The Origins of Trumpism and the Birth of the Present

Reflections on the pre-history of Trump’s rise, the peculiar nature of Trumpism, and the radical politics of white despair – based on John Ganz’s masterful "When the Clock Broke"

In late 2018, the magazine The Baffler published an essay by John Ganz titled: “The Year the Clock Broke: How the world we live in already happened in 1992.” It was a revelation. The essay focused on the “backlash populism” that propelled David Duke to elected office in Louisiana and got him remarkably close to becoming a U.S. senator in 1990 and governor of Louisiana in 1991. It told the story of the rise of the paleoconservatives who, led by Pat Buchanan, challenged the conservative establishment in the 1992 Republican primaries. It dissected the wave of white anger, resentment, and despair that allowed these forces to advance significantly towards the power centers of the Right – even if it wasn’t quite enough to win. Not yet. Not with these leaders.

When Ganz’s essay came out, historians had only just begun to approach the 1990s as history. Historicizing the very recent past is a formidable challenge. If taken seriously, “historicizing” aims at developing an understanding of a period that goes beyond contemporaneous interpretations and perceptions, that situates the era within a broader context and diagnoses its distinct historical significance. This process usually requires some intellectual distance, something that is harder to gain when the object of study offers so many similarities to the present, when we tend to still think of and describe the world we experience around us in the same terms as what isn’t really “history” yet. Historians certainly tend to approach the very recent past with quite a bit of trepidation.

But with “The Year the Clock Broke,” John Ganz made an emphatic plea that we urgently needed to explore the early 1990s as a moment of immense historical significance. The essay didn’t shy away from emphasizing obvious parallels to the Trumpian present, but it also was adamant that the year 1992 presented a very peculiar constellation. It illuminated the past as both pre-history of the familiar and harbinger of things to come while also paying attention to the historically specific, contingent factors that shaped these events.

Six years later, John Ganz has turned his Baffler essay into a book: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and how America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s was published last week. It deserves all the attention it is getting, as every major newspaper and magazine in the country has been writing about it. With this book, Ganz delivers the most illuminating pre-history of Trump’s rise, one that propels our understanding of what Trumpism is, where it comes from, and why it appeals to so many people forward in crucial ways. But yet again, Ganz offers so much more than “just” a pre-history. He takes this moment seriously: It was not the “end of history” as much as it was an incubation period – a very peculiar political, economic, social, and cultural constellation that, in many ways, birthed the present.

Many people may know John Ganz from his newsletter Unpopular Front, in which he dissects our politics and culture with remarkable clarity. Ganz knows history and theory, he is an excellent, even artful writer, and most importantly, he is an independent thinker. While he is unmistakably on the Left, Ganz is certainly not calibrating what he says or writes by where it will place him in the discourse, he doesn’t bother trying to appease this or that faction. What has made his writing an indispensable resource, for me, is the fact that Ganz thinks in innovative and creative ways, which enables him to push the boundaries of our understanding of the political moment.

When the Clock Broke, his first book, presents a history of American society, politics, and culture in the early 1990s. Ganz starts with David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and America’s most infamous Neo-Nazi, entering the Louisiana state legislature in 1989, then running for U.S. senate in 1990 and for governor in 1991 – without success, but winning a majority of the white vote both times. In thirteen chapters and almost 400 pages, When the Clock Broke focuses on the year 1992. The election campaigns of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot provide the through line. But the scope and the ambition of the book is much broader. We get precise biographical portraits of all the main figures, and Ganz’s cast of characters extends well beyond those who are running for election. Paleoconservative thought leader Sam Francis and rightwing “paleolibertarian” Murray Rothbard play a crucial role, representing the far-right intellectual sphere. The reaction to the Rodney King riots was shaped by Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates who, just like his predecessor William H. Parker, embodied the paramilitary vision of a police force that rejected any democratic supervision. We meet Randy Weaver and his family and follow their descent into a paranoid world of conspiracies, “Christian Identity,” and rightwing extremism, culminating in the siege at Ruby Ridge. And we examine New York City in the midst of a dramatic recession and violent crime wave, as mafia boss John Gotti becomes a folk hero and Rudy Guiliani leaves moderate Republicanism behind for grievance populism. Through it all, When the Clock Broke explores not just the politics of the early 1990s, but also the intellectual landscape, the economic situation, and the pop cultural representations. In fact, Ganz writes beautifully about the emergence of gangster rap and grunge as reactions to the same perceptions of despair and depression and elegantly uses the triumph of TV talk shows and talk radio as a way to discuss what contemporaries called the “loneliness epidemic.”  

The underlying theoretical inspiration for the book comes from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Reflecting on the rise of Mussolini fascism around him, Gramsci theorized a “crisis of hegemony” as a moment when, as Ganz quotes in his book, “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.” Following Gramsci, Ganz diagnoses that “the sudden loss of faith and credit in the American system was the acute onset of just such a crisis of hegemony.” The majority of the electorate had bought into Reaganism. But instead of wealth and triumph, it had brought societal and economic devastation – “it left the country battered productively and rudderless ideologically,” Ganz argues. When the Clock Broke certainly makes an excellent case that America in the early 1990s was, to use Gramsci’s term, stuck in such an “interregnum,” famously the time for monsters, when “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” and dangerously charismatic “men of destiny” rise.

Ganz offers a broad canvas. But he never loses sight of what he is most interested in: The populist, extremist forces that were stirring, but didn’t quite break through, certainly didn’t succeed in bringing the system down yet. The counter-revolution failed, but it nevertheless had a lasting impact. When the Clock Broke is a pre-history of our Trumpian present, undoubtedly. It even ends with Donald Trump, who has multiple cameos throughout the book, in the back of a limo on the way to Atlantic City, accompanied by the architect Philip Johnson. With this scene, Ganz closes out his book: “’You’d make a good mafioso,’ Johnson said. ‘One of the greatest,’ Donald replied.” And yet, Ganz does not give us facile analogies or easy genealogies. He offers a dissection of the American condition in that particular moment “when the clock broke.”

When the Clock Broke has occupied my mind for quite some time. In early June, political theorist Laura Field and I organized a roundtable on the book at the American Political History Conference at Vanderbilt University for which we were joined by Nicole Hemmer, Jamelle Bouie, and John Ganz himself. You don’t – or rather: I won’t – often get a chance to bring such a panel together, and that alone would have elevated the book to special relevance for me. But beyond the event, the book represents a crucial intervention into most of the questions I care and worry about: The nature of Trumpism and how to situate it in the broader context of U.S. history; what’s happening on the American Right and how that relates to its recent past; the role of the rightwing intellectual sphere; the challenge of how to approach, research, interpret, and tell the pre-history of the present; and what we can “learn,” if that is indeed the right term, from such a historical perspective – what it changes about our understanding of the world we experience around us right now. Rather than writing a review, in a classical sense, I would like to share some big-picture thoughts and observations the book has sparked.

The nature of Trumpism

Let’s tackle the orange elephant in the room right away: The book’s perspective on the early 1990s is undoubtedly shaped by the experience of Trumpism, and if you read it, it is inevitable you’ll read it through the lens of Trump. Not only is he (albeit a minor) character in the book: There is evidently a proto-MAGA dimension to a lot of what is happening here.

Unsurprisingly, the discourse surrounding the book heavily focuses on this aspect, on When the Clock Broke as a pre-history of Trump’s rise, and ultimately a commentary on Trumpism today. A review in the Boston Globe was titled “In John Ganz’s ‘When the Clock Broke,’ finding the roots of today’s unrest in the early 1990s”; the headline of an interview Ganz did with Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker read: “The American Election That Set the Stage for Trump.” When Ganz was a guest on the Erza Klein podcast a while back, the host moved the conversation quickly towards the present and focused on the reasons why Trump has been able to dominate the Republican Party.

Ganz is indeed offering a distinct interpretation of Trumpism as a political and cultural phenomenon. It builds over the entirety of the book and emerges from the author’s continuing reflections on what, exactly, makes Trumpism so potent, what distinguishes Trump from the rightwing populists that came before him who, at the end of the Cold War, were ultimately kept in check. In Ganz’s interpretation, the insurgency figures of the early 90s embodied different projects and promises. David Duke and Pat Buchanan represented the ethno-nationalist vision of “real America” as a white Christian homeland; Ross Perot offered “billionaire populism,” combining celebrity, wealth, and anti-establishment furor; and mafioso John Gotti became a folk hero because he stood for a weirdly comforting form of “gangster patriarchy” and personal mob rule. All three, as Ganz put it at our Vanderbilt event, offered a version of “national coherence that was based on exclusive, strong leadership.” It broadly appealed to people – to white men, specifically – as an antidote to the feeling of decline and despair, an alternative to the lonely individualism of the post-Reagan capitalist society and the confusing, threatening pluralism of modern democracy. These were visions of a kind of national community in which a strong leader – a “man of destiny,” in Gramsci’s terms – made sure that the “right” kind of people were included and the “others” (women, minorities) were blamed and put in their place.

There are many reasons why these political projects failed to upend the establishment in the early 1990s. The circumstances weren’t quite dire enough socio-economically, Ganz emphasized at our Vanderbilt panel – not for most white Americans, at least, to whom these political promises appealed. But the country has since undergone another round of de-industrialization. More importantly, three decades of significant demographic change have been fueling white grievance: If one regards multiracial, religious pluralism as a threat, it is a much more acute one today than at the end of the Cold War.

From Ganz’s interpretation, a more contingent component of the overall explanation emerges that complements more structural factors: The promise of nationalist coherence did not have a unifying champion in the early 1990s yet, the different elements of a politics of despair were still scattered. But Donald Trump represents “a kind of synthesis of all these different features,” as Ganz argues. He is the white nationalist, the billionaire populist, and the gangster patriarch, all in one grievance-driven package. This, to me, is the most compelling paradigm of the nature and appeal of Trumpism yet.

A “history of losers” in the post-Cold War moment

It may sound paradoxical, but the reason why Ganz is able to deliver such an incisive interpretation of Trumpism is that he is very much not reducing the early 1990s to the status of a pre-history of Trump’s rise. When the Clock Broke does not offer a simple origin story, it doesn’t indulge in a simplistic “This is how we got from there to here” genealogy. The book is definitely predicated on the idea that the events and developments of 1992 stands in some kind of significant relationship to the present, that studying this moment is instructive, that is provides a meaningful reference point. But it also takes the past seriously in its own right. It is dedicated to exploring a very specific constellation – shaped by the devastations brought about by Reaganism, severe shifts in the country’s economy, and the End of the Cold War that generated, among the political establishment, a complacent sense of liberal democracy’s inevitability, when it actually created the conditions for a more open, more explicit anti-democratic politics to (re-) gain mainstream credibility.

Whatever else there is to say about Francis Fukuyama infamously diagnosing the “end of history” as the Berlin Wall was about to fall, he captured something crucial about this particular moment in the “West”: It was hard for mainstream observers to imagine anything but a liberal democratic future, a perpetuated status quo; most contemporaries quickly discounted the upheavals of the early 90s as just a blip. The political center eagerly bought into the posthistorical framework, the center-left parties that rose to power on either side of the Atlantic in the first post-Cold War decade certainly acted and governed as if the grand ideological struggles for a better world were a thing of the past, and all that was left to do was to manage efficiently, with the right kind of expertise – a non-ideological, non-political politics.

The biggest blind spot of the pervasive post-historical thinking was that it vastly overestimated the extent to which liberal democracy, in the form it existed across the “West,” was actually satisfying every individual’s desire to be recognized as equal. In the early nineteenth century, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had defined history as a series of conflicts or contradictions over what idea, what societal and political order would best satisfy this human desire for recognition. In his 1989 essay (and three years later in a book), Fukuyama argued that this struggle was over, as humanity had found the answer in liberal democracy, and no serious competitor remained that could reasonably claim to have any sort of comparably universal appeal for humankind. Therefore, with the end of the Cold War, humanity was witnessing the “end of history.”

But this diagnosis underestimated the severity of the conflict surrounding the claims for true equality, and how much resistance, “backlash,” and counter-mobilization the idea of equality engendered once it was extended beyond straight white men and beyond a formalistic understanding of equality to all spheres of life: the family, the public square, gender relations. It is not an external authoritarian foe, but the internal conflict over whether or not all human beings – regardless of race, gender, gender orientation, sexual orientation, or religion – should indeed have a right to be recognized as equal that is threatening the democratic project itself. A sizable portion of the electorate in most “Western” countries is evidently not on board with that vision, drawn to illiberal ideas that maintain certain hierarchies: between white people and people who are not white; between men and women; between Christians and people who are not Christian, between those who adhere to a binary understanding of gender and those who don’t.

When the Clock Broke takes this “posthistorical” moment seriously and powerfully dissects how the end of the Cold War opened the door for those who emphatically rejected liberal democracy, even as an aspiration, to move closer to the mainstream, and make their case to a mainstream audience more explicitly. Ganz quotes Joe Sobran, paleoconservative commentator, long-time columnist for National Review, Pat Buchanan’s confidant, and aggressive antisemite, who wrote: “Now that democracy has overthrown communism, we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.” For the rightwing protagonists of When the Clock Broke, democracy – any attempt of leveling what they insisted were natural hierarchies of race, gender, wealth – was the real enemy. To the hard Right, liberal democracy wasn’t the end of history, it was the end of the only version of America they were willing to accept. And for a brief moment, that claim found quite a bit of mass and mainstream approval, even if those who advanced it ended up losing. “This is a history of the losers,” John Ganz writes in the very first paragraph of the book. These ideas, protests, and movements didn’t succeed in the moment, but they nevertheless were historically significant. Ganz’s book offers, first and foremost, a careful and detailed dissection of the American condition in that precise, peculiar moment, and the despair and anger and grievance this particular constellation produced.

Conservatism, radicalism, and the lust for counter-revolution

All the protagonists on the Right in When the Clock Broke are convinced that it is not enough to be conservative, that a more radical politics is necessary to stem the tide of leftism, globalism, and liberalism. That is what David Duke and Pat Buchanan promised: The conservative establishment needed to go because they were simply not up to the task; time for something – and someone – a lot more radical.

This general diagnosis, this defining sentiment is most explicitly spelled out by the far-right intellectuals whose arguments John Ganz presents with wonderful clarity and dissects with surgical precision. Throughout the 1980s, Sam Francis argued that “the New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.” As a consequence, “the political style, tactics, and organizational forms of the New Right should find a radical, antiestablishment approach better adapted to the achievement of its goals.” In 1985, Francis called for “Revolution on the Right: The end of bourgeois conservatism.” As Pat Buchanan was gearing up for the 1992 New Hampshire GOP primaries, Francis was imploring him: “call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.” In the same vein, and also in early 1992, Murray Rothbard urged his fellow paleocons to, as Ganz explains, “stop calling themselves ‘conservatives … gentle souls who want to conserve what Left-liberals have accomplished’ and instead embrace the mantle of the ‘radical right’ or ‘radical reactionaries.’” As Rothbard put it, “nothing less than a counter-revolution” was needed to save America – Ganz explains: “His proposal for a far-right populist strategy was precisely the rejection of the politics of prudence, the genteel politics of respectability, in favor of rage, resentments, menaces, and affronts.”

When Buchanan dropped out and his counter-revolution failed, Francis was sure it was because “Pat remained simply too bourgeois and too Beltway.” Rothbard reluctantly endorsed Bush, but longed for more: “What would be soul-satisfying would be taking the offensive at long last, launching a counterrevolution in government, in the economy, and the culture, everywhere against malignant left-liberalism. When or where do we get to start?” After Clinton won the 1992 election, Sam Francis raged: “If there remain today any Americans who are not sheep, they’ll stop trying to hire phony populist gunfighters to save them from the wolfish bandits who run the country, and in the next four years they’ll start learning how to shoot for themselves.” Francis also described what he believed was the only way forward: “The first thing we have to learn about fighting and winning a cultural war is that we are not fighting to conserve something; we are fighting to overthrow something.”

To anyone who has been paying attention, the parallels to what is happening on the Right today are striking. I have written about this several times: The general sentiment that it is no longer enough to be “conservative,” that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics, is currently being echoed across the Right – among pundits, activists, politicians, intellectuals. People at the center of conservative politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, for instance, The Federalist published an instructive piece titled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” It pleaded with conservatives to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” John Daniel Davidson, the author of the piece and senior editor at The Federalist, was fully aware of the implications of what he demanded: “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

As Claremont-affiliated far-right thinker Glen Ellmers put it in an infamous essay published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, channeling the ghost of Sam Francis: “Conservatism is no longer enough.” Fittingly, the piece was published with a picture of a very manly-looking guy taping his fists, getting ready for a fight. Ellmers certainly embraced the idea of mobilizing the coercive powers of the state. But he also went much further, outlining a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Ellmers derided them as “zombies” and “human rodents.” For “authentic America” to survive, Ellmers was sure, a different kind of leader needed to emerge: “What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.”

What are we to make of these striking parallels between the early 1990s and today’s reactionary intellectual and pundit sphere? Such frustration with a conservative establishment that is supposedly too soft and calls for a more radical politics are indeed a constant, a defining feature of the modern Right. It is a reminder that the Right is best approached as a coalition of forces, ideas, people who struggle over how to respond to what they see as the existential the threat of multiracial democracy, with more extreme voices always trying to pull the coalition towards a more radical politics.

The question, then, is why these calls for a more radical politics were more successful at certain moments, why these revolutionary desires succeeded in some situations and constellations, but not in others? It directs our attention to the significant radicalizations of the Right in recent years: In the early 90s, the self-regarding counter-revolutionaries still existed mostly on the margins of mainstream politics, and Buchanan did not win the Republican nomination. Today, “Conservatism is not enough” has become the defining characteristic of even the rightwing mainstream.

Reactionary 90s nostalgia

John Ganz’s book will prompt you to think about the 1990s more broadly – a period I find endlessly fascinating (also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first decade I, born in 1982, can properly remember). There has been a lot of transnational 90s nostalgia in recent years – not just in the political discussion, but also culturally, in the broader public discourse. In late 2018, for instance, the British BBC published a broadcast titled “The 90s: A Holiday from History” – fully reveling in post-history that never was, with Anne Applebaum and Thomas Friedman serving as expert witnesses. Another theme in this nostalgic discourse is the idea that the 90s were the last good decade – because it supposedly had just the right amount, but not too much, of everything: A little bit of internet, for instance, but not yet today’s social media hell.

I don’t think the appropriate reaction to 90s nostalgia is to let the pendulum swing all the way to the other extreme and paint the decade as the worst in history. It wasn’t. But politically, 90s nostalgia often has a very clear valence: The battle-cry of reactionary / centrist anti-wokeism is precisely this: We reached the right amount of social and racial progress in the 90s – and everything since has been too much! That is explicitly the argument leading celebrity-thinkers of reactionary liberalism like Stephen Pinker make: The 90s were the Goldilocks zone of progress and equality. And after that came the horror of wokeism.

When the Clock Broke is an urgent reminder that political 90s nostalgia tends to perpetuate a warped, distinctly white male elite perspective that doesn’t hold up to a sincere assessment of the period’s historical significance. John Ganz presents a picture shaped by disillusionment and anger. But while this gloom and anguish extended far beyond white America, only the predominantly white, predominantly male despair was legitimized as a national crisis, blamed on minorities and women, and channeled into a politics of grievance and resentment that has come to completely dominate and define today’s Right.