These uncertainties about a liberal future sit at the center of John Ganz’s accomplished debut, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. While many Americans in 1989 “believed they were witnessing the ultimate victory of liberal democracy,” Ganz notes, “others thought they were observing its death throes.” A whirlwind tour of the myriad right-wing insurgencies that punctuated the George H.W. Bush years, When the Clock Broke presents the post–Cold War United States not as a victorious empire but an ailing nation plagued by deindustrialization, racist militias, millenarian sects, extremist demagoguery, urban unrest, conspiracy theories, and generalized despair. If that sounds a lot like the Trump era, well, that’s precisely Ganz’s point. Trump’s election in 2016, he writes in his introduction, “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate in the period of this book.” The supposedly ascendant United States at the end of history, in other words, already demonstrated all the symptoms of its present maladies.
Over the past several years, Ganz has become known as an acerbic combatant in the often internecine political debates on social media, but his considerable talents are better appreciated in his Unpopular Front newsletter, which has offered everything from nuanced commentaries on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to deeply researched investigations into the history of France’s Third Republic. When the Clock Broke, which is an expansion of a 2018 essay Ganz wrote for The Baffler, replicates this approach. Like Unpopular Front, it showcases sophisticated political argumentation, erudite prose, enviable rigor, and a depth of knowledge.
A historian outside the academy and a political journalist without a staff job, Ganz invites comparisons to Rick Perlstein, who is thanked in the acknowledgments and whose cover blurb proclaims Ganz as “the most important young political writer of his generation.” Like Perlstein, Ganz tends to use an immersive approach to writing about the past: When the Clock Broke not only recounts but seeks to approximate the experience of living through 1989 to 1993.
Functioning almost as a sequel to Perlstein’s acclaimed multivolume history of the conservative movement from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, When the Clock Broke is similarly concerned with the nation’s rightward drift and wants to understand where it came from. “American democracy is often spoken of as being in peril. This book by and large agrees with this thesis,” Ganz writes. “Others point out that democracy in America never fully existed in the first place: for them, it has always been a nation enchained by great inequalities and ruled by an unrepresentative system designed largely to keep those chains in place. This book also agrees with that thesis.” In When the Clock Broke,Ganz pursues both of these arguments, emphasizing throughout not only the emerging villains but also the circumstances out of which they emerged. The origins of our times, he reminds us, have their own origins in the longue durée of American history.