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

by John Ganz

Although they were often white members of the lower middle class or “skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar workers,” these MARs are “less an objectively identifiable class than a subjectively distinguished temperament.” That attitude involved a sharp feeling of being exploited by and condescended to by the rich and having to foot the bill for minorities: “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.”

Although he admired and honored the man as he had Nixon, Buchanan envisioned an expansive frontier beyond Gipperism: “The greatest vacuum in American politics,” he said, “is to the right of Ronald Reagan.”

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.

As a result of all this, the “new nationalism” would not “dwell on limiting the size of government but rather on the issue of who and what controls the government”; its purveyors should seek to seize the state and combat the elites who had effected the middle class’s “dispossession.” Of course, if this white middle class no longer possessed a distinct cultural ethic and lacked a shared economic basis, it was unclear what identity it still possessed other than being white.

“Gotti’s a satanic sort of authority figure.” When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority than the type Giuliani had represented up to that point. It didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit. The institutions had failed, the welfare state had failed, the markets had failed, there was no justice, just rackets and mobs: the crowd didn’t want the G-man dutifully following the rules, and it didn’t want to be part of the “gorgeous mosaic”; it wanted protection, a godfather, a boss, just like the undertaker at the beginning of The Godfather. Gotti was not really a figure of revolt and anarchy at all, he was a symbol of order, the old order that many longed for still, an order more real and deeper than the law, upheld by brute power. The papers made much of Giuliani’s use of “obscenity” in his speech. Giuliani understood that the voice of real authority was obscene. Maybe all the city’s fractious parts came together to make a mosaic, but it was in the form of an icon of John Gotti, a negative spirit of the city as a warren of rackets, mobs, and grasping, fighting individuals. And if Giuliani wanted to be mayor, he’d have to light a candle at the altar.

The United States’ economy, to begin with, yes, but also its culture, its confidence, its sense of what it is. And the country is in bad shape because it broke the deal.” 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.”

“If they don’t go after the Perot voter like Clinton is, they’ll be in the wilderness for a long time,” Luntz warned the Republicans. Luntz’s research found that Perot’s vote had become steadily more male, more conservative, less educated, and less well-off as Election Day approached. He counseled the Republicans to pursue “economic or political reform issues; speak to the forgotten middle class; speak in plain, non-political English; avoid ideological labels; cast doubt on Clinton’s honesty.”

In May, Sam Francis gave a presentation at a conference on “Winning the Culture,” which had been organized by Pat Buchanan’s new American Cause foundation. “The first thing we have to learn about fighting and winning a cultural war is that we are not fighting to conserve something; we are fighting to overthrow something,” Francis began. To effect this overthrow, he told his audience, they had to look to the left, since the conservative tradition was focused “on the defense of existing authority.” The figure the right should refer to was “the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, whose idea of ‘cultural hegemony’ has facilitated the cultural revolution that the enemies of American civilization have pulled off in the last half century.” According to Francis, Gramsci’s idea “recognizes that political power is ultimately dependent on cultural power—that human beings obey because they share, perhaps unconsciously, many of the assumptions, values, and goals of those who are giving them orders—and, second, that in order to challenge the dominance of any established authority, it is necessary to construct a countervailing cultural establishment, a ‘counter-hegemony’ (or, as the New Left called it, a ‘counterculture’) that is independent of the dominant cultural apparatus and is able to generate its own system of beliefs.” This insight had been shared by others as well: “It is interesting to note that Adolf Hitler seems to have conceived much the same idea in the aftermath of his fail...