When the Clock Broke (w/ John Ganz)
Added 2024-06-24 17:10:49 +0000 UTCSomething happened to America — and to American conservatism — in the early 1990s: an unspooling, a coarsening, a turn from substance to symbol and from narrative to fragment; prevailing political myths ceased to make sense or have purchase, and nothing sufficiently capacious or legible emerged to replace them, leaving only a dank, foggy climate of conspiracy, bellicosity, and despair. Victorious in the Cold War, America was supposed to be riding high; instead the whole country was experiencing a crisis of confidence.
Why? What happened? And did we ever get over it — or are we still somehow stuck in the "long 1990s?" No one is better equipped to tease out answers to these questions than our great friend John Ganz, whose riveting new book is called When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. With his characteristic wit and panache, John guides us through a lively discussion of: Sam Francis's middle American radicalism; Pat Buchanan's "culture war" speech; Ross Perot and POW-MIA; Carroll Quigley's influence on Bill Clinton; John Gotti's appeal; and how these figures, and this era, prepared the way for Donald Trump. It's a barnburner, folks! Enjoy!
Sources:
John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (2024)
— "The Year the Clock Broke: How the world we live in already happened in 1992," The Baffler, Nov 2018
Jen Szalai, "The 1990s Were Weirder Than You Think. We’re Feeling the Effects." NYTimes, Jun 12, 2024.
Listening:
KYE "The Year the Clock Broke, (w/ John Ganz)" Mar 16, 2020
KYE "Christopher Lasch’s Critique of Progress, (w/ Chris Lehmann)" Aug 11, 2022
Comments
Great episode. Ironic that Ross Perot’s IT outsourcing company EDS eventually became a model for “offshore” IT outsourcing, which led to many US jobs moving out of the country.
Douglas Chandler
2024-10-23 18:48:32 +0000 UTCI started listening to this episode in my car while on the way to get some lunch near a bookstore. By the end of the episode I had a copy of Ganz’s book in hand and I’m reading it now. Fantastic.
Gabriel Edwards
2024-07-11 16:32:40 +0000 UTCJohn Ganz is in all my wet dreams
Kevin Spicer
2024-07-07 21:37:40 +0000 UTCGod this ep goes so hard - Big Gov Commie Mafia 2024
Jenna Harmon
2024-07-04 16:02:50 +0000 UTCThis is excellent, guys. John's original episode on this topic years ago is what turned me into a KYE-head in the first place. One thing this got me thinking: At a certain point, in passing, John mentions the southern agrarian tradition. If you guys do a historical deep dive into an old book any time soon, I'd love to get one on "I'll Take My Stand"/"Who Owns America?". The traditionalists were in many ways junior partners to the midcentury fusion, and I feel they get ignored a lot, but those books are quite something. The whole rural agrarian strain has always interested me a lot (family's been in the same part of the Tennessee Valley since before the Revolution, so it's close to home), and in many ways it antedates all other forms of America conservative thought. Plus, the Twelve Southerners behind the book are a real bunch of characters. A curious mix of insane reactionaries, literary crackpots, and men with genuinely interesting criticisms of industrial civilization that leftists could learn something from.
Hunter McClure
2024-07-01 14:05:56 +0000 UTCSecond comment: the first time in my life I heard fellow Catholics speaking warmly about Generalissimo Franco was after the 2012 election. Frances Fitzgerald’s book “The Evangelicals” also highlights that time as when the religious right became disenchanted with democracy and its norms. I suggest a future episode about the 2012 election and its aftermath.
Chad Bailey
2024-06-30 17:17:38 +0000 UTCFirst comment: the farming issue is one in my family. My dad grew up on a dairy farm in northeast Ohio that sold its herd in the late 1980s. Unlike many nearby farms, they kept their land. Why? They kept fixing their old tractors, rather than accumulating new debt to get the newest technology. Eventually, a nearby family farm became a 1200 head dairy CAFO where my cousins still work.
Chad Bailey
2024-06-30 17:08:21 +0000 UTCSubstackers are the worst
Psych-O-Sonic 99
2024-06-29 00:44:04 +0000 UTCAt around 25 minutes John talks about the story of the markets, the story of the rule of law, and the story of politics as having been proven to be bullshit for a lot of people. And the attractive answer is insular protectionism, rule of law be damned, especially a broken and corrupt rule of law. The idea that Trump is that guy for enough people feeling the same way today makes sense. We all see where neoliberalism got us and we don’t have a collective identity to make us feel like we’re part of the team that can fix it. It feels like a continuation of that romanticization of the strong man of the 90s. I wonder if, had we not gotten the adrenaline shot of patriotism that 9/11 and the war on terror brought us, we would’ve gotten here much sooner.
DJM
2024-06-28 21:47:40 +0000 UTCReally enjoyed this episode and definitely plan on picking up a copy of John's book soon. Especially found the discussion around Carroll Quigley interesting as a figure whose influence I knew nothing about prior to this podcast. Feels like that Quigley ideal of part-striver, part-hippie is still very resonant in the Democratic Party in some of the retrospective looking back at the Kennedy's as well in modern figures like Obama, Mayor Pete and even Nancy Pelosi. Cheers to the three of you for this fascinating discussion!
Brendan Kane
2024-06-27 18:59:37 +0000 UTCExcellent episode. In retrospect, it makes sense that there'd be a line connecting the demands for term limits, shrinking congressional staffs, etc. we saw in the 1990s and the kind of radical right-wing politics we see today. The common thread is anti-parliamentarism, which is at the heart of Sorelian politics of all kinds.
Chris Maisano
2024-06-27 15:47:35 +0000 UTCLoved this episode. Fun fact: my political awakening started in 1992 when I was four years old and saw a debate involving Ross Perot. I was delighted by his ears and became obsessed with him. This horrified my mom, but my dad thought it was funny as hell and bought me a bunch of Perot ‘92 merch to deck out my room. I was absolutely crushed when he lost. My political priorities have since shifted, but his ears were pretty funny.
Thomas Peake
2024-06-27 00:57:36 +0000 UTCJohn Ganz is a national treasure
Eric Quirk
2024-06-27 00:18:26 +0000 UTCAnd also Jonathan Schell’s Time of Illusion! Tbh this is my favorite political/thinky-book typeface and I’d like to put together a library just of these thick-gothic 1970s units
Shabbos Tatty
2024-06-26 19:37:37 +0000 UTCThank you for this great conversation. Towards the end, you suggest that the traditional leftist faith in organic forms of solidarity following hegemonic collapse might be a misplaced one, and that what come to fill the void have more often been the violent, reactionary ones encouraged by demagogues like Trump. But I missed if you suggested any ways the left could take a more active role in building and promoting alternative solidarities in response. Is it enough just to stay the course by supporting unions and egalitarianism, and hope that the electorate will catch up? Or is there some immaterial, moral drive that is lacking when we think/talk about these issues, as the more generous communitarians might have suggested? I wonder what that would look like in a left that embraces pluralism and, perhaps to a lesser extent, relativism
Matt Eriole
2024-06-26 18:22:55 +0000 UTCThis is a really good book, and the episode is terrific too. I’m a little puzzled why Ganz doesn’t theorize more in the book along the lines he does here in the episode. The book offers excellent portraits and descriptions but is rather light on explanation/interpretation/elucidation. Perhaps the constraints of the publisher’s intended audience? If so, understandable, but I would love to see a follow-up writing that develops the theoretical payoff a bit more
Charles Zug
2024-06-26 14:06:31 +0000 UTCThere’s blame to go around, no doubt about that!
Dónal Gill
2024-06-26 03:25:51 +0000 UTCGanz says the kind of pseudo good government reforms Francis and others were pushing didn't amount to much, but some of the specific ones mentioned, like reducing congressional staff, got borrowed by Gingrich and were a huge part of him hollowing out Congress as an institution, which led directly to a lot of the current extremes of legislative inefficiency and dysfunction -- and shifted both research and influence from groups like "congressional committees" to Heritage or the Koch network. Term limits on red state legislatures are also part of why they're so pliable in the face of national activist networks - experience gets forced out and novice legislators rely on outside groups like ALEC for advice. So he's right that it didn't satisfy the *psychological* needs those policies were trying to express, but it absolutely has been a big part of this general style of politics gaining influence in the decades since.
Adam
2024-06-26 00:16:45 +0000 UTCLoved this episode, it really hit a bull’s eye, thank you! I take this occasion to suggest Mark Ames of Radio War Nerd as a potential lead if you are still interested in finding a guest for an episode on post-USSR politics (Speaking of the mob, rackets, “toxic pluralism” and “prevailing political myths ceasing to make sense or have purchase, and nothing sufficiently capacious or legible emerging to replace them, leaving only a dank, foggy climate of conspiracy, bellicosity, and despair”)
Paul Lemaire
2024-06-25 23:23:41 +0000 UTCA Gramscian crisis of authority means that a moment of cross-partisan coalition building is inherently extremely difficult: that's why you get "monstrous" political formations like fascism. A certain type of liberal loves to pretend they're above all this, but liberals have their own Trump-like figure, the guy who could bring us all together and solve all the problems: he was FDR, or more lately, Obama, maybe Bernie. For the brain-dead, Biden represents that. New Deal style democratic socialism sounds amazing in theory, but it's proven to be incredibly brittle because it contains all the contradictions of liberalism and capitalism. Even the ur-example of successful social democracy in the US, the New Deal, was snuffed out in less than half a century. So, obviously at some point we're going to have to stop wistfully (or smugly, as the case may be) waiting for the next FDR and go back to the drawing board, if we want to stop - or at least survive - the fascists that are so obviously at the door. I like this podcast a lot, I like Ganz, but I'm not sure this episode amounted to more than pining for the 1960s - seemingly when the clock stopped for the liberals.
Caroline J
2024-06-25 22:51:51 +0000 UTCOh yeah, there's a certain percentage of leftists who just want their own style of Trump in power, ignoring the actual practical reasons why Trump can do the things that can a left-wing version for him couldn't do, but there is a cross-partisan hatred of any kind of political coalition building and creating an argument that gets large-scale support - nope, just get our person in charge and impose their will, especially on the libs we actually hate more than the Right. Which I understand in a way, but also isn't how any successful left-wing movement in the US is actually going to be.
Jesse Ewiak
2024-06-25 21:38:47 +0000 UTCDuring the episode, you talk about the hard right's fantasy of a strongman or modern-day Caesar who will restore the nation to an imagined past glory. That made me wonder if the far left has its own fantasy of how the world can be remade, not to restore an imagined past glory but to create a new reimagined world. Perhaps, a candidate for this fantasy is "revolution". Not dramatic and wide-reaching change in the social order per se. But a forcible overthrow of the social order in a short period of time measured in years, not decades or more.
Paul Smolinsky
2024-06-25 20:05:52 +0000 UTCNot to defend Obama, who was not that bold, but wasn't there a Republican House from 2010 on? If I remember correctly, the Republicans (and even the Democratically controlled Senate) would not support anything bold to stimulate the economy leading to a slow economic recovery. In other words, everyone failed to meet the moment, not just Obama's administration.
Paul Smolinsky
2024-06-25 19:57:58 +0000 UTCHappy to get my copy of the book last week. Great episode; makes me even more excited to read it.
Taylor
2024-06-25 18:47:54 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Love the ‘toxic pluralism’ concept. Helpful framework alongside ‘the racket.’ I think sports bettor, crypto, and retail investing communities slide right into this framework. Inherently zero sum, but also posed against institutional outsiders. Vegas/Sports Leagues; banks/The Fed; banks again. Folk concern with Pelosi & other Congressional insider trading operates out as a guillotine-like reflex against rackets. Also, these groups idolize the Sopranos, Gotti, Goodfellas, and other historical and fictional organized crime figures. The mob’s ties to gambling help too. Trump is again a good synthesis here. History with boxing and other gambling-friendly sports. Owned a casino. Recently committed to embracing crypto. Whatever that means. In reading the David Duke chapter, I wondered whether the next Duke/Perot/Robertson/Gotti isn’t cutting his teeth in some online gambling fora. But perhaps these groups aren’t sufficiently material. The Duke chapter includes a note on Huey Long in St. Bernard Parish. I have family there. My oldest family members speak reverently of Long. They claim he brought free children’s meals into elementary school for the first time, and when he died the free food went away. I doubt the Barstool Smokeshow of the Week Triple Parlay can match the significance of a kindergartener’s first free meal.
Jake Medvitz
2024-06-25 18:06:09 +0000 UTCJobs are bad, I endorse quitting and also gangs.
DC
2024-06-25 16:35:03 +0000 UTCNot finished yet, but an incredible episode so far! Two immediate thoughts: Matt’s point about post-Reagan presidents no longer inaugurating eras via bold and sweeping policy initiatives ie so true. Just think about how pathetically (embarrassingly so, really) unimaginative and conservative Obama’s response to the financial crisis was. A bona fide Kuhnian paradigmatic collapse is just waved away and the broken and demonstrably false paradigm is stitched back up only to yield almost all the woes that drive our current maladies. Unbelievable failure of leadership then and now! Re: gangsters keeping towns safe… In Cork City, Ireland, where I grew up we were always told of how the last gasps of the IRA in the area used muscle and influence to keep hard drugs at bay.
Dónal Gill
2024-06-25 15:39:52 +0000 UTCHope he ok
Sam
2024-06-25 15:06:53 +0000 UTCMatt sound tired
Sam
2024-06-25 15:06:21 +0000 UTCI've re-listened to episodes before, but never until this one have I immediately hit play again upon finishing. May quit my job to get time to read John's book, which has been mocking me for a week from my table.
James Talley
2024-06-25 03:03:40 +0000 UTCfantastic ep! about third of the way through the book and prose is as great as Sam mentions
joe yan
2024-06-25 00:57:46 +0000 UTCI think he stole the cover design from Lasch’s World of Nations.
Psych-O-Sonic 99
2024-06-24 23:53:44 +0000 UTCSo excited to listen to this!
DC
2024-06-24 19:52:20 +0000 UTCCongrats, John!
Vincent
2024-06-24 19:11:02 +0000 UTC
