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

by John Ganz

heralded “the total exhaustion of all viable systematic alternatives for Western liberalism”

worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

The attempt to expand Western standards of living to the rest of the world would lead very quickly to the exhaustion of non-renewable resources, the irreversible pollution of the earth’s atmosphere, drastic changes in its climate, and the destruction of the ecological system upon which the earth depends.”

He argued in his 1991 magnum opus, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, that the very notion of progress and optimism should be abandoned in favor of a more frugal and restrained model of human flourishing.

“Two out of ten women will go to bed with you, but you’ve got to ask the other eight,”

“a sense of resentment and exploitation, mainly economic but also broader, that is directed upwards as well as downwards,… distrust of decision-makers in state and economy as well as fear of the economically depressed,” and “the frustration of aspirations,… an alienation of loyalties and … a suspicion of established institutions, authorities, and values.”

described in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution: civilization would not pass from capitalism to socialism under workers’ control; instead a new exploitative ruling elite, the managerial class, was taking the reins of power the world over through their superintendence of growing state bureaucracies and corporations—Nazi

“Burnham and the Machiavellians saw politics—and to a large extent the human condition—in terms of savage and incessant struggle for power at all levels of society, regardless of how this struggle might be disguised by language, symbolism, and institutional forms.”

“men seek to dominate each other or to escape domination by others.”

for democracy, it was just “a special kind of disguised oligarchy based on commercial and industrial power and not fundamentally different from earlier kinds of elitism.”

The neoconservatives largely still upheld the liberal mythos of America as the land of Lincoln and FDR. Self-consciously the sons and grandsons of immigrants, they championed the America of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

excess. Some were realists about foreign policy, but many believed that the United States had an obligation to spread democracy around the world—even

Not only was its economic independence stripped away by the rise of corporate society, so too was its “Anglo-Saxon” and “Victorian” culture of sobriety and discipline.

“parasocial relationship” to describe the fantasy of intimacy and friendship that could develop between the audience at home and the host’s persona.

Often I think stars of the mass media don’t know themselves when they are being sincere or playing a part.

holding forth in his motormouthed Texas twang on the Persian Gulf War

“New-class theory enabled the right to attack ‘elites’ without attacking big business,” the cultural critic Christopher Lasch had tersely put it a year earlier in his book The True and Only Heaven.

“Jesse Jackson says, ‘Keep Hope Alive,’ but there is no hope, because they look at the leadership and they say, ‘Okay, to get along in American society, you have to be a sell-out, you have to put on a suit, talk like a white man, ask for what white people want, say what people like, to be successful.

behind. People wanted to talk about something else while seeming as if they were still addressing the serious issues. As always, symbols—actors, rappers, songs, movies, culture—were needed to stand in for complex issues.

The path to victory lay not in being Rudolph W. Giuliani, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, but in being “Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!” as the cops on Murray Street chanted. He’d have to foam at the mouth, rant and rave, go a little berserk: he’d have to become the human scream machine.

According to Margolis, the deal had been that the citizens would do something productive and in return would get a comfortable standard of living, rising prospects for their children, and protection “from most calamities.” At some point the “country opted out and the citizens know it. That’s why more than just the economy is troubled; the whole society is. A sense of security that blanketed most of it for decades has been snatched away.” This was obscured by the economic growth of the Reagan years, but when that growth stopped, that security went with it: “The reality was exposed. There is no deal. Without it, the United States is a different country, and an unhappier one.” The prospects of postindustrial life, of a nation of “knowledge workers,” seemed grim: “Making big, thick, heavy things can provide the average person with a pretty good wage. Sending electronic impulses rarely does.”

There’s a conception of the party on the one hand as a national populist movement on behalf of the Middle American working class, led by a Caesarist president, to smash the power of the “globalist” professional and managerial elite; and, on the other, as a radical libertarian project of administrative state demolition behind a populist facade.