“When the Clock Broke: Fraudsters, Conspiracy Theorists, and How America Collapsed in the Early 1990s.”
Since I read so much that I’m no longer able to write proper book reviews (most of the time I don’t have the time for it), I wanted to write a few posts promoting a few books.
I really enjoyed John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Ganz gives us a panoramic view of politics in the early 1990s. He makes a good argument that the emergence of a cabal of far-right figures from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to Donald Trump to David Duke presaged much of the politics that have entered the mainstream since 2016. 
As someone who lived through those years and was politically active, I found Ganz’s books to be a fun nostalgia trip and a great refresher course. David Duke’s scary runs for governor of Louisiana and the U.S. Senate, Pat Buchanan’s successful revival of “America First,” and Ross Perot’s (the “most successful” of all) 1992 presidential campaign were all dismissed as “weird” and “absurd” by the political establishment at the time. Trump was still a tabloid joke then.
I find that only two things are missing from Ganz’s book. Because Ganz’s book focuses primarily on mainstream politics, he does not talk about the popular grassroots campaigns like the Louisiana Coalition against Racism and Nazism that played a major role in the fight against David Duke. Second, that the labor movement was in tatters at the time and that deep-rooted xenophobia helped legitimize the bigotry of Duke, Perot, and Buchanan, even though the labor movement formally rejected it.
I remember talking to my late uncle when Buchanan was running for president in 1992. He was a Vietnam veteran and a truck driver. I asked him about the election and he said, “I like Buchanan, but I like my Social Security better.” There was still a certain line that some people wouldn’t cross, but it was getting weaker.
Read the book, you will like it.
