What Were the '90s?
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
by John Ganz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp.
The America of the 1990s took on, in my world, mythic proportions.
Transmitted to me mostly through old television re-runs, the decade seemed downright paradisiacal—a kind of Eden resting happily in that neat little space after the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the Fall, or the cascade of hideous events beginning after September 11th, 2001: the Global War on Terror, our running imbroglio in the Middle East, the 2008 financial crisis, and, as if on cue, just as I was reaching the age of legal responsibility, Donald Trump’s fateful trip down the golden escalator (and the rebuke of all American politics, and politicians, that he embodied).
To those calamities, one can add, in just the last decade: an ongoing, major land war in Europe, the utter desolation of Libya and Syria, the renewed specter of direct nuclear confrontation, a pandemic, and the largest war in Israel and Palestine since 1982.
Sandwiched on either side by capital-H History, the ‘90s seemed to constitute a little oasis.
Elite attitudes of the time seem to confirm my little hunch: In 1990, Francis Fukuyama published his famous (and famously misinterpreted) “End of History,” positing that the liberal democratic paradigm exemplified by the US signified the end-stage of civilizational development. In 1996, Thomas Friedman would formulate in the pages of the New York Times his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” demonstrating that two countries which each had a McDonald’s had never gone to war. The verdict was clear: Liberal democracy had won out, and now the rest of the world just had to get over the line.
Nothing, perhaps, signified the vibes better than the respective campaign anthems of the two most successful figures in Western liberal politics at the time: Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Stop” (Thinking About Tomorrow) by Fleetwood Mac, in 1992, and Tony Blair’s “Things Can Only Get Better,” by D:Ream, in 1997.
But today, commentators are likelier to turn D:Ream’s chart-topping refrain inside-out: Actually, things can only get worse.
Intelligent people don’t even bother to debate whether humanity faces impending destruction; it is simply a given. The true action surrounds the question of how our end will come about—climate apocalypse? Malevolent artificial superintelligence? Nuclear armageddon? Antibiotic-resistant bacteria?
So it’s not as though the politics of the 1990s didn’t have to wrestle with intractable problems. It’s not as if there wasn’t war, famine, and terrorism. But domestically, at least, America’s front-of-mind issues were normal: the budget, the national debt, violent crime, the private immorality of politicians, etc. These were difficulties generic to democracy—they did not threaten to swallow humanity whole and spit out the bones. Which is to say that America in the 1990s was just about as close to the picture of placid, consolidated, democratic normalcy as a society can get.
Not so, writes John Ganz, in When the Clock Broke.
The ‘90s were not only much weirder and more turbulent than we remember, Ganz argues, but were, in fact, the genesis of the worst, most reactionary and paranoid political trends that plague our country today.
He cites in evidence:
Ex-Klansman and neo-Nazi David Duke winning a majority of Louisiana’s white vote in the race for governor in 1991 (and, before that, a seat in the state’s House of Representatives).
Billionaire Texan Ross Perot running for president in 1992 and winning nearly 20% of the national vote on a “run government like a business” and “throw the bums out” platform.
The rise of the so-called “paleoconservatives” — exemplified in the writings of the intellectual Sam Francis and the political campaigns of the Nixon/Ford/Reagan White House staffer Patrick Buchanan — who preached, among other things, an “America First” nationalism.
The advent of the POW/MIA conspiracy theory which held that dozens — hundreds? thousands? — of American soldiers were still being held in southeast Asian prison camps. Which reached such heights that Bill Clinton paid lip service to it in the run-up to the 1992 election (Clinton: there “will never be normalization or improvement of relations [with Vietnam] until we’re sure that we have all the evidence not only from that country or from any others … I have never been convinced that we know the whole truth about this. We may, but I’m not convinced we do.”)
The precise figures were, and remain, irrelevant. To wit: defense.gov states that of the “80,000 American service personnel” missing from previous conflicts, “38,000 are estimated to be recoverable” (???).
Right-wing militia activity, manifest in the Weaver family of Ruby Ridge. Ganz, whether he meant to or not, actually convinced me that right-wing militia violence was actually more dangerous and confrontational then than now: The Ruby Ridge episode, in which Randy Weaver’s wife, Vicki, and 14 year-old son Samuel were killed in a stand-off with federal agents, is cited as a factor in the radicalization of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh—the perpetrator of the deadliest domestic terror attack in US history.
Mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani inserting himself in what was, effectively, an NYPD race riot aimed at the city’s black mayor, David Dinkins. 4,000 officers representing the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, hurled racial epithets and attempted, at one point, to storm City Hall.
I enjoyed Ganz’s book more than any other work of political history I’ve read in a long time. He operates with a light, ironic touch, and keeps things humming along, allowing the mere biographical facts of his cast of sewer-dwelling creeps to speak for themselves.
Bereft of hysterics, his telling demonstrates (to the dismay of the MSNBC crowd) that the political currents often associated with the 2016 election, and the Pandora’s Box that Trump is blamed with opening, aren’t really all that new; that a reactionary, populist strain has a way of rearing its head in our national politics every once in a while, and that our country has a knack for producing the kind of charismatic figure required to harness those energies.
It also gives you an appreciation for how rare that kind of person is, all the same. The particular confluence of events and forces that allowed a character as unusual as Trump to emerge—job losses from outsourcing coincident with an economic downturn; and popular disaffection with politics, and politicians, as usual—and to eventually capture the presidency are specific to his generation. They also have a way of regenerating themselves through the decades.
I think Trumpism will end with Trump—it’s too bound up with his particular style of humor and showmanship to be effectively co-opted by anyone else (least of all those so obviously lacking his charisma and crowd-swaying magnetism).
But someone else will come along, eventually, whose style rhymes with his. And no matter the particulars, we’ll have seen it before.
Thanks for reading McBrodie.
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- Brendan