When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I saw this new book and though I was not familiar with John Ganz I thought I would take a look. I am glad I did.
One of the book “blurbs” on the back cover comes from Rick Perlstein, the author of a series of books on the rise of the right in the GOP. (Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland.) This book made me think of those, and The Invisible Bridge might make a decent title for this book. We arrive at where we are today in the GOP not by accident, but through the efforts of those who pushed up against GOP orthodoxy over the years, mostly in a losing cause. Like the Goldwater debacle (for the GOP) in 1964 the ideological basis for a right wing resurgence was created through that loss, with an infrastructure that was not really visible to many, but was there and working. Ganz shows us how some of the losers of the 1990’s laid the groundwork for the Trump movement that has captured the GOP these days. In telling this story there likely will be much recollection of at least some of these events by readers, but Ganz manages to connect the dots in a way that has produced a fascinating and very readable book. I had a hard time putting it down.
Ganz recognizes some of the monumental changes that occurred in American society in the 90s. The hollowing out of the American manufacturing base, and the start of the devastation that change brought to some areas of the country, is front and center. In the view of Ganz that was the building block for what was to come. He then highlights some of the characters that seemed to grasp the changing dynamic, and tried to advantage themselves in ways that rejected “mainstream” Republicanism as well as the Democratic Party. Some of the tools in that toolbox look very familiar today.
One of the “characters” that Ganz pays attention to is David Duke, the neo-Nazi/Klan member who tried to break into Republican politics in Louisiana and then nationally. I remember Duke as a fringe candidate, with lots of condemnation from across the board. But Ganz brings some information that has to open your eyes a bit. That invisible bridge comes into view. When Duke ran for Governor against Edward Edwards (in Louisiana) in 1991 he got crushed 61% to 39%, and that is what I remember. But what I did not remember is that Klansman Duke won 55% of the white vote, and a whopping 69% of the white evangelical and fundamentalist vote. (Page 51)
Ganz brings us back Pat Buchanan, who many, including myself, believe to be the godfather of the MAGA movement. Buchanan was a few years ahead of the large wave that has swept the GOP, but he most certainly created many ripples that contributed. Buchanan, whose challenge to GOP President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries managed to wound Bush politically, hit some many of the themes that we see today. The book had so many pieces that jolted the memory, and many of those emanated from “Pitchfork Pat.” Reverence for the Confederacy, and for the monuments to the Confederacy, obviously is not new.
“In Georgia, with cameras in tow, he gazed up admiringly at Stone Mountain, the massive bas-relief monument to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. He told gathered supporters there that the Voting Rights Act was ‘an act of regional discrimination against the South.’In the midst of a dramatic downpour, he stopped to lay flowers at the grave of his great-grandfather William Martin Buchanan, a Confederate soldier who he claimed had owned a plantation. He said that another great-grandfather ‘died on the way to Vicksburg’ during what he was calling ‘the war of northern aggression.’”
When the Clock Broke Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Ganz, John pg. 167
The Civil War as a “war of northern aggression?” Let that sink in a bit. The movement away from GOP orthodoxy on free trade did not begin with Donald Trump. In a foreword to a book called “America Asleep: The Free Trade Syndrome and the Global Economic Challenge” Buchanan wrote:
“Suspicion of Japan is not only related to race…but to a sense that Tokyo’s trade policy is a bastard child of Hirohito’s imperial policy of 1941. It is related to a sense that Japan’s invasion of U.S. markets have been plotted at the highest level in Tokyo with the same thoroughness that Admiral [Isoroku] Yamamoto plotted Pearl Harbor, that Japan’s objective is to ‘go the economic road’ to acquire the hegemony in Asia and the world her army and navy were unable to win half a century ago.”
When the Clock Broke Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Ganz, John pg. 176
Buchanan, an ardent free trader when he worked for Reagan, had now started the GOP movement away from free trade.
After his loss to Bush in the primaries Buchanan, with Bush looking to shore up the right, was granted a prominent speaking role at the GOP convention. His speech is considered by many to be the opening salvo in the “culture wars,” a term he used explicitly. It was a different world back then for sure but his attack on gays and abortion rights , amongst other things, managed to galvanize Democrats and tarnish George H.W. Bush.
“My friends this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
When the Clock Broke Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Ganz, John pg. 282
The speech led New York Times columnist Garry Wills to declare that George H.W. Bush was a “Prisoner of the Crazies.”
“The crazies are in charge. The fringe has taken over. A year earlier, Wills recalled, the televangelist Pat Robertson had published The New World Order, ‘arguing that the President’s gulf war, his protest achievement, was part of a diabolical plot to destroy America. By submitting to the U.N. and calling the world to its banner, President Bush was proclaiming the New World Order of the Antichrist.’”
When the Clock Broke Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Ganz, John pg. 284-285
Even GOP hating on the Bush family did not start with Trump. The book is a bit unkind to George H.W. Bush, playing on some of the, for lack of a better term, goofy moments of his re-elect effort. Unkind as they were Bush simply being out of touch with average voters was a major reason for his loss.
Buchanan is, as mentioned, a key figure in this movement, and his communication skills made him prominent where others had been ignored.
Ganz pays some attention to the Ross Perot independent candidacy for President, which had so many goofy moments of its own.
Ganz did bring to us some people that are less well known but just as important to the book. Sam Francis is one of those folks. I would describe him as a “theoretician” of the movement to change the focus of the right in the GOP. I was not acquainted with him before this book but like Buchanan he has been an advocate for the change that we have seen in the GOP. His rhetoric is even harsher than Buchanan’s.
“What is really amazing about American society today is not that there is so much violence and resistance to authority but that there is so little, that there is not or has not long since been a full-scale violent revolution in the country against the domination and exploitation of the mass of the population by its rulers. A people that once shot government officials because they taxed tea and stamps now receives the intrusions of the Internal Revenue Service politely; a society that once declared its independence on the grounds of states rights now passively tolerates federal judges and civil servants who redraw the lines of electoral districts, decide where small children will go to school, let hardened criminals out of jail without punishment, and overturns local laws that are popularly passed and have been long enforced.”
When the Clock Broke Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Ganz, John pg. 368
Francis is a key thread that runs through this book, bringing real insight as to the origins of the turbulence that we see in our politics today. The changes in the GOP did not happen overnight. Ganz draws us an excellent roadmap, as did Perlstein in his earlier series. This is my first exposure to Ganz, and based on the excellence of this book I anticipate much more in the future. This book is highly recommended.
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