Want to Understand the Right? Look to the 1990s.

In January 1992, an obscure group of conservative political activists calling itself the John Randolph Club held its second annual meeting in Washington just as primary season was getting underway. The Soviet Union had fallen a year before, and it might have seemed a time of triumph for the right.

Instead, the club meeting was dominated by a speaker — the libertarian Murray Rothbard — whose address took an unusually grim and militant tone. Rothbard devoted his speech to describing what he saw as a history of internecine conflicts within the conservative movement. Once, Rothbard argued, the right had been characterized by “fury and despair” at the “enormous acceleration of Big Government” brought by the New Deal. The liberal intelligentsia had mocked its passion as paranoia, and conservatives had been forced to mellow their stances. But by 1992, Rothbard said, the time for conciliation had passed. He called for the “right-wing populism” embodied by Pat Buchanan, whose “exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational” leadership would “short-circuit the media elites and reach and rouse the masses directly.” With Buchanan’s leadership, “We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. … We shall repeal the 20th century.” The purpose of the meeting was to endorse Buchanan for the presidency.

John Ganz’s sparkling new history of the 1990s right takes its title — When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s — from Rothbard’s speech. It’s a fitting phrase, for it speaks to the limits of the prior historical literature on the American right for thinking about our contemporary political moment. For one of the clocks that got broken in the 90s — one that scholars have been trying to fix ever since — was our chronological narrative of the history of American conservatism itself.

American conservatism has been one of the major preoccupations of political historians since the early 1990s, the very moment that Ganz chronicles. The first generation of scholars of American conservatism were drawn to their subject out of the shock of political defeat. As Alan Brinkley wrote in “The Problem of American Conservatism,” a 1994 American Historical Review essay that is often thought to have inspired the growth of the subfield, the reason for the absence of serious historical scholarship on the right was that liberal historians had grown complacent. They found it difficult at first to take seriously the election of Ronald Reagan: an actor, a lightweight, a fraud who failed to comprehend the complexity of political and economic life. Only his re-election in 1984 prompted a re-evaluation, out of which came the flourishing of scholarship on the American right.

Those scholars by and large treated postwar conservatism as a political mobilization that had to be taken seriously, with its own intellectual traditions, distinctive cultural institutions, and careful electoral strategies. They saw conservatism as a politics focused on free markets, anticommunism, and conservative Christianity — and on whiteness. In the wake of the civil-rights movement, conservatives were able to capitalize on racism, often under the cover of a putatively “colorblind” politics.

Recent years have seen a remarkable set of changes in the historical literature on conservatism, driven once again by changing political currents and especially by the rise of Donald Trump. When Trump first erupted onto the political scene, it was easy to dismiss him as a freak and a narcissist, a weird distraction from the politics that really mattered. But after his victory in 2016, and even more as he stands for re-election today, historians have been compelled to reckon with the meaning of Trumpism. Where did it come from? How does it relate to the history of the conservative movement?

One approach has emphasized continuity, seeing Trump as part of a long American tradition of far-right, nativist, and racially exclusionary politics. Some historians (for example, Linda Gordon) have looked deep into the country’s past to trace echoes of the present in earlier mobilizations of the radical right, such as the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Others — such as David Austin Walsh, whose new book Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right explores the complex relationship between mainstream conservatism and the far right, especially the antisemitic right, of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s — have parsed the reactionary patterns of conservatism in the mid-20th-century, looking at how supposedly moderate institutions such as National Review actually contained far less respectable impulses, engaging in a delicate dance with the extremists who had flourished in the 1930s.

Then there are those, like Ganz — a political writer and journalist who specializes in the history of the far right — who emphasize discontinuity. In the popular liberal imagination, the 1990s are often recalled as the glory days: a time of economic expansion and stock-market enthusiasm, when the newly born internet still seemed rife with utopian possibility and when triumph in the Cold War promised a new era of global prosperity and peace. But When the Clock Broke offers a starkly different interpretation of the decade, arguing that it is really the origin point for our present “politics of national despair.” Ganz opens by saying that his is a “history of the losers,” of “protests that exploded and dissipated, writers who toiled at the margins of American life, figures who became briefly famous or infamous and then were forgotten.” This is a framework that echoes Rick Perlstein’s landmark account of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 election campaign, one of the early and most important books in the history of the right, telling the story of how Goldwater’s stunning defeat anticipated Reagan’s 1980 victory.

But where Perlstein wrote about the roots of the free-market Reagan right among such figures as conservative radio host Clarence Manion and the Midwestern industrialists who founded the John Birch Society, Ganz is telling the stories of more recent figures like Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Rush Limbaugh — the stylistic, political, and intellectual progenitors of the Trumpian turn, whose conspiratorial, jeering political style emphasized nationalistic culture clash rather than Goldwater’s free-market libertarianism. In doing so, he helps us to see Trump as part of a post-1990s movement within American conservatism. This raises the question: If Trump had not emerged, would someone else have done so in his place? Trumpism, Ganz argues, can’t be reduced to tendencies always present in American conservatism; nor is it simply the latest iteration of a far-right tradition that has percolated beside the mainstream movement, persisting throughout the 20th century. It reflects a reaction in American politics to the successes of earlier conservatism and to the political dynamics of Reaganism.

Starting in the 1990s, Ganz writes, a group of activists, intellectuals, and politicians on the right “hoped to recast American democracy around the ‘negative solidarity’ of knowing who you hated and wanted to destroy.” They needed “a charismatic leader who would use his power to punish and persecute for the sake of restoring lost national greatness.” They were waiting for their man, and eventually they got him.

The 1990s exist on the edge of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as “the twilight zone between history and memory,” the space between “the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life.” Still close enough that they are very much part of our present politics and the lived experience of people in middle age today, the decade has receded sufficiently that it is possible to start to see how its developments shaped the world we live in now.

Ganz starts with a startling claim: that Reaganism, often touted as a victory for conservatism, was in fact a “failed political undertaking,” even as it was able to achieve its major goals in the short term. The sharp redistribution of income upward, the increasing difficulties of American manufacturing, and the need to justify the benefits of capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union (which had provided a unifying foil throughout the postwar years) left the country “battered productively and rudderless ideologically.” Over these years, Ganz argues, the end of the postwar “social contract,” the polarization of income, and the increasing insecurity of life for everyone outside of the elite meant not just “class war, but also a war of all against all.” The United States, he suggests, faced — and is still facing — a “crisis of authority,” in the philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s famous phrase: an “interregnum” in which the “old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

We are still living with the “morbid symptoms” (as Gramsci put it) of this interregnum today, but the 1990s, Ganz argues, were when they first started to present themselves. He traces Trump’s genealogy back to David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and college Nazi from Louisiana who lurched into the political mainstream with a series of failed bids for senator, governor, and ultimately president. (Along the way, he also wrote pseudonymous sex-advice manuals for women and developed a reputation for sleeping with the wives of fellow Klansmen.) The candidate once nicknamed “Puke Duke,” Ganz suggests, did not just represent the “old ghosts of the Klan”: He was the first of a series of political candidates who channeled racist grievance and antisemitic conspiracy to appeal to an angry white lower-middle class. Metairie, the central city in the district Duke first represented in the Louisiana state legislature, had bled manufacturing, oil and gas, and construction jobs over the 1980s, as the “pillared-and-porticoed houses near the country club” that were a bastion of traditional Republican strength prospered. Duke, according to Ganz, tapped into something different from George Wallace in 1968: a frustration and rage born of the cruelties and betrayed promises of the Reagan era, reflecting the sour disappointments of the 80 percent of the American public that saw its income decline over the 1980s. “If the ideals that I stand for are addressed, then I will be only a footnote in history,” Duke said after his narrow defeat for governor. “But if the deterioration of the white middle class continues, then I will be president.”

Rush Limbaugh and Ross Perot were other 90s political figures who were able to connect to the zeitgeist of resentment. Ganz places Limbaugh (and the surge in talk radio generally in the 1990s) in the context of fraying social bonds, suggesting the loneliness and anomie that powered the mocking, sneering tone of the radio hosts whose verbal style anticipated that of the internet. He is especially good on Perot, suggesting that the eccentric businessman synthesized two strands of political fantasy: cowboy individualism and corporate paternalism. Perot’s own career had been built in the interstices of the computer revolution. He’d started at IBM, but quickly broke away to found Electronic Data Systems, which brokered between firms that needed computers and those that owned massive mainframes they could rent or lease out to others. The company’s economic breakthrough came with the war on poverty, as EDS helped the federal government access the computer space it needed to administer Medicare and Medicaid. But Perot used his financial success to promote a workplace politics distinctly hostile to 1960s counterculture: no Afros, no facial hair, no alcohol at company functions, lie-detector tests as a condition of employment. People caught cheating on their spouses would be fired.

Perot became politically involved in the late years of the Vietnam War, when he linked up with a political movement of enraged veterans who believed the federal government had betrayed POWs left behind in Vietnam. Perot spoke at their rallies and built bamboo cages with life-size wax figures of soldiers surrounded by rats and roaches to display at protests at the U.S. Capitol, becoming a “messianic figure in this nationalist cult of the undead.” Perot lost in 1992, of course, but he got 18 percent of the popular vote, and Ganz suggests that the movement that backed him did not dissipate once he lost.

Betrayal was the leitmotif of this new politics. The collapse of farmland in the Reagan years led to the rise of survivalist extremists such as Randy Weaver and his wife Vicki, killed in a shootout at Ruby Ridge. (Ganz offers a virtuoso tour through the religious subculture that led to Christian Identity, the particular sect to which the Weavers belonged, tracing it back to British-Israelism, which holds that Anglo-Saxons, not Jews, are the true “chosen people” descended from Moses, and that the Jews have usurped their place.) In cities such as Los Angeles and New York, police departments took on a central role in advancing an intransigent politics of betrayal: This was the “thin blue line” that emerged after the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots in 1992, the largest such uprising since the 1960s. Those inspired by this reactionary fervor, Ganz suggests, no longer wanted “the law, university, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice.” Instead, they sought a restoration of “the old order that many longed for still, an order more real and deeper than the law, upheld by brute power.”

For Ganz, the crucial right-wing thinker of the early 1990s and the man who brought together these disparate intellectual strands is Samuel Francis, a Washington Times columnist who became one of Pat Buchanan’s main advisers and also worked for Sen. John East of North Carolina. Francis (a “loathsome toad,” to quote one journalist’s description) is a deeply unappealing figure. Ganz highlights his yellow teeth thanks to a pack-a-day Pall Mall habit. He apparently liked to describe himself as a fascist (using the Italian pronunciation, “FAH-schist”). In 1995, The Washington Times fired him when Dinesh D’Souza reported on comments Francis had made at a 1994 conference calling for white people to “reassert our identity and our solidarity” in “explicitly racial terms.” He then wound up as a leader in the Council of Conservative Citizens, an openly white-supremacist organization that traces its lineage to the segregationist Citizens Councils.

But in the 1980s and early 1990s, Francis was still within the fold of the semi-respectable right, and he gave voice to the deepening divides within the conservative movement during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. These rifts, as Ganz explains, were sociological as well as ideological. The neoconservatives included many formerly liberal intellectuals who had come to prominence in the movement in the 1970s. Writers such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz’s turn to the right had more to do with their distaste for the Great Society and the counterculture than with the welfare state of the New Deal. Unlike the Old Right that had backed Barry Goldwater, they were not libertarians (Kristol’s plea for conservative economics was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism”). Unlike the earlier isolationists, they were often idealistic and expansionist when it came to foreign policy. Many of the neocons were also Jewish, a fact which was troubling to the array of figures who called themselves “paleoconservatives” and who felt that they had been displaced by these upstarts as Reagan came to power. The paleocons objected to the role they thought the United States was being asked to play in a global political order; they wanted to go back to a world of America First.

Francis was allied with the paleoconservatives, but he was emphatically not a libertarian. Instead, he spoke for what he called the “middle-American radicals,” a group that he suggested was not an “objectively identifiable class” but was defined by a “subjectively distinguished temperament” — a mood of “resentment and exploitation, mainly economic but also broader, that is directed upward as well as downwards.” These were skilled and semi-skilled workers, small business owners and members of an older middle class, who were becoming proletarianized in the Reagan economy and were losing not only their economic position but their cultural authority. They had been displaced by a “new class” of academics, social workers, and do-gooders — what the conservative social theorist James Burnham called a “managerial regime of salaried technocrats and bureaucrats who promote a humanist and cosmopolitan myth.” A movement that spoke for “middle-American radicals” wasn’t even conservative, in the usual sense: “Viewed in this sociopolitical perspective, the New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one,” Francis wrote.

Francis thought this constituency — the “real victims” of the regime, a white working class that had been betrayed by Reaganism and was now motivated by the cold reality of “dispossession” and what this would mean for itself and its descendants — could be politically explosive. To win them over, the old laissez-faire doctrines would not do. Free markets and limited government had been the ideology of the old propertied entrepreneurs, but these “bourgeois issues” were no longer salient given their decline and irrelevance. A “strong governmental role” would be needed to protect the elderly, fight cheap imports, and support organized labor where it still existed, as well as subsidize construction and manufacturing. Francis called for constructing a new nationalism that would place these radicals at its center, one that would (as he put it) “synthesize the attention to material-economic interest offered by the left with the defense of concrete cultural and national identity offered by the right.” In 1985, even as his employer, Sen. East, sat on a Senate subcommittee on terrorism, Francis penned an essay celebrating what he called “the end of bourgeois conservatism.” By this he meant the emergence of “revolutionary” violence on the far right, such as Bernhard Goetz’s shooting of four Black men on the New York City subway, the assassination of Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg by neo-Nazis, and abortion-clinic bombings.

For Ganz, Francis was able to see and to articulate a new political formation coming into view. He anticipated not only Trump but the broader revolt on the right against neoliberalism that we see in figures such as Patrick Deneen and magazines such as Compact. In a way, their interpretation echoes what the historian Arno Mayer once characterized as the “historical problem of the lower middle class”: a constituency of people easily panicked in economic crisis, susceptible to a politics of “anger, scapegoating, and atavistic millenarianism.”

Ganz’s narrative stops in the mid-1990s, and it does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of the decade. Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America are not featured here, nor are the Koch brothers. He also ignores the various leftist mobilizations of the 1990s, from the growing movement against police brutality to quickening of the labor movement in the 1996 UPS strike and from the early revival of academic unionism to the anti-globalization mobilization that climaxed in Seattle. And of course the War on Terror — a crucial episode in the prehistory of today’s conservative moment, with its inflated rhetoric of danger and threat and its re-shifting of the politics of immigration — falls outside the chronology of the book. (For a broader history of the period, readers might consult Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.)

The real insight of When the Clock Broke is the way it names a break in the conservative tradition. That break sees the emergence of a politics of the right that frames itself in opposition to the free-market anticommunism that had powered the movement through the postwar years. The triumph of Reaganism could not help but lead to a reaction from the people it betrayed: the ones who thought that they would be helped but were instead hurt by the endless flow of the market. They had championed capitalism, but it turned out that capitalism had no interest in them. Out of their rage, a new reactionary politics would be born. We shall see what happens to this politics in the future. But Ganz’s book makes clear that it didn’t begin — and, more than likely, won’t end — with Donald Trump. Whatever the outcome of the presidential election in November, Ganz’s book suggests that it is unlikely to run its course for some time.