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

by John Ganz

Militant anti-communism had long provided the glue that bound the various factions of the right together and gave them common purpose. The loss of the USSR was so traumatic that the John Birch Society went into full-blown denial: they insisted that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a KGB ploy to get the West to drop its guard. Who was to be the main enemy now? The answer increasingly was one another. As

And a month later, in The New York Review of Books, Wills put his finger on the center of Buchanan’s speech: “While some are talking about postwar conversion problems in terms of phasing out the cold war military establishment, Buchanan thinks of conversion as a turning of energies from an outer enemy to an inner one.”