When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
by John Ganz
View on GoodreadsJohn Ganz's argument that the early 1990s — Pat Buchanan's campaign, David Duke's near-success, the LA riots, the rise of right-wing talk radio, the LaRouchies, the militia movement — is where contemporary American political dysfunction actually originates, not 2016.
Core ideas
- The Buchanan-Duke-Perot moment looked anomalous at the time and was treated as a passing fever; Ganz reads it as the actual ground state, with the 1992-2015 normalcy being the anomaly.
- The intellectual figures of the period — Sam Francis, Murray Rothbard, Russell Kirk, the paleocon network — built the ideological architecture that Trump-era movements would later inherit and amplify.
- Conspiracy thinking and racial grievance fused in this period with new media (talk radio, early cable) in ways that made them durable; the "fever" became the operating system because the delivery infrastructure stabilized.
Published2024
Pages420
ISBN9780374605445
ReadJul 2024
