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

Ganz, author of the newsletter Unpopular Front, debuts with a lucid and propulsive narrative of the failed right-wing populism at the fringe of the 1992 U.S. presidential election. According to Ganz, the discontent exploited by bigoted Republican challengers Pat Buchanan and David Duke and the proto–“drain the swamp” rhetoric of independent candidate Ross Perot laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. The book profiles these and other figures—including New York City mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani and mob boss John Gotti—and it’s woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary (left-leaning historian Christopher Lasch critiqued liberalism as an “infinitely expanding universe of spoiled consumers and bureaucrats,” Ganz writes, while hard-right economist Murray Rothbard hoped Buchanan would “break the clock of the New Deal” and “repeal the twentieth century”). Ganz’s dry wit is ever-present; describing how media coverage of the early-1990s culture wars eclipsed George H.W. Bush’s attempts to stoke the fight against Saddam Hussein, he writes, “Apparently the ‘New Hitler’ wasn’t as juicy a story as the incipient totalitarianism of literature professors.” The book’s highlight is a long chapter focused on New York City, which Ganz portrays as a breeding ground for strongman leadership by comparing Trump to Giuliani and Gotti as outer-borough “arriviste[s]” who celebrated personal liberty, but preyed on fear. This is a revelation. (June)