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"
"The 90s were the Goldilocks zone of progress and equality. And after that came the horror of wokeism"
The two paragraphs around this quote got me thinking about Friends and Frasier and other 1990s shows we rewatch from streamers as nostalgic and comforting TV. A lot of the jokes in Frasier -- about gay characters, or the idea that Frasier or Niles might be gay or mistaken for gay, or slutty Roz, or ANYTHING about Maris -- landed differently with me hearing them again in the 2020s compared to the golden 1990s of my yout'.
Thomas, thanks for sharing your analysis and thoughts, much appreciated!
Thanks for this, Thomas. Interesting that your personal link to the 90's tracks with my personal link to the 60's per our respective ages. Not nostalgia, but a recognition of the power of awakening that a certain life stage can bring.
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful read of Ganz's book, and the explication of his thought and practice. Having both the lived experience of the 90s (as a federal employee) and as someone who studied political philosophy and governance, Ganz chose the right time to look at to explore what changed and why it changed, with liberal democracy in the United States. It's not the only moment that deserves review -- the Nixon to Reagan interregnum, and the beginning of the Reagan Revolutions is equally important, as is the application of authoritarian-light populism of the GWB era. I'm looking forward to reading the book, and appreciate that we're having this conversation now.
Gantz's When the Clock Broke and your review are spot on from the perspective of this criminologist born in 1948 who has written two books on Trump published in 2022 and 2024, which argue similarly historically, ans synergistically the same types of analysis.
TZ and your Democracy Americana have recently become among my favorite reads and I have been integrating your words into those of my own. As in my most recent Salon piece over the weekend that takes up to the present moment as we await Thursday's night debate:
"far right radical revolutionary" - there's a seven letter word for that word salad: starts with and "f" and ends with a "t".
This is all nothing new on the Right. Doubt me? Go read Jacob Heilbrunn;s "America Last: The Right's Love Affair With Foreign Dictators" (Buchanan is a star player, learning from all the Old Right Nazi lovers and Fascist fanbois of Mussolini). This has been going on at least since the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. Rick Perlstein's quadrilogy history of the rise of the Right in the last half of the 20th Century is also excellent: "Before the Storm" (Goldwater); "Nixonland" (you know who), "The invisible Bridge" (rise of Reagan) and "Reaganland". James Garner had a good two word definition of the ol' Ray Gun: "Amiable dunce." Having met him in 1974 when he was governor, my opinion is that Garner was being generous. Reagan was the performing monkey for the dark forces making those strange noises behind the curtain.
Since he was pre-Alzheimers while running in 1980 and had diagnosed Alzheimers ascending in strength for a minimum of 5 of his 8 years in office, yeah he was a sock puppet,mostly. An actor reading his lines and playing a role. The one thing he did good was that because he loved movies, he watched "The Day After" and it had its intended terrifying effect on him. After that, he got serious on nuclear controls and reductions, at just the time a Soviet leader appeared who he could deal with.
Trumpism is just the latest in a long pipeline of malignant ideologies that have come to a head. The main difference right now being that the dog whistle has been swapped with a megaphone/bullhorn.
Slavery => Confederacy => Ku Klux Klan => Jim Crow => Southern Strategy => "Welfare queens" => Fox News => Tea Party => MAGA / QAnon / Proud Boys
Thanks for this torture. Six months waiting from pre-order to this past week's delivery of Ganz's book, and you've already inhaled it AND put out this excellent overview! Curse your available reading time!
This is all interesting, and I'm sure it's a good book (which I haven't read), but based on this and other discussions of the book, I have to think that y'all are too egghead-ish about the whole thing. I just don't think that relatively obscure intellectuals are that important
To my mind, the 90s' precursor to MAGA is the 1993 movie "Falling Down," ironically almost as much for its shortcoming as for its main theme. It's main theme, of course, was the angry white man, but in the end the film flinched and explained away this angry white man as a domestic abuser. This pigeonholed the character as a caricature of the kind of deformed version of masculinity that liberals love to fault for many of society's woes, and deprived his anger of legitimacy. For anyone who, like me, was inclined to identify with the guy's anger, our anger intensified by being caricatured as domestic abusers too. Neither the filmmakers nor the intelligentsia had the courage to face the raw anger on its own terms, but reduced it to an aberrant masculinity that fit neatly into the liberal's condescending ideology. This suppression of genuine grievances was bound to erupt.
And it did erupt politically with Newt Gingrich in 1994, which was eventually followed by the Tea Party. Yes, these were both ostensibly somewhat traditional conservative movements, but that wasn't their animating emotional force. This animating emotional force was animosity toward liberal elites, initially personified by the Clintons and then again by Obama. With them you had the quintessential Ivy League lawyers who had never worked real jobs or run real businesses their entire lives telling the people who had how to run their lives.
Throw in Hillary Clinton's Politics of Meaning speech in 1993. Actually, the whole idea of the politics of meaning is about as close to an accurate diagnosis of Trumpism as it gets. Trumpism is NOT a political movement. The MAGA faithful are rarely even informed about issues, much less have strong opinions about them. For them, the movement is closer to a religious crusade, an attempt to discern or impose some meaning on the national experience consistent with their feelings of exclusion and belittlement. The opening for this movement was created by what Robert Bellah called the third great crisis of American Civil Religion--and a crisis that I don't believe has been adequately addressed. Trump offers his followers a revisionist meaning of America consistent with their grievances, and has emerged as their cult leader as a result. But none of this is political in any narrow sense.
Yet it was Hillary--the very person who later called the MAGA faithful "deplorables"--talking about the politics of meaning. From her it had no credibility. No way were any of the "deplorables" going to listen to her about meaning. Indeed, her first main failure was to get a comprehensive healthcare reform passed. It wasn't the policy that so many objected to as it was the person spearheading the policy. Something similar happened when Obamacare finally passed. Obamacare was actually modeled on a Republican policy initiative, but spearheaded by Obama, the backlash was fierce.
None of this is political, and none of it is rational in the way rationality is usually understood. It's cultural and even religious, a matter of meaning and purpose, as well as inclusion in and exclusion from the national project.
Funny how you skip right over GWB in your analysis here. As if lying the country into war in 2004 & crashing the economy in 2008 has nothing to do with any of this, as if a 1993 HRC speech nobody remembers explains anything. FFS. GWB is the man who engineered the final hollowing out of bourgeois conservatism. He had plenty of idiots to staff the green zone but none to send to New Orleans when it was drowning, live on TV. And Romney’s candidacy was the cherry on top of the intellectually & culturally dead R party. Trump was able to take over the party only because its own elites ran it into a ditch.
But “it’s all Hillary’s fault” is so much easier, isn’t it?
Mine was just a late-night comment off the top of my head, not a developed essay, but yeah, I think there’s more interpretive bang for the buck to be gotten from focusing on cultural themes than political ones. Personally, I hated GWB with a passion and figured that there may be no saving the country after him, but I couldn’t help noticing that voters reelected him over a decent Democratic alternative. About then I gave up trying to explain any of this in terms of conventional politics. IMO, the political culture itself was rotting. HRC knew this, but she didn’t know how to improve it and became herself an unintentional catalyst for more rot. So yeah, culturally I think she’s far more important than GWB (much less Romney), though of course she’s not the only one. Obama probably became an even more powerful catalyst for MAGA, but again, not for anything he said or did, but for what he symbolized. I just don’t think much of this is rational in the ordinary way rational is understood.
The reason we think you morons are stupid is because you are. The MAGA faithful make good cannonfodder (like they did 60 years ago) I grew up among these people, including a four year hitch in the Navy where I never saw so many white male morons like you in one place at one time.
Still missing HOW and WHY racist theocratic non-economic populism went from trivial minority to winning. I suggest an nd/also must include combination of rise one sided right wing media with edits of fairness doctrine and Limbaugh/Murdoch takeover of airwaves promoting racist misogyny right wing non-economic populism and then add to this failures of bipartisan neoliberalism from carter-reagan-bush-clinton-obam; cutting taxes for rich, suppressing wages for workers and breaking
unions, deregulation, corporations (ceo class, wall street and their lobbyists) as people. The why left economic populism (Sander/Warren, Nation, American Prospect) never able to gain dominance (because corporate media not I terest (case example the oganized advertising boycott against attempt to have commercial left radio network). The Rise in white resentment required both education and stoking, and the lack of widespread counter narrative being able to counter it. And the real despair of hollowed out middle and working which goes back to mid-19070s, not 1991.
Once the state agreed that corporate media are the most (or only) legitimate media, then corporate media ARE the state media, and whatever it is that corporations want in the end is what they will report.
Thank you for this thoughtful discussion and for alerting us (me anyway) to what sounds like a insightful book. I do wonder, though, about the role of contingency. It's frequently noted that Trump didn't win the popular vote in 2016, and he arguably wouldn't have won at all if the Democrats had not run a (fairly or not) historically unpopular candidate in HRC. Polls indicated that a large portion of 2016 Trump voters voted for him as a protest candidate *against* HRC more than *for* him. After being elected, however, he grew increasingly popular, and that is when, it seems, most of the hardcore fanaticism set in. From the other direction, Ross Perot's 1992 campaign self-destructed and he *still* won 19 percent of the vote. A few contingencies here and there, and the outcome could have been different. It's true that Trump decisively won the primaries, something that, say, Buchanan failed to do. But, of course, Trump is inestimably more charismatic and politically forceful than Buchanan, and Buchanan dealt with more formidable GOP opponents. And this is not mentioning changes to party organization, including the weakening of the party leadership and the ascendance of the so-called independent candidate, that made it easier for a candidate like Trump to emerge.
Intriguing essay and another book to put on my reading list no doubt. Aren't things like, “backlash populism” or Francis's “authentic American” really a euphemisms for the ugly thick vein of racism that runs throughout US history? And what of US evangelical Christianity and how it has morphed into something far more akin to a political cult now in service of tying together many of those ideas that Ganz itemizes? Indeed, I see convergences, but I guess the above two so underscore the 3 main ones Ganz outlines.
I think you’re correct to see them as euphemisms for the racism that has has existed in this country. Sam Francis was an old line white supremacist, although he used more educated terms to describe his politics.
"The 90s were the Goldilocks zone of progress and equality. And after that came the horror of wokeism"
The two paragraphs around this quote got me thinking about Friends and Frasier and other 1990s shows we rewatch from streamers as nostalgic and comforting TV. A lot of the jokes in Frasier -- about gay characters, or the idea that Frasier or Niles might be gay or mistaken for gay, or slutty Roz, or ANYTHING about Maris -- landed differently with me hearing them again in the 2020s compared to the golden 1990s of my yout'.
Thomas, thanks for sharing your analysis and thoughts, much appreciated!
Thank you for bringing this book to my attention. I’m going to get it ASAP.
Thanks for this, Thomas. Interesting that your personal link to the 90's tracks with my personal link to the 60's per our respective ages. Not nostalgia, but a recognition of the power of awakening that a certain life stage can bring.
Excellent, thank you!
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful read of Ganz's book, and the explication of his thought and practice. Having both the lived experience of the 90s (as a federal employee) and as someone who studied political philosophy and governance, Ganz chose the right time to look at to explore what changed and why it changed, with liberal democracy in the United States. It's not the only moment that deserves review -- the Nixon to Reagan interregnum, and the beginning of the Reagan Revolutions is equally important, as is the application of authoritarian-light populism of the GWB era. I'm looking forward to reading the book, and appreciate that we're having this conversation now.
Completely fantastic and illuminating
Wasn't Trump a Democrat in the 1990s?
Whatever it took to squeeze more cash from the system.
Great essay! I am eager to read John Ganz’s book.
Gantz's When the Clock Broke and your review are spot on from the perspective of this criminologist born in 1948 who has written two books on Trump published in 2022 and 2024, which argue similarly historically, ans synergistically the same types of analysis.
TZ and your Democracy Americana have recently become among my favorite reads and I have been integrating your words into those of my own. As in my most recent Salon piece over the weekend that takes up to the present moment as we await Thursday's night debate:
https://www.salon.com/2024/06/22/trumps-dark-money-gets-darker-how-campaign-finance-loopholes-help-him-fight-criminal-cases/.
Keep it coming,
Gregg Barak
"far right radical revolutionary" - there's a seven letter word for that word salad: starts with and "f" and ends with a "t".
This is all nothing new on the Right. Doubt me? Go read Jacob Heilbrunn;s "America Last: The Right's Love Affair With Foreign Dictators" (Buchanan is a star player, learning from all the Old Right Nazi lovers and Fascist fanbois of Mussolini). This has been going on at least since the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. Rick Perlstein's quadrilogy history of the rise of the Right in the last half of the 20th Century is also excellent: "Before the Storm" (Goldwater); "Nixonland" (you know who), "The invisible Bridge" (rise of Reagan) and "Reaganland". James Garner had a good two word definition of the ol' Ray Gun: "Amiable dunce." Having met him in 1974 when he was governor, my opinion is that Garner was being generous. Reagan was the performing monkey for the dark forces making those strange noises behind the curtain.
Regean was capable of his own bad plans and intentions. If he was a puppet you can't really hold him responsible.
Since he was pre-Alzheimers while running in 1980 and had diagnosed Alzheimers ascending in strength for a minimum of 5 of his 8 years in office, yeah he was a sock puppet,mostly. An actor reading his lines and playing a role. The one thing he did good was that because he loved movies, he watched "The Day After" and it had its intended terrifying effect on him. After that, he got serious on nuclear controls and reductions, at just the time a Soviet leader appeared who he could deal with.
Again in that case, nothing was really his fault, so we should not be holding him to account for the consequences of anything.
Trumpism is just the latest in a long pipeline of malignant ideologies that have come to a head. The main difference right now being that the dog whistle has been swapped with a megaphone/bullhorn.
Slavery => Confederacy => Ku Klux Klan => Jim Crow => Southern Strategy => "Welfare queens" => Fox News => Tea Party => MAGA / QAnon / Proud Boys
Thanks for this torture. Six months waiting from pre-order to this past week's delivery of Ganz's book, and you've already inhaled it AND put out this excellent overview! Curse your available reading time!
I’ve had the privilege of getting an advance copy of- ha!
Foiled by you...meddling... ah, I got nothing. Going to go gnash my teeth and read!
Lucky you - still with teeth to gnash!
I'm cackling! Phantom metaphor, apparently: had them yanked out a year or so ago and can't justify the debt involved to get implants!
Hearted for the toothless cackling imagery.
This is all interesting, and I'm sure it's a good book (which I haven't read), but based on this and other discussions of the book, I have to think that y'all are too egghead-ish about the whole thing. I just don't think that relatively obscure intellectuals are that important
To my mind, the 90s' precursor to MAGA is the 1993 movie "Falling Down," ironically almost as much for its shortcoming as for its main theme. It's main theme, of course, was the angry white man, but in the end the film flinched and explained away this angry white man as a domestic abuser. This pigeonholed the character as a caricature of the kind of deformed version of masculinity that liberals love to fault for many of society's woes, and deprived his anger of legitimacy. For anyone who, like me, was inclined to identify with the guy's anger, our anger intensified by being caricatured as domestic abusers too. Neither the filmmakers nor the intelligentsia had the courage to face the raw anger on its own terms, but reduced it to an aberrant masculinity that fit neatly into the liberal's condescending ideology. This suppression of genuine grievances was bound to erupt.
And it did erupt politically with Newt Gingrich in 1994, which was eventually followed by the Tea Party. Yes, these were both ostensibly somewhat traditional conservative movements, but that wasn't their animating emotional force. This animating emotional force was animosity toward liberal elites, initially personified by the Clintons and then again by Obama. With them you had the quintessential Ivy League lawyers who had never worked real jobs or run real businesses their entire lives telling the people who had how to run their lives.
Throw in Hillary Clinton's Politics of Meaning speech in 1993. Actually, the whole idea of the politics of meaning is about as close to an accurate diagnosis of Trumpism as it gets. Trumpism is NOT a political movement. The MAGA faithful are rarely even informed about issues, much less have strong opinions about them. For them, the movement is closer to a religious crusade, an attempt to discern or impose some meaning on the national experience consistent with their feelings of exclusion and belittlement. The opening for this movement was created by what Robert Bellah called the third great crisis of American Civil Religion--and a crisis that I don't believe has been adequately addressed. Trump offers his followers a revisionist meaning of America consistent with their grievances, and has emerged as their cult leader as a result. But none of this is political in any narrow sense.
Yet it was Hillary--the very person who later called the MAGA faithful "deplorables"--talking about the politics of meaning. From her it had no credibility. No way were any of the "deplorables" going to listen to her about meaning. Indeed, her first main failure was to get a comprehensive healthcare reform passed. It wasn't the policy that so many objected to as it was the person spearheading the policy. Something similar happened when Obamacare finally passed. Obamacare was actually modeled on a Republican policy initiative, but spearheaded by Obama, the backlash was fierce.
None of this is political, and none of it is rational in the way rationality is usually understood. It's cultural and even religious, a matter of meaning and purpose, as well as inclusion in and exclusion from the national project.
Funny how you skip right over GWB in your analysis here. As if lying the country into war in 2004 & crashing the economy in 2008 has nothing to do with any of this, as if a 1993 HRC speech nobody remembers explains anything. FFS. GWB is the man who engineered the final hollowing out of bourgeois conservatism. He had plenty of idiots to staff the green zone but none to send to New Orleans when it was drowning, live on TV. And Romney’s candidacy was the cherry on top of the intellectually & culturally dead R party. Trump was able to take over the party only because its own elites ran it into a ditch.
But “it’s all Hillary’s fault” is so much easier, isn’t it?
Mine was just a late-night comment off the top of my head, not a developed essay, but yeah, I think there’s more interpretive bang for the buck to be gotten from focusing on cultural themes than political ones. Personally, I hated GWB with a passion and figured that there may be no saving the country after him, but I couldn’t help noticing that voters reelected him over a decent Democratic alternative. About then I gave up trying to explain any of this in terms of conventional politics. IMO, the political culture itself was rotting. HRC knew this, but she didn’t know how to improve it and became herself an unintentional catalyst for more rot. So yeah, culturally I think she’s far more important than GWB (much less Romney), though of course she’s not the only one. Obama probably became an even more powerful catalyst for MAGA, but again, not for anything he said or did, but for what he symbolized. I just don’t think much of this is rational in the ordinary way rational is understood.
The reason we think you morons are stupid is because you are. The MAGA faithful make good cannonfodder (like they did 60 years ago) I grew up among these people, including a four year hitch in the Navy where I never saw so many white male morons like you in one place at one time.
You morons, huh? If you have a mirror handy and take a look, you might find the crux of the problem.
Still missing HOW and WHY racist theocratic non-economic populism went from trivial minority to winning. I suggest an nd/also must include combination of rise one sided right wing media with edits of fairness doctrine and Limbaugh/Murdoch takeover of airwaves promoting racist misogyny right wing non-economic populism and then add to this failures of bipartisan neoliberalism from carter-reagan-bush-clinton-obam; cutting taxes for rich, suppressing wages for workers and breaking
unions, deregulation, corporations (ceo class, wall street and their lobbyists) as people. The why left economic populism (Sander/Warren, Nation, American Prospect) never able to gain dominance (because corporate media not I terest (case example the oganized advertising boycott against attempt to have commercial left radio network). The Rise in white resentment required both education and stoking, and the lack of widespread counter narrative being able to counter it. And the real despair of hollowed out middle and working which goes back to mid-19070s, not 1991.
The end of the Fairness Doctrine is the "Rubicon moment" for the transformation to out and out fascism.
Once the state agreed that corporate media are the most (or only) legitimate media, then corporate media ARE the state media, and whatever it is that corporations want in the end is what they will report.
Thank you for this thoughtful discussion and for alerting us (me anyway) to what sounds like a insightful book. I do wonder, though, about the role of contingency. It's frequently noted that Trump didn't win the popular vote in 2016, and he arguably wouldn't have won at all if the Democrats had not run a (fairly or not) historically unpopular candidate in HRC. Polls indicated that a large portion of 2016 Trump voters voted for him as a protest candidate *against* HRC more than *for* him. After being elected, however, he grew increasingly popular, and that is when, it seems, most of the hardcore fanaticism set in. From the other direction, Ross Perot's 1992 campaign self-destructed and he *still* won 19 percent of the vote. A few contingencies here and there, and the outcome could have been different. It's true that Trump decisively won the primaries, something that, say, Buchanan failed to do. But, of course, Trump is inestimably more charismatic and politically forceful than Buchanan, and Buchanan dealt with more formidable GOP opponents. And this is not mentioning changes to party organization, including the weakening of the party leadership and the ascendance of the so-called independent candidate, that made it easier for a candidate like Trump to emerge.
Intriguing essay and another book to put on my reading list no doubt. Aren't things like, “backlash populism” or Francis's “authentic American” really a euphemisms for the ugly thick vein of racism that runs throughout US history? And what of US evangelical Christianity and how it has morphed into something far more akin to a political cult now in service of tying together many of those ideas that Ganz itemizes? Indeed, I see convergences, but I guess the above two so underscore the 3 main ones Ganz outlines.
I think you’re correct to see them as euphemisms for the racism that has has existed in this country. Sam Francis was an old line white supremacist, although he used more educated terms to describe his politics.