When the Clock Broke

Starred review from March 11, 2024
Ganz, author of the newsletter Unpopular Front, debuts with a lucid and propulsive narrative of the failed right-wing populism at the fringe of the 1992 U.S. presidential election. According to Ganz, the discontent exploited by bigoted Republican challengers Pat Buchanan and David Duke and the proto–“drain the swamp” rhetoric of independent candidate Ross Perot laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. The book profiles these and other figures—including New York City mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani and mob boss John Gotti—and it’s woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary (left-leaning historian Christopher Lasch critiqued liberalism as an “infinitely expanding universe of spoiled consumers and bureaucrats,” Ganz writes, while hard-right economist Murray Rothbard hoped Buchanan would “break the clock of the New Deal” and “repeal the twentieth century”). Ganz’s dry wit is ever-present; describing how media coverage of the early-1990s culture wars eclipsed George H.W. Bush’s attempts to stoke the fight against Saddam Hussein, he writes, “Apparently the ‘New Hitler’ wasn’t as juicy a story as the incipient totalitarianism of literature professors.” The book’s highlight is a long chapter focused on New York City, which Ganz portrays as a breeding ground for strongman leadership by comparing Trump to Giuliani and Gotti as outer-borough “arriviste” who celebrated personal liberty, but preyed on fear. This is a revelation.

Starred review from May 15, 2024
A searching history of a time, not so long ago, when the social contract went out the window and Hobbesian war beset America. As Ganz, the creator of the Substack newsletter Unpopular Front, writes, the early 1990s was a time when social Darwinism pitted the state against the poor, gang wars broke out in big cities, and companies stopped making things and starting dealing in the abstractions of finance. The author credits George H.W. Bush with being "competent within small bounds and small groups," a fundamentally decent fellow whose clubby Republican Party began to slip into the shadows under the influence of the neo-Nazi David Duke and the Christian nationalist Patrick Buchanan. Both men set a tone that would grow ever more insistent and extremist, eventually culminating in the rise of Trump. "Duke's entire career would be characterized by attempts to simultaneously gain mainstream recognition and respect and be the predominant leader of the fringe, subcultural world of the Klan and neo-Nazism," writes the author, a notion that speaks to the current political landscape in the U.S. Yet those two didn't act alone: Ganz also pins the rise of Trumpism to the neo-Confederate injections of white supremacist writer and editor Sam Francis and New Rightists who insisted that their conservatism was in fact radicalism, just the sort of reimagined Leninism that Steve Bannon would go on to proclaim a few decades later. All of these characters, writes the author, "looked for inspiration among the ideological ruins of earlier times: nationalism, populism, racism, antisemitism, and even fascism." From the proto-QAnon-ism of Ruby Ridge and Waco to the wacky white-shirt populism of Ross Perot, Ganz makes a convincing, well-documented case that everything old is indeed new again. A significant, provocative work that joins an ugly past to an uglier present in American democracy's continued decline.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2024
The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring a "Peace Dividend" of opportunity, prosperity, and domestic tranquility. Instead, the bill came due for Reaganomics, leaving a heavily indebted and deindustrialized society that was impoverished both economically and culturally. Ganz presents a comprehensive intellectual history of ferment during George H. W. Bush's administration. His narrative flows seamlessly from David Duke to the rise of hate-filled talk radio; the crisis of loneliness; Cold Warriors who, without commies to fight, turned on mainstream America; Pat Buchanan's culture war; the Ross Perot phenomenon; right-wing survivalists; urban riots and police oppression; and the glorification of mobsters. This distinctive history documents a potpourri of disparate ideas and events in a country on the verge of great change without knowing where it is going. Ganz reveals the deep background on movements and ideas that continue to shape society, leading inexorably to Donald Trump and the MAGA phenomenon. A tour de force that is eloquent in its terribleness, When the Clock Broke is a must-read for every American wondering how we got here.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.