The 1990s Were Weirder Than You Think. We’re Feeling the Effects.

WHEN THE CLOCK BROKE: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz

Some truly strange stuff was afoot in the 1990s. Yes, the early part of the decade marked the end of the Cold War and the beginning of Clintonian “triangulation,” giving the impression of a bland consensus coalescing around a political middle. This smooth hum of stability stands in obvious contrast to our current plight of fracture and chaos.

But as John Ganz shows in his terrific new book, “When the Clock Broke,” the early 1990s were also a time of social unrest and roiling resentments, of growing alienation and festering anguish. The debt-fueled growth of the ’80s had created a “glitzy veneer of great wealth” atop a wreckage of junk bonds, bank failures and vacant skyscrapers. Outside cities, farmers struggled with tanking commodity prices and increasing isolation.

Even though Reaganite policies of financial deregulation and trade liberalization were largely to blame, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 showed how the ensuing sense of precariousness could eventually redound to the benefit of the Republican Party. America’s troubles didn’t generate a victory for solidarity and egalitarianism. Instead the far right built a movement from the “politics of national despair.”

There have been several books about the 1990s in recent years, connecting the dots between the radical right’s failed bid for power then and its takeover of the Republican Party now. “When the Clock Broke” is a vibrant addition to the genre. Ganz writes a newsletter on Substack called “Unpopular Front” and co-hosts a podcast (with the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie) about post-Cold War action movies; previously, Ganz was an editor at Genius, a website for annotating music lyrics. He puts his full range of interests into this book, braiding together history, theory and cultural criticism. “When the Clock Broke” captures the sweep of the early ’90s in all its weirdness and vainglory.

Ganz gets his title from the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who wrote a speech in 1992 titled “Right-Wing Populism” that pledged to “break the clock of social democracy.” Rothbard was thrilled by the presidential run that year of the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, finding in Buchanan’s explicit appeals to white grievance something “exciting, dynamic, tough and confrontational.” The Republican establishment, led by the incumbent candidate George H.W. Bush, was too timid and polite, Rothbard wrote, too committed to a “measured, judicious, mushy tone.” The pugnacious Rothbard had developed a taste for conflict early. Growing up in the Bronx, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, a young Rothbard would shock his Communist aunts and uncles by asking, “What’s wrong with Franco anyway?”