When the Clock Broke

1990s America and the foreshadowing of Trump

A few months ago I did a post recommending ten books that help explain the world right now. Several readers got in touch afterwards to say that “When the Clock Broke” by John Ganz should have been on the list. It wasn’t out in the UK at the time but serendipitously his publisher got in touch shortly after to send me a copy.

I read it and it should have been on the list - there’s a reason President Obama picked it as one of his summer reads. It’s a fascinating history of early 90s politics in the US, with the 1992 election as the focus. Main characters include Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, David Duke and many others who spotted the beginnings of the voter coalition that Donald Trump would later ride to victory.

In this post John and I discuss the main themes from the book. Many of which link with previous posts I’ve done on the backstory of the modern radical right: on the techbro ideology, on the strange marriage of libertarianism and authoritarian nationalism, on the contradictions of global nationalism, and on the death of the centre-right (for the Observer).

Lots more coming later this week including a full analysis of the spending review and the latest on Ukraine.

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Sam: Your book focuses on the 1992 election as the moment when the rot set in in American politics. Particularly the attempt by Pat Buchanan to win the Republican nomination, and then Ross Perot's campaign to try and win the presidency as a third party candidate. What made you pick that era? You could have gone for the start of the Reagan era, or the early conservative campaigns of the of the 70s on things like school bussing. What made you pick on 92 as the key moment when, as you say, the clock broke?

John: It seemed to me that the politics of Buchanan and Perot and a little bit before them, David Duke [a neo-Nazi who was elected to the state legislature in Louisiana in 1989 and then ran for President], were really the first crystallization of the things you saw in Trump's successful campaign. A combination of anti-system populism with a hard right reactionary edge. Now in Ross Perot, that's a little softer, but certainly in Buchanan and Duke that has a very strong racial side.

So I thought that their hostility, both to the kind of settled consensus about what American race relations ought to look like and to the constitutional order was really starting to come into focus in a way that was different, although there are continuous processes going back to Nixon or Reagan. And the thing that really made that click for me was a an essay in an obscure newsletter written by the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard. The name of the essay was “Right Wing Populism”. I chanced upon this around in 2017 and basically he's reflecting on the failed gubernatorial campaign of David Duke in Louisiana. And he points out all the media and the establishment came after him hard. He got blown out, but he won a majority of the white vote as a former Klansman and neo-Nazi.

Rothbard is very excited by this, he identifies Duke's right wing populism as an attractive strategy for the right. He talks about how the right needed a charismatic leader who could, as he puts it, short circuit the media elites and rouse the masses directly with this resentment. What he described, I thought, was uncanny, a blueprint of the type of politics Trump practiced. So this got me interested in the era, and then I looked deeper into the Buchanan and Perot campaigns.

The Buchanan campaign breaks with Republicans consensus about trade and immigration. Perot has a strong economic nationalism, that is not combined with a social democratic program or socialist program, but with a kind of developmental state capitalism, which he feels is necessary for the United States to compete against Japan and Western Europe, which at the time were looking very strong. And this is combined in both their cases, and in Duke's case, with a conspiratorial negative campaigning against conventional politicians as corrupt and controlled by foreign entities. When you take all these aspects, and also that it was the beginning of alternative media, with cable and talk radio, you see all of this foreshadowing of the types of politics that Trump would really refine and practice in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

Sam: I wrote a post recently in which Rothbard featured heavily, what really struck me reading about him was his support for the hard right was very calculated. He saw populism as a means to an end, because he wanted a vehicle to ride to victory. Then he could impose the ideas he really believed in on the population.

John: Rothbard was politically marginalized as a crackpot. He realized he had to work, as libertarians always have in the United States, in a coalition with other political forces that maybe didn't share all of their premises or conclusions. He saw right wing populism as a means to an end, and was willing to compromise or find common ground with people who would not agree with libertarian positions, for instance if they had highly protectionist views about American industry, like Buchanan. So you have Rothbard representing the hard libertarian right, and then you have a figure named Sam Francis, a friend and advisor of Buchanan, representing the National populist right. And they form an alliance.

Sam: They're both advising Buchanan at the same time.

John: Yes. And Buchanan’s heart is a little closer to the national popular side, with its protectionism and its belief in state power for national ends. You see the echo of this kind of intellectual coalition today when you have a party that brings together Elon Musk's radical program of state destruction with Steve Bannon's hope for a workers’ national populism. Now, these things aren’t always in contradiction. Take, for instance, the attack on US foreign aid. This has an obvious libertarian justification, in removing government spending, and it has a nationalist justification in that the United States should work around its own concerns and stop helping foreign countries. So in that respect, they're totally in concert.

And both of them share a populist aspect: an attack on the types of elites that they feel staff and support such endeavors and are parasitically living on the state and NGO infrastructure. They find ways in which in which they can see eye to eye. Another example is immigration. Traditionally, libertarians are open borders people, and don't have a lot of time for strict immigration regimes. But Rothbard’s paleo-libertarianism has a strict hierarchy of who is actually productive member of a capitalist economy, and usually that's a white person, right? Because they believe they have higher levels of IQ and are more productive members of society.

They also hate the welfare state. So they think if we restrict immigration we won't expand the welfare state, so they find a libertarian justification for what is, in effect, a highly authoritarian politics. There are ways this coalition can work. In the same way a nationalist can see their way to policies that are friendly to business, because they view those particular types of businessmen as national champions, as the types of entrepreneurs that will support their nationalist project.

A lot is spoken of today about the contradictions of this coalition. But I think it’s sometimes more useful to think about the commonalities and the ways they can figure out ways to work together. That doesn't always work. We saw recently Elon Musk very animated about tariffs and had strong words to say about [Trump’s trade adviser] Peter Navarro [we spoke before the Musk/Trump meltdown]. But again, it seems as if Trump's flexibility and his lack of ideological rigor makes it possible for some kind of modus operandi between these two parts of the coalition to work.

Sam: I want to come back to Trump later on. But let’s talk about Sam Francis, because he's a really interesting character that I suspect few people, certainly on this side of the Atlantic, will have heard of. I recently wrote about him because he was very influenced by James Burnham, who wrote “The Managerial Revolution”. I'm really interested in the way that the radical right have become obsessed with the managerial class, which they see as this parasitic group of people that are slowing down the economy. That seems to be the basis via which you can create an alliance between very rich people like Musk and Peter Thiel, and lower income people who feel like they've not been given the opportunity to be part of this managerial class.

John: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there is a shared sense among all right movements that the enemy is the progressive middle classes to upper middle classes, who are seen as a rent seeking group that is defending its own privilege. Now us liberal managerial elites like to say, well, we keep everything going, and we're the doctors and the lawyers and you can't do without us. And they're saying, well, your moment has passed.

When Burnham wrote “The Managerial Revolution”, he said the necessity of modern capitalism creates this intermediate class which is very powerful. Capitalism needs managers. It needs technicians, and that's what's generated and empowered this class. Now, what they're saying is perhaps, the time of these people has gone, and there's not much need for them. Part of the way they make that argument, is artificial intelligence, which can increasingly do administrative work. They're hoping they can liquidate the class of professional, managerial people.

Sam: One thing that’s interesting to me, and I’ve recently written about, is that the people who are under attack under this philosophy, this managerial class, are the people who used to vote Republican in the US and Conservative here. The lawyers, the accountants, the actuaries. They were the bastion of the centre right, whilst the left were seen as the party of the less educated working class. So it seems impossible to follow this philosophy and then return back to having a centre right rather than a radical right, because it's destroying its own potential support.

John: Yeah, that's an excellent point. The Reagan Revolution was supposed to benefit the conservative working class and lower middle class. But who actually does quite well in the Reagan years is this professional middle class. They get their houses in the Hamptons. Of course, the same people today could never afford a house in the Hamptons on the kinds of salaries those jobs make.

Sam: And you see a big expansion in higher education benefitting this group too.

John: Yes and massive law firms do extremely well during this period. But the fortunes of the people who put Reagan into office don't necessarily improve, and they begin to look around for alternatives that are still on the right, but definitely don't share some of the beliefs about political economy that conservatives did for a long time, especially around trade.

Sam: One of the interesting things about the foreshadowing of Trump during this period is that there's quite a long gap between Buchanan and his failed campaigns and Trump winning his first term. As you say the Trump coalition were already looking for alternatives in the early 90s. So why, when all the necessary factors seemed to be there in 1992, did it take until 2016 to happen?

John: I don't think the situation had become dire enough yet in 1992. People were not quite as disillusioned with politics as usual. In 1990 there’s a financial crash and recession, which did a lot of damage to the country and in some regions they faced really horrible conditions. But it was not as dire an institutional failure as the 2008 crash.

Also you did not have the same network of alternative media outlets that gets around the mediation of mainstream institutions. You had the beginnings of it. You had cable news and radio talk shows, but this accelerates many times over with the advent of the internet. So my argument is essentially very simple. You see a lot of the same processes in embryonic form, but you had to have a much larger crisis, and you had to have this technological acceleration that made it possible. It's helpful to look at these historical examples, when things weren't moving quite so fast. You can see things about today, that if you try to catch it in movement, it's very overwhelming.

Sam: I want to ask you about Perot. To the extent that anyone in the UK remembers Perot it’s probably as a gag in The Simpsons. There's not much memory of that campaign. Because Clinton won we remember “it’s the economy stupid”, like he was inevitably going to win. But actually, as you say in the book, Perrot was leading for quite a long time in the polls. Then he made a complete hash of his campaign. But is there a world in which he doesn't do that, in which he runs a more effective campaign and wins that election? If he had would it have been a one off or would it have radically changed American politics much earlier?

John: It’s hard to answer that, because the reason he dropped out is because he was who he was. He had character traits that made him lose interest and focus and get frustrated with it and drop out and start it up and want to quit again. That was just part of his personality. The other thing is, is that the reason why he dropped out is that there were negative news stories and actual scrutiny into his record. He was losing approval, and he didn't like that. Back then the mainstream media had a lot more power, and he didn't quite have the alternative support base. He had cable and talk radio, which really liked him, but not the alternative media infrastructure. He could have won in 2016 by the time we have Twitter and Facebook.

Sam: He had less baggage than Trump.

John: Yes and he was fun. He was folksy, he was entertaining. He was less sinister, less angry, less hateful, on the surface than Trump. I think he had strong authoritarian tendencies, which didn't quite seem as threatening as Trump's, because Trump mixes that with a very unattractive way of expressing himself, though it’s also entertaining to his base in a different, confrontational way.

Had he won it would have looked a lot like what Musk is trying to do now with these extra constitutional ways of attacking the state while claiming to be cracking down on bureaucratic waste and corruption. He would have had a lot of trouble with Congress. There would have been a lot of press conferences where, much like Trump, he's attacking this person, complaining about this or that, trying to rally public support behind him for moves that constitutionally dodgy or flatly unconstitutional. Maybe the country gets it out of its system under less dire conditions, and then the negative example of the rather silly Ross Perot era might be a barrier when other outsider candidates come along.

Sam: There is a fascinating similarity between Perot and Musk. They both present themselves as pure entrepreneurs, who are superior to the state, and yet they're both dependent on the state for their fortunes. Perot made his money out of government contracts. And obviously Musk has been heavily subsidized as well.

John: When I wrote the book Musk wasn't so much on the radar politically. I wrote in the postscript of the book, which is going to come in the UK edition and the US edition, that it's uncanny how much these guys have in common. But I didn't see it at the time because Musk wasn't a political factor. I was thinking of Trump when I wrote it, because Perot was a populist billionaire. And of course, Trump had tried to hitch himself onto Perot’s Reform Party when he first got into politics. So he was already kind of in that nutty third party space that Perot had opened up.

But yeah, when Musk comes along. It’s not just that like Perot, his version of capitalism is very reliant on state support and contracts. Perot also wanted to do electronic direct democracy, like Musk with his twitter polls, which is only possible in the age of social media. Perot called for electronic town halls where people would vote live on what the government should do. Critics at the time saw through it and that it was liable to manipulation. It's an obvious tactic of dictatorship, and an old one, but that technique, he comes up with that, and a lot of people at the time say that's a neat idea.

He also says things that you hear Musk saying and Trump saying, which just ignore the constitutional system, saying Congress shouldn't be allowed to raise taxes anymore. That's a core constitutional function of Congress. It doesn't matter. He's got a better idea. And people hear it and they say, that sounds good. Plus he talked a lot about trying to apply systems engineering to government, to the problem of government, there's ton of resonance with Musk and his way of approaching things.

Again, I think Perot, and this says much about what's changed in the country, is a sweeter, more quaint figure. From a time that was not quite so angry and hateful. There's something endearing about him. I don’t admire him or think he was a good person but I don't think that he fundamentally was, for the lack of a better word, evil like some of these guys around Trump. His will to power was extensive, but not psychotic.

Sam: One of the other big characters in the book is Rush Limbaugh, as the leader of the talk radio revolution, after all the legal rules about political partisanship on the media have gone out the window in the 1980s. There’s something similar there in that these guys were seen as horrendous at the time. Limbaugh and Howard Stern as well. I remember reading when I was a kid people being horrified by Stern. Now they seem almost quaint compared to what we have today.

John: It's true. I think some of the stuff that they got away remains shocking, but now you can find the most horrible things you could imagine. People like Andrew Tate. And then you have Joe Rogan bringing people on his incredibly popular show that say totally outlandish things like downplaying the Holocaust.

It's just gone out of control. Now you have hundreds of Howard Sterns, hundreds of Rush Limbaughs, for every gradation of taste and political extremism. So, again, in the 1990s you see the process beginning. You see the no holds barred partisanship. You see the crudeness. You see the introduction of, and I don't want to sound like a prude about this or a hypocrite, because I can express myself quite strongly too, but a certain violence.

Now I can see the counter argument to that, which was that civility of rhetoric protected unaccountable, stupid elites who got by thanks to never being challenged in strong ways. We're a democracy. We have free speech. People are going to express themselves strongly and should be able to say things that are insulting. I believe in those things. But I don't think it's an ideal democratic situation where you can slander people without consequence, there is a difference. Maybe it's difficult to build a public sphere that is free and lively but not dominated by outrageous propaganda and pornography. How do you strike that balance?

Sam: We’ve held the line a bit longer here but we have the same problems now. You can't control the internet. It has no gatekeeper. So you can still have rules that apply to the BBC and the main news channels, but they're not being watched by anywhere near as many people. Younger people watch YouTube, they watch TikTok.

Let’s go back to Trump, who is in many ways the main character in the book, despite barely being in it, because it's about this foreshadowing of where we ended up. But he does appear at the end, talking to an architect building one of his casinos. The architect says “you'd have been a good mafioso”. And Trump replies “yeah, one of the best”. Which I liked because that's always been how I've thought of him. He's a gangster. That's the best framing for him. He spent his career around gangsters, and that's how he thinks. It's about power and control and loyalty and that gives him the ability to operate in this space where people have all sorts of ideologies, as you were saying earlier. Those contradictions don’t destroy him because he doesn't care about them.

John: Yeah. He grew up in this sleazy milieu of New York politics, where business, politicians and the mafia all rub shoulders in the same restaurants and clubs. Roy Cohn [Trump’s lawyer and mentor earlier in his career] had very close relationships with the mafia.

But there is a certain kind of ideological aspect of the mafia, maybe not in how the mafia conceives of itself, but in how people perceive the mafia as an order retaining force, or even something efficient and preferable to the annoying red tape of politics. You can just make somebody an offer you can't refuse, or you threaten somebody, and that's the way to get things done. So people view the mafia with a certain amount of nostalgia or a certain belief that they'll get things done, or they can protect you, or will make things easier. There's a pop cultural ideology around the mafia in the United States that looks at those figures with a lot of affection. And Trump speaks the language of the mafia. He sounds like a gangster. He speaks in the regional accent, and people associate that with strength and intelligence and being a no bullshit guy and a tough guy.

So yeah, Trump benefits greatly from the myths about the power and effectiveness of the mafia, which, of course, in actuality, is a complete disaster and a mess. It's more like the films of Scorsese than of Coppola. And Trump certainly is more of a Scorsese character than a Coppola character, but the myth is the Godfather, and Trump has convinced a lot of people that he's the Godfather. In the same way that Ronald Reagan really cashed in on the fact that Americans were raised on westerns.

Sam: That leads on to my next question, which is that Trump is a sui generis character. He's so unusual and of the moment and of a type that no one else seems to be able to replicate. I can't see JD Vance ever managing to pull off the same kind of trick. Is that the way out of this? Is that the way that the clock gets fixed? After he's gone no one is able to do what he does as successfully?

John: There has been no example in history of a fascist movement having a successor, because they've all come to terrible ends, like Mussolini and Hitler. Stalin had successors, but he wasn't a charismatic leader. The regime did not exist based on the myth of his personal magic abilities. And Trumpism is definitely based on the idea that Trump has some kind of special sauce that allows America to do all these things, and that he believes it.

So does it exist without his personal charisma? I think the synthesis requires his person, and he really is able to bring all these factors together. He balances all the things I talk about in the book, which is the showbiz and entertainment side of things, with the political and ideological side of things, with America's mythological worship of mobsters. All these elements that were floating around and never coalesced into one thing. He brings them all into one thing in a way nobody else does.

And also the things that he represents are going to be gradually forgotten. The type of guy Trump is, is very rooted in the mid-20^th century. Donald Trump was the rich guy on TV, and he also was very New York. He represented a style of what New York meant. Do young people have those similar cultural references that makes it so powerful? I don't know. Maybe the next thing will be something that's given birth to in this weird social media age.

What comes next probably won’t be better. The same way Ross Perot, with his Texas twang, looks quaint to us, there is an imaginable future where Donald Trump looks quaint to us.

Sam: Given that, what should Democrats in America, progressives in the UK, be thinking about in terms of beating this and trying to get the clock started again?

John: I'm not sure I have a good answer, and if I did, I would be making a lot more money. A lot of people have the confidence of their convictions that they have the answer.

I would like people to stop viewing things from a reactive and tactical point of view, saying we need to moderate it on this issue, or we need to drop this issue and pick up this issue. And we'll fix the bleeding with this group of voters. I want people to take seriously that something structural is changing and have a new conception of what it means to practice politics, which is not just plugging the leaks, but building a new ship. Now that sounds extremely cliched and abstract at the same time, but I don't have specific formulas.

When I wrote my book, I was critical of Bill Clinton for what I felt was a lack of principle and a certain weakness of character. Under current conditions, I'm more sympathetic to what he was facing and the way that he created his political coalition. There was a side of Clinton, both in terms of his own instincts and his advisors, that was more socially democratic and wanted to take a more active role in trying to rebuild a popular prosperous society for all. What I would like to see, perhaps, is instead of the neoliberal Clinton that we got because of the politics of the time, someone with the charm, the warmth, the moderate appeal but who would represent the more social democratic side of Clinton.

So what I'm basically calling for is a red Clinton, where you have someone who appears to people to be reasonable, doesn't come off as an extremist, but is able to make some much needed changes that will lead the country to a better place. I think unfortunately, Clinton was cursed with an incredibly successful economic situation, which covered up the fact that there were important reforms that needed to happen to fix the country in the wake of the Cold War.

Sam: Almost like the centre-left needs to discover politics again. It seems like the right are the only people trying to persuade anyone of the value of their beliefs. Whereas the left are in a defensive crouch all the time.

John: Yes, I think people are frustrated that things don't work and so are open to Trump-style arguments, but they don't like the hatefulness of the right. So there is a space there. But the Democrats are in a difficult position because they're forced to constantly play defense and defend institutions. It's hard to say we're going to change this, but we also stand for the status quo.

Sam: Let’s hope they can find someone who can identify the path through that. Thanks very much for speaking with me.