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

by John Ganz

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.