the economy and institutions failed America, yet the book is a harangue against seeking alternatives.

Though Ross Perot is the star of this aspect of the story, it is David Duke over whom Ganz obsesses. The first chapter begins with a lengthy historical digression about how Louisiana is nothing like the rest of America, but then the Louisiana politician Duke is treated as a key figure in American conservatism. He acknowledges that Duke narrowly won a district populated through white flight and thus particularly prone to being riled up about urban crime and was never successful anywhere else. Ganz makes much of the fact that Pat Buchanan said Republicans should look at which of Duke’s stances were popular and “expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles.” Of course, this is what everyone in politics does, but to Ganz it is a defining moment of right-wing history, even though he clearly shows the Republican Party wanted nothing to do with Duke.

Racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia are the subjects Ganz can’t stop returning to. Ganz gives credibility to the old smear that “neocon” is a stand-in for “Jew.” In one particularly egregious passage, the author cites historian Stephen Tonsor’s metaphor of the neocons joining the Republican Party like the town whore finding religion, to which Ganz adds, “Tonsor didn’t have to say, when this town whore was probably a Jew.” He provides no evidence for this vicious insinuation. In another instance, Ganz refers to how Rush Limbaugh’s listeners were “mostly white.” White people were 75 percent of America in 1990, so minorities would have had to listen to his show at three times the rate of white people for anything else to be the case. The implication is clear: Rush Limbaugh and his listeners were racist. Ganz provides some good examples of conservatives being too comfortable around racists or with race baiting, but he fails to mention that it was actually establishment Democrats and their “super predator” rhetoric that ultimately found the most success playing up race and crime as a political issue. 

The arch-libertarian Murray Rothbard gets special attention in this book. Ganz takes obvious pleasure in pointing out that he was a son of Jewish immigrants who, in Ganz’s view, surrounded himself with men defined by bigotry. Justin Raimondo is described only as Rothbard’s biographer. Ganz doesn’t mention that Raimondo was openly gay and a long-time gay rights activist. This sort of diversity never makes Ganz wonder whether perhaps this movement was based on more than personal grievance and out-group hatred. 

The whole text suffers from too much pop psychology. Everyone is responding to an unhappy childhood and personal animus explains their behavior. It is no great insight that men who grow up to be non-mainstream intellectuals often start out as bookish and unpopular children or that talk radio hosts are attention seekers. Ganz tells us over and over how the men in the book did poorly with girls growing up. If that is how we are judging motivations, suffice to say that from his hall monitor personality, evident throughout the text, we can assume Ganz himself was not the Homecoming King. 

The most important fault of When the Clock Broke is that it fails at its key goal: explaining how this history led to Donald Trump’s election. The book ends with Trump in late 1992 saying he would make a great mafioso to an architect who, we are informed, was friends with a fascist 60 years prior. It is true that Trump adopted much of the old Buchanan political program, and thus in Ganz’s telling, by extension, the David Duke program, but beyond that the relevance to our era is unclear. If some of the oddballs Ganz writes about are still around, there is a simple reason for that. Conventional politicians had 24 years from Clinton’s election to Trump’s and failed at every major challenge they faced. Contra Ganz, the “clock” didn’t break; it continued interminably.