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

by John Ganz

Sensing that America as they knew it was in peril, they hoped to recast American democracy around the “negative solidarity” of knowing who you hated or wanted to destroy: this system would be based on domination and exclusion, a restricted sense of community that jealously guarded its boundaries and policed its members, and the direction of a charismatic leader who would use his power to punish and persecute for the sake of restoring lost national greatness. In a period when some said that ideological struggle was irrelevant and that even history itself had ended, they looked for inspiration among the ideological ruins of earlier times: nationalism, populism, racism, antisemitism, and even fascism.

The average income for 80 percent of American families declined between 1980 and 1989, while the top fifth of Americans saw an increase of nearly 50 percent. The income of the top 1 percent grew by almost 75 percent over the decade. The median net worth of a high-income family grew by 82 percent between 1984 and 1989, while the wealth of the lowest-income group dropped by 16 percent. While the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, the middle was being hollowed out: the proportion of Americans making between $18,000 and $55,000 a year shrank by 20 percent in the 1980s.

Even Reagan’s supporters and surrogates had trouble denying that the policy regime of the previous decade—deregulation, tax cuts, high interest rates, and scaled-back social services—looked a lot like open class war waged on behalf of the rich.

Reaganism preferred to devolve responsibilities to the state level: this contributed to a regional race to the bottom as states struggled among one another to attract capital with generous business incentives that strained their fiscal capacity.

He possessed the ditziness of the high WASPs: a love for games, toys, and practical jokes; he spoke in non sequiturs and inside or private gags. It was difficult, even for him, to know what he really meant sometimes.

Anyway, a good enemy was the best friend you could have.

With war just three weeks away, Saddam Hussein got only a little box at the top of the cover. Apparently the “New Hitler” wasn’t as juicy a story as the incipient totalitarianism of literature professors. Both sides of the controversy claimed conspiracy: for the right, there was a concerted effort by left-wing academics to undermine the basis of Western civilization; for the left, the assault on higher ed was a carefully coordinated media campaign orchestrated and funded by a network of conservative think tanks and foundations.

Lasch called for a renewal of populism’s “appreciation of the moral value of honest work, its respect for competence, its egalitarian opposition to entrenched privilege, its refusal to be impressed by the jargon of experts, its insistence on plain speech and on holding people accountable for their actions.” He would say that populism “was not a panacea for all the ills that afflict the modern world,” and he admitted that “it would be foolish to deny the characteristic features of populist movements at their worst—racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, and anti-intellectualism, all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics.”

Still, he believed that “at a time when other ideologies are greeted with apathy, populism has the capacity to generate real enthusiasm.” The principal figures of this book would agree. Like Lasch, they wanted to recover a “submerged tradition” that was an alternative to Enlightenment liberalism, although the populism they envisioned and helped to create looked different from Lasch’s idealized picture. And, as we shall see, they thought the enthusiasm populism could generate was because of, not despite, all those “other evils.”

Writing in the 1920s, Gramsci maintained that such crises “were situations of conflict between representatives and represented,” and that when the “ruling class has lost its consensus,” the populace feels that the existing political and public institutions no longer provide a vision of national leadership, but merely dominate and coerce, serving their own narrow self-interest. In such a situation, both politics and the economy take on the aspect of a zero-sum squabble between competing factions and cliques.

In a way, this book charts the transformation of the Southern Strategy from a regional to a national campaign.

The obscene spectacle of masculine domination in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 1991 would trigger a feminist mobilization that would make 1992 “The Year of the Woman” for its record number of female senators and representatives elected.

American democracy is often spoken of as being in peril. This book by and large agrees with this thesis.

Others point out that democracy in America never fully existed in the first place: for them, it has always been a nation enchained by great inequalities and ruled by an unrepresentative system designed largely to keep those chains in place. This book also agrees with that thesis.

Perhaps Louisiana provided particularly fertile soil for the emergence of a candidate with a neo-Nazi past.

(John M. Parker, a “progressive” governor who defied the Klan, had once been involved in the lynching of eleven Italian laborers in New Orleans; he never expressed any regret for the act.)

In 1928, a new kind of experiment began. “There is no dictatorship in Louisiana,” Huey P. Long said. “There is perfect democracy there, and when you have perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship.” After winning the governorship by campaigning in a populist mode against the Bourbon oligarchy’s concentration of wealth and power, “The Kingfish” quickly coordinated the organs of the state to concentrate his own wealth and power. In office, Long marshaled the governor’s vast powers of appointment to build an empire of patronage jobs, sweeping from office the allies of his political opponents and replacing them with his own people. No state office was too petty to serve as an opportunity for rewarding a friend or avenging an enemy, as well as that enemy’s family and friends. With this apparatus in hand, along with his fine-honed talents of personal insult and threat, Huey set himself to pushing through an ambitious legislative agenda:

Distrusting the “lying” press, he created an apparatus of propaganda, replete with radio addresses, sound trucks blaring slogans, and his own newspaper. Huey was a traveling salesman by trade, and the public loved his buffoonish histrionics, cornpone demagoguery, and flamboyant dress. They cheered his vituperative attacks on his enemies and relished his intentional flouting of decorum. Long enjoyed the destruction and humiliation of his enemies, and his people shared in his enjoyment. The rural poor began to look upon Long with religious ardor, flocking in droves to catch sight of a man they compared to an angel or to Jesus himself.

For both his admirers and detractors, the regime Long set up brought to mind fascism.

(He was so effective at his job that he managed to deliver more votes to Long than there were registered voters in his parish.)

Equally embarrassing were the pseudonymous books he wrote and attempted to sell. The first, African Atto, was a fake martial arts guide for Black Power militants, written by one “Mohammed X,” that diagrammed various fighting moves to use against white opponents.

It’s difficult to imagine any political purpose for Duke’s other volume, Finders Keepers, a guide to sex and dating for the modern single woman.

Duke’s paradoxical effort to be a public Klan leader was born from a narcissistic personality that couldn’t be satisfied with the rulership of an “invisible empire” and therefore craved public recognition, at the same time still desiring the frisson of ghoulish power that flows from conspiracism, secret societies, and terrorist machinations. This amphibian nature helps to explain both his successes and his failures: he found purchase as the acceptable public face of unacceptable private hatreds and paranoias, but he was always too “soft-core” for the radical vanguard of his own movement even as he was too tainted with the reek of the racist netherworld to fully cross over into the mainstream.

“If I had anything to say to people outside the state,” the author Walker Percy told The New York Times when they came down to report on the District 81 race, “I’d tell ’em, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.’”

But charges of hypocrisy could not damage Duke, who had a strange power to make voters alter their opinions to fit him. Roemer’s staff and RNC consultants organized a focus group of white, blue-collar swing voters from Jefferson Parish. They were asked a series of questions about a hypothetical candidate who had dodged the draft, avoided taxes, had plastic surgery, and never held a job. The group reviled the imaginary pol. But when the same questions were asked naming Duke as the candidate, the group grew testy and defended him. Roemer’s media consultant Raymond Strother noted, “When we described a hypothetical candidate in the same way, the people hated him. But when you told them that person was Duke, they made the same excuses. Basically, we found that the guy was bulletproof.” “Only dumb people pay taxes,” one woman said. “Politicians and millionaires don’t because they are smart. Duke must be smart.”

Duke came under assault from all sides, as if the immune system of the state and the entire nation was activated against a pathogen.

On TV he could avoid the two great enemies of demagogues: context and memory.

Then Nightline proceeded to give him thirty minutes of free airtime.

His public life was defined by a kind of narcissism: he craved approval and acceptance by the crowd and also relished his ability to frighten and repulse the society that rejected him.

“Is this the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln or is this the Republican Party of David Duke?”

Labeling the act a “quota bill” was part of the hard-right push ahead of the upcoming congressional election.

The Times was founded by the Korean cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon in 1982 as a conservative counterweight to The Washington Post, but also as a beachhead for his Unification Church in D.C. Another investor was the government of apartheid South Africa, which funneled several million dollars to Moon’s outfits for an interest in the paper.

Identifying the thinkers who helped transform the party of Reagan into the party of Trump may be an intellectual parlor game, but if anyone deserves a prominent spot on the list, it is likely Sam Francis, whose writings and advocacy would prove startlingly prescient as well as influential.

“The New Right will favor a populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchical establishment … whose values and interests are hostile to the traditional American ethos and which is a parasitical tumor on the body of Middle America.”

As the decade wore on, Francis’s hopes for the New Right and Reaganism faded. He began to doubt it was capable of destroying the oligarchical elite and removing the “parasitical tumors” from the body politic, and he began to gaze deeper into the abyss for signs of revolutionary stirring.

The paleo aesthetic was American Gothic: white-sided Presbyterian and Congregational churches in small towns; stern, industrious folk; farmers, homesteaders, and frontiersmen. Added to this was the myth of the gallant South and the Lost Cause. Many were Catholic traditionalists, but they praised the character-annealing rigors of the Protestant ethic. In the paleo junk shop of discarded historical forms, the dour Puritan Roundhead made a strange peace with the chivalrous Southern cavalier. 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 commando.

Buchanan: “If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation, democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind’s ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.”

“He is yesterday and we are tomorrow. He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the Old Republic. He would put American’s wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first.

At a campaign event at a mall in Manchester, Buchanan sat down next to a man in fatigues who was unemployed and apparently homeless, telling the man that if the cameras intimidated him, he could send them away. The man said they did. But Buchanan didn’t send them away; he asked the man about being unemployed, asked if he was on welfare, which the man claimed not to be. Pat wished him good luck and a merry Christmas and moved on, cameras in tow.

A few weeks later he called for the chronically homeless to be jailed.

Duke was even losing the interest of his core supporters among the nuttiest of the nuts.

Without the baggage of a Klan and Nazi past, Buchanan could indulge freely in rhetoric that Duke could only dance around.

While at a state dinner in Japan, Bush fell ill and collapsed into the lap of the Japanese prime minister, where he vomited.

Environmentalists and logging companies were clashing over the shrinking habitat of the northern spotted owl; Bush attempted to split the difference, saying that his paramount concern was the loggers’ jobs, but, “Yes, we want to see that little furry-feathery guy protected and all of that.”

Rothbard’s political philosophy ultimately did not jibe with the New Left; he believed they ignored “the iron law of oligarchy” that governed political affairs, and that their egalitarianism was a revolt “against the ontological structure of reality itself.” Human beings were innately, biologically unequal, and the workings of the market would reveal the elect of the race. But the existence of the state disrupted the natural workings of the free market: it was a parasitic organism that fed off the honest toil of the real producers.

Koch was so impressed he gave Rothbard the funding to help form a new libertarian organization, which became known as the Cato Institute.

With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal … We shall repeal the twentieth century.

To the frustrated and wounded American manhood of New Hampshire, Buchanan had an undeniable appeal.

Copping to the fact that liberals were “dead right” about their belief that “David Duke represents the logical culmination of the conservative resurgence of Ronald Reagan,” Francis identified what he thought was the true essence of the Reagan revolution: Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural, and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what [it] will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for [it].

he taught Sunday school at the Methodist church.