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

by John Ganz

History, as the cliché goes, is written by the winners, but this is a history of the losers: candidates who lost their elections, movements that bubbled up and fizzled out, protests that exploded and dissipated, writers who toiled at the margins of American life, figures who became briefly famous or infamous and then were forgotten.

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. In the words of one, they wanted to “break the clock” of progress—returning America to a previous dispensation while also creating an entirely new country of their own devising.

Thesis

One favorite was Bob Grant, a rebarbative talk show host who bounced from station to station; Grant would shout “GET OFF MY PHONE” at callers, called for the sterilization of any women with two illegitimate children supported by welfare, and labeled Blacks “mutants” and “savages.” David Duke was a repeat guest on the show. (Limbaugh was also a big fan.

Gross. And yet apparently not disqualifying

“Voter rage.” That’s what it was being called. The term appeared not long after the emergence of “road rage,” the phrase coined to describe the irrational explosions motorists were having against one another on America’s highways. “It is like a monster in a cave, and no one is sure how big or how dangerous it is.