When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz 

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

432 pp., $30.00

The Western world began to look inward during the 1990s. The Cold War was over, but there were other problems on the horizon. In 1988, French President François Mitterrand declared quite casually that the movement of immigrants from the Global South to the Global North might be of greater import than what remained of the East/West conflict in Europe.

Mitterrand did little to address that threat. In 1984, however, Jean Marie Le Pen and his National Front Party (now renamed the National Rally) won seats in a European Parliament election. A decade later, Le Pen gained 4.5 million votes in the French presidential election. France’s election officials quickly rewrote legislative laws to prevent this from happening again. Instead of proportional representation, lawmakers would have to win seats by making deals with the establishment parties on the second ballot, that is, assuming they failed to get past the 50-percent victory threshold on the first one. That kept the shunned National Front out of the General Assembly. Still, it couldn’t slow down the party’s momentum. Le Pen’s successor, his daughter Marine, may be France’s next president.

In America, an equivalent populist right took off at about the same time. In When the Clock Broke, John Ganz focuses on American cultural and political wars during the hectic year 1992, when two maverick candidates, Patrick J. Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, rocked the previously staid presidency of George H. W. Bush, thereby paving the way for Bill Clinton’s upset win.

Ganz walks his readers through a cast of characters prominent that year, from David Duke to Rush Limbaugh, Sister Souljah, Randy Weaver, John Gotti, and Rudy Giuliani, as well as former Chronicles columnists and contributors Samuel T. Francis, Joseph Sobran, and Murray Rothbard.

Of course, this book may not fit the requirements of a rigorous historical study. The chapters on Weaver and Gotti are both dated and irrelevant. As a prelude to his invective against David Duke, Ganz feels driven to rant against Louisiana politics (Duke was briefly a state representative from a New Orleans-area district.) All the same, Ganz is correct that the populist revolt on the right found a precursor in Duke. He is even more correct in identifying Sam Francis as the prophet of the right-wing populism that the author plainly hates. 

Unfortunately, Ganz falls short in naming the forces behind the political rise of David Duke. He acknowledges conservative discontent with the Reagan administration on such issues as abortion, school prayer, welfare spending, and illegal alien amnesty. There was also white racial discontent in the early 1990s, a sentiment that Ganz also declaims against. In 1984, Reagan garnered 70 percent of the white male vote nationwide. The next year, he considered signing an executive order banning affirmative action in federal government agencies.

Longtime Reagan loyalist Ed Meese, serving as his Attorney General, and Pat Buchanan, who was then Reagan’s Director of Communications, urged the president to ban affirmative action. From Capitol Hill, however, Senator Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) opposed that proposed order. It should be noted that Dole ran against Reagan in the GOP primaries in 1980. Meese and Buchanan, by contrast, were Reagan loyalists who stood by him when he lost his challenge to President Gerald Ford four years earlier. Unexpectedly, Reagan sided with Dole by letting the order lapse.

By the early 1980s, America had already lost control of its southern border.  Attorney General William French Smith admitted as much. During the 1984 presidential debates, Reagan floated the idea of amnesty for illegal immigrants in exchange for a controlled border. Two years later, bipartisan legislation granted amnesty to 6 million illegal aliens. But what about the offer of increased border control as a quid pro quo? Might we ask how many illegals have invaded this country since that amnesty was granted? Twenty million? Thirty million? At this year’s GOP convention, thousands of placards demanded mass deportation. Before Trump came on the scene, that demand would have fallen on the deaf ears of the Republican establishment. 

Amnesty was obviously the second disastrous mistake made by the Reagan administration. Yes, Reagan won commandingly the white male vote in 1980 and 1984. And for what end? The 1980s saw the rise of multiculturalism, political correctness, demographic revolution, and assaults on the collective American past. Duke’s campaigns specifically targeted affirmative action and immigration. The former Klansman was explicit in addressing his indignant white base. But, with his Klan past and a wasted youth spent parading around the Louisiana State University campus in Nazi regalia, Duke’s political career was doomed before it started. 

GOP leaders, however, knew they were in trouble by the 1990s. The thunder on the right returned when conservatives denounced George H. W. Bush for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which opened the door to racial hiring quotas by making employers potentially liable if there was a racial imbalance in their workforces. Their resistance got Pat Buchanan into the 1992 race, followed by Perot. Duke, happily for the GOP establishment, fell out of the picture, but Bush spent the year battling his primary opponents and agonizing over his political future.

Ganz acknowledges that his book represents the story of history’s losing side, the populist right tribe that he fears has made an inconvenient comeback. The author seems both bored and annoyed with these unrepentant right-wingers who see the world so differently from himself. Who are these people crashing the great American garden party? Why can’t they just go away? Unfortunately, Ganz seems entirely unable to engage with his hated subjects intellectually. He just tries to link them through association (often with each other) to some vaguely anti-Semitic, “fascist” network. One can only speculate on how much better his book would have been if Ganz had risen above his irksome practice of name-calling.

This book covers all too familiar ground: Limbaugh and talk radio, and the anti-government militias that came into public consciousness with Ruby Ridge and other incidents. Although Ganz covers Perot’s presidential run after a fashion, this aspect of American history has been explored more thoroughly and less peevishly elsewhere. In the final analysis, Ganz’s book is less a history of the ’90s populist right than another anti-Trump diatribe designed to warn voters that history is repeating itself in the emergence of the Bad Orange Man. 

Many Chronicles editors and readers lived through those bleak days of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when it looked like their agenda for protecting American jobs, restricting immigration, and opposing foreign wars all belonged to a hopeless cause that was outside of the mainstream conservative movement. “You guys weren’t a wing in the party,” Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes told Buchanan mockingly during his America First crusade. “You’re not even a feather!” It certainly seemed that way at the time Barnes said it. After 9/11 and the Iraq War, the triumph of the neoconservatives within the GOP looked permanent.

But it didn’t turn out that way, at least not for a few years. The occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan had obviously failed miserably despite the constant efforts of neoconservatives like David Frum and Bill Kristol (also of The Weekly Standard) to spin them into victories. George Bush’s illegal alien amnesty proposal, unlike Reagan’s, found little support among Republican voters. Finally, voters began to question the rule of a supercilious elite.

Ganz’s depiction of the paleoconservative movement sometimes sinks to baseless disparagement. Concerning the movement that the Rockford Institute, the publisher of Chronicles, helped to bring into existence, Ganz sneers, “In the paleo junk shop of discarded historical forms, the dour Puritan Roundhead made a strange peace with the chivalrous Southern cavalier.”

Anything on the right reminiscent of the martial spirit drives Ganz up the wall: 

Their imagination resembles nothing so much as the rainy-day transports of a boy who lines up all his toy soldiers from different periods in a grand alliance—here’s a knight, there’s a cowboy, here’s Davy Crockett, there’s a Special Forces commander.

And when Ganz asserts that “the writing of this cohort of paleo thinkers is shot through with a deep cynicism, even nihilism, and a hard-hearted notion of power that questions democracy itself” the only proper response may be to ignore this childish outburst. It is true, however, that old-fashioned conservatives have never been apologists for mass democracy. The United States, they insisted, was a republic that was intended to be a body politic of self-governing, self-reliant communities. 

Chronicles, moreover, has always been about a lot more than ephemeral political issues. But it has made its influence felt in this area as well. The October 1989 issue of the magazine was titled “Nation of Immigrants,” and contained a critique of that often-quoted mantra that jumpstarted the immigration debate—it also got the magazine’s editors labeled as “nativists” by the neoconservatives. The “Mass Deportation” banners that you see today in red states may have had their birth in the Chronicles office in Rockford, Illinois.

Thanks to its one-time Ingersoll Awards—the T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing and the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters—Chronicles elevated the cause of American culture considerably. For a time, the Ingersoll Awards were considered the conservative equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Let’s note some of its recipients: James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Murray Rothbard, Forrest McDonald, Walker Percy, Muriel Spark, V. S. Naipaul, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavia Paz, Fred Chappell, Andrew Lytle. When Naipaul won the Eliot Award in 1990, Lytle was the recipient of the Weaver Award. Naipaul was so fascinated by Lytle’s storytelling talents that he decided to write his final book, A Turn in the South, about Lytle’s homeland.

Ganz understandably ignores such details as he singlemindedly pursues his political agenda: to expose the intellectual and historical roots that led to his side’s new Satan, Trump, and the MAGA movement. That said, he is correct in highlighting Buchanan’s titanic importance to paleoconservatism. Buchanan gave paleos the national platform that their movement had long lacked. 

But, with his uncanny talent for prophecy, it is Sam Francis who steals the show in Ganz’s rogue’s gallery of paleos; and it is not surprising that Francis is central to Ganz’s work. Francis seems to be more relevant for his despiser than Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich, perhaps even more so than Buchanan. 

It goes without saying that Ganz abhors Francis’s conservative worldview. His ad hominem attacks against Francis, which weaken his already weak arguments, often verge on the utterly tasteless. For example, he notes that Francis’s “teeth [were] stained by a pack-a-day Pall Mall habit.” Sam, by the way, eventually abjured cigarette smoking.

Yet Ganz is intrigued by Francis’s arresting prose style. He can’t help himself. The book abounds in references to Francis’s many groundbreaking essays. It is as if Ganz has just finally turned off MSNBC and discovered an enemy on the right who is actually a serious thinker with a prodigious volume of work. Despite himself, Ganz conclusively demonstrates that Francis was and remains, even two decades after his death, the great theorist of right-wing populism. No one else is treated as extensively in Ganz’s disquisition.

Francis theorized that the foot soldiers of the populist right would be an army of white working-class and middle-class voters alarmed by the disappearance of their country. He appealed to what David Brooks has characterized as the “300-pound beefy guys.” That vision gradually materialized. When Trump won the presidency in 2016, the white working class, along with white evangelicals, were the only demographics to give him a majority. In 2024, the GOP nominee maintains a daunting lead among “non-college whites.”

Is that enough, we might ask, to ensure another electoral victory? Perhaps not. Francis’ dream of white unity, in response to the identity politics of other races, may be failing. College-educated whites have also mostly lined up with the political and cultural left. 

A Trumpian GOP must fight against not only the urban vote but also a suburban vote that prioritizes abortion and other feminist issues. Those voters, pounding away at their email jobs and ensconced in their suburban bubbles, don’t (yet) feel threatened by mass immigration or by factory jobs fleeing the country. Much of their social lives are spent virtue-signaling.

Sam Francis was only 57 years old when he died of an aneurysm. At the time of his death, he seemed to have realized that the white middle-class was more liberal than he had originally imagined. Fate deprived him, and us, of his further analysis of a changing historical situation. For his part, Ganz is critical but not especially reflective and driven by a transparent leftist agenda. 

Yet his deeply flawed potboiler reveals one truth a sensitive reader could not fail to notice: He is obsessed with Sam Francis.