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

by John Ganz

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.