Portside

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s  
John Ganz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374605445

One would have thought these and other aspects of a confused and anxious American body politic could fuel a progressive insurgency, even with spoilsports like Francis Fukuyama proclaiming, in his widely disseminated 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that any ideology advancing progress was rendered moot by liberal democracy’s winning streak. But in hindsight, as Ganz’s whole book asserts, the era’s true insurgencies were animated from the right by a motley assortment of demagogues, reactionaries, hucksters, thugs, and race-baiters emerging from the margins of traditional politics to galvanize fearful, angry, disaffected, and (almost forgot) predominantly white Americans into thinking that, somehow, liberal democracy was their enemy and authoritarian rule may be not be a bad path for their teeter-tottering republic to follow.

As you read When the Clock Broke, your frontal lobe will keep flashing “Yikes!” at the uglier manifestations of the era’s racist and reactionary thinking, especially when Ganz provides deep background on such dark-side emissaries as “new-jack” Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, paleo-conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan, hard-case Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl Gates, and Ruby Ridge survivalist Randy Weaver. Yet he resists using even their worst impulses and outbursts as fodder for caricature, fashioning nuanced, detailed portraits with astute, energetic wit. 

His depiction of Gates rings with irony: the chief abetted the LAPD’s militarization and egregious use of force throughout the ’80s, and his tactics remained relatively unchecked until 1991, when a video of a brutal police beating of Black motorist Rodney King went public. Gates’s popularity suddenly plummeted, and not even the riots that followed the 1992 verdict exonerating the officers could restore his popularity. A referendum restoring civilian control of the LAPD passed by a 2-1 margin in 1992. But as Ganz often shows, such “progress” wasn’t unmitigated. (For starters, gun sales spiked in the riots’ wake.) 

Ganz’s most revealing and, thus, more alarming portrait emerges through the words and ideas of Sam Francis, editorial page editor of the conservative Washington Times, who wrote that the Los Angeles riots, if anything, justified the acquittal of the cops who beat King. “In a country . . . where the leaders’ only concern is massaging the resentments of minorities, somebody has to take nightstick in hand [sic].”

Behind Francis’s outburst here and elsewhere was hardcore white-supremacist ideology. He saw in David Duke’s unsuccessful 1991 campaign for Louisiana governor “a new political creed” that “accepts race as a biological and social reality, as opposed to the denial of race that both conservatives and liberals have endorsed.” As far back as 1982, Francis identified a “profound social movement” of “MARs” or “Middle American Radicals” motivated, in Ganz’s words, “by a sharp feeling of being exploited by and condescended to the rich and having to foot the bill for minorities.” Throughout When the Clock Broke, Ganz uses quotes from Francis’s columns to disquieting effect, demonstrating a right-wing rhetoric that cloaked the most insidiously racist sentiments in reasoned, if far from reasonable, language. 

Even if Duke was still a Klansman in his white-supremacist and anti-Semitic views, Francis thought he could carry them in a slicker, more media-savvy package that could connect with those disaffected MARs. But here Francis miscalculated, and Duke played no better on the national political stage than he did on Louisiana’s, pulling in around 119,000 votes in 1992’s nationwide presidential primaries, which wasn’t enough to gain any delegate support to challenge incumbent president Bush. 

The less slick, more caustic and belligerent Pat Buchanan, another Francis favorite, did better in his own 1992 presidential bid. He was getting media attention for the crowds he drew in New Hampshire and for early exit polls showing him neck and neck with Bush. (“Buchanan sailed into Duke’s wind and stole it completely.”) He ended up with 37 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. The problem was with women voters, who didn’t like Buchanan’s opposition to abortion and affirmative action—and didn’t care much for his bluff public demeanor. But, as Ganz writes, “to the frustrated and wounded American manhood of New Hampshire, Buchanan had undeniable appeal. Even if they realized that the textile mills weren’t coming back, Buchanan gave their despair shape and direction.” Keep this in mind when remembering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to restore long-lost coal-mining jobs and you understand how Buchanan’s politics of rage and resentment may have lost the battle but would eventually win the presidency.

Ganz excels at connecting dots. In surveying popular culture of the era, he even manages to bring up New York mob boss John Gotti and his 1992 conviction for several crimes, including murder, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Gotti had by then become a folk antihero, the “Dapper Don,” whose iron rule, however sordid and disreputable his activities, was seen by some idolaters as a sociopolitical ideal. The book climaxes with architect Philip Johnson (whose own far-right authoritarian-populist disposition led to enchantments in the 1930s with Huey Long and Adolf Hitler) reacting to Donald Trump’s bloviations by observing that Trump would make a “good mafioso.” Neither Johnson’s compliment nor Trump’s response—“One of the greatest”—should spoil anything for the reader. 

It also shouldn’t surprise readers that deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during the 1980s, including putting to sleep the Fairness Doctrine previously assured “reasonable opportunities” for opposing viewpoints, helped enable the proliferation of conservative talk radio. The bully-in-chief of this vast echo chamber of grievance was Rush Limbaugh, whose success helped embolden talk-radio hosts to go big and loud on political issues—and, by the by, helped enable a third-party candidacy in 1992 for a man who had mastered the trick of making his life look like a melodramatic tale of uplift.

Of the “con men” and “conspiracists” in the book’s subtitle, Henry Ross Perot Sr. is at once the easiest to comprehend and the hardest to pigeonhole. At times, this Texarkana-born billionaire seemed caught up in the hype fashioning him as one of Horatio Alger’s storybook protagonists, a pious striver from a hardscrabble background who grew up to become Davy Crockett, or a fronter just as legendary and indomitable. Other times he was willing to deflate his puffy persona to the point of calling himself “P. T. Barnum without the elephants.” By February 1992, the cult of Ross Perot as “populist tycoon” and independently wealthy action hero, boosted by his widely publicized crusade to find missing American POWs in Vietnam years after the end of the war (casting himself, Ganz writes, “as a messianic figure in the national cult of the undead”), had reached a near-feverish pitch; TV interviewer Larry King compelled Perot to admit his willingness to run for president, but only if he could see “some sweat” from those pressing for his candidacy. Perot embodied what would become a recurring archetype in American politics: the successful businessman professing he could run the country more efficiently than politicians. Though conservative, Perot was no hardcore ideologue like Buchanan. And though no shrinking violet, he directed his outrage toward those in power, especially the incumbent Republican president, George H. W. Bush, who now seemed more besieged than ever from all sides. 

A strange amalgamation was taking effect. Perot was making himself an outlet for all the anti-government furor of those who showed up for Buchanan’s rallies. But he was also putting forth opinions that at one point, according to Ganz, even tugged the lapels of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who, though not a candidate, was de facto leader of the Rainbow Coalition, acting as a power broker representing minorities, the poor, and traditional Democratic liberals. “There’s a lot we don’t know about [Perot],” Jackson said, adding: “When he questions going too fast on free trade with Mexico, when he talks about equal funding for all schools in public education, and freedom of choice for women on abortion, we need to listen.” 

Jackson’s fleeting interest in Perot was generated in part by his problems with the front-running Democratic candidate, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, described by Ganz as “the talented and favored son of a modest background.” The eventual winner of the 1992 presidential campaign was something of a political high-wire walker: in speech and manner, he looked like a genial, glad-handing good-ole-boy complete with the nickname of “Bubba.” But, in Ganz’s words, “in the year of populism and voter rage and ‘throw the rascals out,’ he was a dedicated elitist.” In any other year, Clinton’s jaunty cocktail of centrist politics, policy-wonk pragmatism, and slick folksiness would have made his presidential run a relative cakewalk. But Perot’s flinty, straight-talking, people’s-tycoon image was proving more potent than anything Bush or Clinton could counter with during their respective primary victories. Still, with nascent signs of Perot’s campaign growing more “erratic” as questions about his business practices cropped up in late spring, Clinton found a way to draw attention from both his competitors by coming on less like what voters expected of a liberal Democrat. Clinton had, after all, cast his lot with the Democratic Leadership Council, formed in 1984 in the wake of “catastrophic losses” in presidential runs by Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, believing, among other things, that “catering to minority groups” had become the party’s fatal flaw. (A counterpoint: maybe the real “fatal flaw” has been taking minority votes for granted, as Republicans did for decades after the Emancipation Proclamation. Yes, that actually happened a while ago.)

Three weeks after the rioting in Los Angeles following the not-guilty verdict in the Rodney King case, Sister Souljah, a hip-hop artist and activist, delivered the keynote at a Malcolm X celebration in Washington, DC, where her mostly young, mostly Black audience found communion with her assertions that their generation was “very frustrated” with older Black leadership. In a Washington Post interview, Souljah said the rioting had been “a black-on-white ‘rebellion,’ plain and simple and righteous.” Then added: “I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people.” Despite Souljah’s later protestations that she wasn’t advocating violence, only trying to explain the rioters’ motives, Clinton used part of his speaking time at a Rainbow Coalition conference in June to attack Souljah’s comments to the Post and her other, similarly provocative statements. “Jackson,” Ganz writes, “understood that he and his Rainbow Coalition, not Sister Souljah, was the real target.” Said Jackson: “The attempt to align me with her is an attempt to malign me with her.” But talk radio perked up with what its constituency saw as Clinton’s vilification of Souljah’s racially inflammatory language. Eventually, Jackson fell into line with the rest of the Democrats. But you can feel the acid coursing out of Ganz’s summation of what looks in retrospect like the kind of “high-tech lynching” Clarence Thomas less aptly accused the Senate Judiciary Committee of committing in interrogating his suitability for the Supreme Court. 

“Sister Souljah,” Ganz writes, “was Black, aggressive, young, putatively the representative of a culture and a people that white America feared. . . . She attempted to use her voice and assert herself, but in the end her name became a symbol, a signifier, a catchword. Her actual remarks are largely forgotten. Sister Souljah is now known for what Clinton said about her, not for anything she said herself.” To put it plainer, it was easier for Clinton to use Sister Souljah to get elected than to come up with language to express progressive ideals—or, for that matter, language as direct and forceful as that used by the far right to ridicule and demean those ideals. 

At this writing, another “Dapper Don” is awaiting sentencing for his conviction on thirty-four criminal counts in a trial whose impact on this fall’s election is in question. When the Clock Broke can’t help us determine what will happen in November. But it does show how the monsters of greed, cultural warfare, class resentment, and white grievance were awakened and unleashed in the first two years of the 1990s. It leaves us, or this reader, at least, wishing that these cultural and political forces hadn’t come spilling into our own moment, leaving American democracy teetering on a cliff. 

I don’t see it dissipating any time soon. Cons, crooks, and cranks will always be with us. And voters may well be as volatile as they were eight years ago—or, for that matter, thirty-two years ago, when there was, as now, an incumbent president with whom even supporters were underwhelmed. I’m with Mark Twain in thinking that History rhymes more than it repeats. But I also see in the push-pull of racial advancement and regression still another potential outcome: exhaustion. It may not happen as soon as one would like, but I’m betting that eventually Americans of all shades and classes will simply get bone-tired of raw nerves, empty bluster, and white noise. Pun, at least tentatively, intended.  

Gene Seymour is a writer living in Philadelphia.