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

by John Ganz

It’s a time out of joint with the two eras of—at least superficial—prosperity and optimism that preceded and followed it—but it may feel more familiar today. It was an era where America felt itself to be losing out: losing its dominant place in the world, losing the basis of its security and wealth, and losing its sense of itself, as if a storm cloud rapidly gathered over the country and the national mood suddenly turned dour, gloomy, fearful, and angry. Americans were fed up. Leaders found once-loyal constituencies deaf to their appeals, the two-party system received its strongest challenge for nearly a hundred years, the country witnessed its worst single episode of public disorder since the Civil War, and oddballs, cranks, and even crooks captured the public imagination more than staid figures of reasonable authority. Paranoia was the new common sense. The country seemed to be seeking something new, a break with the exhausted possibilities of the past but also a restoration, a way to recover what had been lost.

What added to the weirdness of the time is that it should have been a moment of triumph. At its start, America had won the Cold War. The Berlin Wall would soon fall. The Soviet Union was retreating worldwide and on the verge of collapse. Democracy and capitalism were apparently the only viable political and economic systems remaining. Freedom—both political and economic—had prevailed.

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.

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.

Commentators often spoke of a breach of the “social contract” between employees and employers. But the termination of the social contract meant not just class war, but also a war of all against all. Television told sensational stories about gang wars in the inner cities, but the state of nature prevailed in perhaps more subtle ways in the suburban office park as well. By the middle of the decade, “communitarian” social thinkers were already wringing their hands over a culture of atomized, grasping selfishness, of an “individualism grown cancerous.” In his 1990 postmortem on the Reagan years, The Politics of Rich and Poor, the Republican strategist and former Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips characterized the economic and social conditions of the era as “Darwinian.” For a putative boom time, there was an unusually high rate of business failure and bankruptcy. 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.

The electorate believed Reaganism’s promise and sunny optimism, but it left the country battered productively and rudderless ideologically. Gramsci famously remarked that in the “interregnum” when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born … a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Such an interregnum, he believed, would also provide an opening for “violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’”

Duke freely admitted to his past Klan membership, which, as he pointed out, he shared with many respectable public figures like Robert Byrd, but he denied ever being a Nazi. When inconvenient photographs reemerged of him in a brownshirt’s uniform on the LSU campus with a sign reading GAS THE CHICAGO 7, Duke claimed that such antics constituted a “teen-aged stunt” and “a satire” rather than “a defense of totalitarianism.” Absurd defenses such as these aside, his platform was undeniably shot through with thinly veiled anti-Black racism: he denounced “welfare dependency,” affirmative action, and minority “quotas.” He put a eugenic spin on these issues, calling for a reduction in “the illegitimate welfare birthrate that is bankrupting us economically and is the source of much crime and social ills.”

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 smaller producers of this coalition would also “require protection against cheap imports and access to the raw materials and resources of the Third World, and they are less committed to international stability than to the continued predominance of the United States.” Francis also believed that the old conservative preference for Congress and the courts should be abandoned, and the right should instead pursue what he called a “Caesarist” embrace of executive power: “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.”

Pat Buchanan had a soft spot for the idyllic 1950s, but for the most part the whole postwar period was a scandal to the paleo mind. They traced their lineage to isolationist, prewar America Firsters. The New Deal, the Second World War, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, immigration, the New Left, the Vietnam War, opposition to the Vietnam War—all these things were deeply regrettable to the paleos and had changed American society almost beyond recognition. If the neocons held up mid-century New York as the height of U.S. civilization, the paleos wanted to go much further back: to the 1920s at least, and preferably back to the nineteenth century, to the world before Lincoln and the Civil War. While the neocons upheld statistical research and the social sciences, the paleo intellectuals were mostly humanists who detested “managerial” technocracy.

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.” Sobran: “Now that democracy has overthrown communism, we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.” Francis: “Serious conservatives ought to ponder … whether the failure of the Reagan experiment means that conventional conservative policies can be implemented in a mass democracy.” And Francis and Sobran urged their friend, who had flirted with the idea in 1988, to run for president.

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.

Other factors were recognized as well. The author Louise Bernikow traveled across the United States and interviewed three hundred people to write Alone in America: The Search for Companionship. Speaking to U.S. News and World Report in 1986, she painted a grievous picture of the country, a nation of loners, desiring connections but unable to find them. “Loneliness permeates the culture. Look at the ads. New York Telephone says: ‘Don’t be lonely, pick up the phone.’ AT&T’s recent ad campaign urged people to ‘reach out and touch someone.’” Bernikow identified “large social, economic changes behind the spread of loneliness: the decline of the social movements of the 1960s, the ease of divorce, the end of lifetime employment with one company and the rise of mergers and acquisitions and layoffs.” A decline in values and the new economic principles of the ’80s boom seemed to be equally to blame: “American life has become privatized. People are wrapped up in selfish, individual pursuits of material goods. We’re not often encouraged to value people.”

The idea that there were abandoned Americans still alive in Southeast Asia synthesized the pro-war and anti-war imagination: paranoia and distrust of government born of revelations about the intelligence agencies, Watergate, and the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia mingled with the sense that the country was stabbed in the back by cowardly and deceitful bureaucrats and liberal elites. The myth gave hope to the families of the 2,500 men still “unaccounted for”—a category that included those believed by the military to be dead—that their fathers and sons might still be alive. And it gave hope to the nation that its honor could be restored through the rescue—or the resurrection, really—of the lost men. What began as a public relations blitz had transformed into a veritable national cult. Perot positioned himself as a messianic figure in this nationalist cult of the undead. Here was a man who could overcome the traitors who had left America’s warriors behind, rescue the captives, and redeem the nation’s sense of loss and humiliation.

In 1981 Reagan named Perot to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where he quickly became a conduit for questionable information and dubious schemes. But perhaps more important to the administration, Perot was also a possible source of cash. Private money raised on behalf of POW/MIAs ended up being funneled by the National Security Council to anti-communist guerrillas in Laos. A National Security Council staffer, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, working with a covert Pentagon unit called the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), began to hit Perot up for ransom money to free the American hostages taken by Hezbollah in Lebanon and General James Dozier, who’d been kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy. In neither case did Perot’s money end up securing the release of the prisoners, but he came up with it happily. Perot also claimed that the government wanted him to organize a rescue attempt for Dozier. (The same secret DOD group—ISA—was also responsible for providing support for Bo Gritz’s Southeast Asian activities.)

“The West has failed so far to seize the moment to shape the history of the next half-century,” Nixon wrote. “If Yeltsin fails, the prospects for the next 50 years will turn grim. The Russian people will not turn back to Communism. But a new, more dangerous despotism based on extremist Russian nationalism will take power … If a new despotism prevails, everything gained in the great peaceful revolution of 1991 will be lost. War could break out in the former Soviet Union as the new despots use force to restore the ‘historical borders’ of Russia.”

Buchanan wanted to go to one of the closed General Motors plants to set a dramatic scene of American decline. But United Autoworkers Local 1776 refused to let him have his photo op and locked him out. Bush had run an ad in Michigan saying that Buchanan drove a Mercedes-Benz. Buchanan admitted that he did drive the German car and that he considered the three Cadillacs he had owned over the past two decades “to be of poor quality.” The workers inside the union hall heckled him as he stood out in the snow and shouted back, “Come out and talk to me.” In its dreary Alamo, American organized labor made a last stand against the phony patriotics of America First populism.

the tape that showed a Black motorist named Rodney King being swarmed and beaten by four LAPD officers—Theodore Briseño, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, and Thomas Wind—while dozens more stood nearby. At first King is prone, and he suddenly gets up in what looks like an effort to escape or the response to a shock. He later said he was scared for his life. The officers claimed that King was attempting to charge them. Then the cops start to beat and kick him—fifty-six times in all as he lay flat or tried to crawl away. The wires of a taser are visible. An overhead LAPD helicopter obscures almost all the sound, but the metal baton blows were so hard that a clear clink on the pavement from one of the strikes across King’s legs can be made out on the video. Emergency room physicians later reported that King’s fillings had been knocked out by the blows. One of King’s eye sockets was shattered; his cheekbone was fractured, his leg broken; there were burns where the stun gun had been used; he had a concussion and nerve damage in his face. The negligence suit that King would file alleged “11 skull fractures, permanent brain damage, broken bones and teeth, kidney damage, and emotional and physical trauma.”

That phrase—“the thin blue line”—was Parker’s invention and the core of his philosophy of policing. On the one side were the forces of disorder, on the other was the public; in between them stood the police: “Between the law-abiding elements of society and the criminals that prey upon them stands a thin blue line of defense—your police officer.” Civilization itself was under threat by internal enemies. “Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome rose, then fell, as strength gave way to weakness, alertness gave way to complacency, and virtue gave way to corruption,” Parker explained to the National Automatic Merchandising Association in 1952 in a speech titled “Invasion from Within.” “It is interesting, and perhaps productive, to recall that the high walls of these civilizations were never toppled by barbarians from without. But the walls crumbled into rubble and the enemy poured through when BARBARIANISM within rotted the moral supporting timbers.

In an article for Police Chief magazine, he wrote, “It is the premise of some eminent theologians that man is inherently corrupt. If such is the case, there is an inherent tendency on the part of humankind to engage in improper courses of behavior that will include activities that have come to be labeled as criminal.” He spoke of the “melancholy” and “despair” implicit in this view. If humanity could not be improved, at least there was the nightstick. “Lacking the ability to remedy human imperfection, we must learn to live with it. The only way to safely live with it is to control it. Control, not correction, is the key.”

Then there was Donald Trump, another arriviste who emerged from the outer boroughs’ squat, humble dwellings for the lower-middle class into the adamantine canyons of Manhattan. Less predator than scavenger or parasite, Trump took advantage of the openhanded giveaways to developers in the wake of the city’s fiscal crisis and feasted on the decaying hulk of the city. Trump Tower was built with the helpful assistance of S&A Concrete, a joint venture of the Genovese boss “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. The three men shared a lawyer in Roy Cohn, who generously provided his town house living room for a meeting between Trump and Salerno to work out the details of the contract. Trump quickly grew tired of building and engaged in an orgy of acquisitions beyond his means. By 1992, his empire had collapsed under the weight of unserviceable debt, a victim as much of his own prodigality as the recession in the real estate market. Appropriately, he ran aground in Atlantic City, a casino town past its prime. Meant as a bid for legitimacy and belonging in the city patriciate, Trump Tower became a favorite place of residence for organized crime figures. By the early ’90s Trump and his second wife, Marla Maples, had become the butt of jokes and tabloid fodder, apparently with their own encouragement. Negative attention was better than no attention. While Trump raged against the accused rapists in 1989, in 1992 he was giving press conferences offering a scheme in which convicted rapi...