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

by John Ganz

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...