When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

Ganz's "When the Clock Broke" is a powerful book that will stick with you after you finish it. Each chapter narrates a different event in the early 1990s and uses it to develop the author's thesis of a "politics of despair" as an explanation of the explosion of the far right in the United States over the last thirty years.

Ganz has an amazing knack for connecting personal stories and biography to broader societal trends in a way that is both informative and relatable. A story about the deregulation of radio and television broadcast to explain the rise of a figure like Rush Limbaugh is humanized and made relatable through the idea of an epidemic of loneliness and the creation of large imagined communities with parasocial celebrity show more relationships. Ganz's empathy aids his explanations.

Ganz, despite his obvious misgivings, almost seems to have a certain kind of love for the figures he writes about and through his writing one almost feels empathy for figures like Perot, Limbaugh, and even the Ruby Ridge family. Ganz is a good humanist and has a tremendous ability to understand his subjects nonmoralistically, while also avoiding the trap of romanticization or implicit endorsement. This goes a long way in providing credence for his thesis about the far right. He also knows when to include a revealing (and sometimes hilarious) detail.

Like all good history, the book is not afraid to tackle the fraught topics of intellectual history and political theory, while also avoiding being hamfisted or oversimplifying. Ganz's thesis is about twenty times better thought out than Timothy Snyder's "politics of inevitability and eternity" in his Road to Unfreedom (Although that is not a high bar). Ganz also lets his points develop themselves through his narrative. The book gives a more sophisticated social explanation for the development of the American far right in the late 20th and 21st century than any other book I've read, and he manages to do it through a critical reading of the far right's own writers and the borrowed concept of a "politics of national despair."

Although he only rears his fat orange head in a few places, this is probably the best explanation of the Trump movement that i've personally read. The only criticism that could be leveled is that the book probably would have benefited from a full chapter covering Gingrich. One can't blame him though as it fall beyond the chronology of the book. As far as the "explanation of new authoritarianism" trend in nonfiction in recent years, this is in the upper echelon. It certainly leaves Timothy Snyder in the mud. One also catches a whiff of Marx's 18th Brumaire. Spooky. show less

A detailed recap of the 92 campaign for those who missed it. Probably destined to be required reading for poli sci classes on the era, I found it lacked a stance on what could have been different or what that election really cost America.

Did the third party insurgency of Ross Perot really presage the Citizens United fueled MAGA movement? Was the Bush presidency really the pinnacle of the self serving lies of the Southern Strategy era, rather than Iran Contra scandal, or the unamerican backroom diplomacy of candidate Nixon to the VFC or candidate Reagan to the Ayatollah? I'm not convinced that Clinton's New Democrats are really to blame for George W's faked WMDs.

In the end, this is an exhaustive review of an election. All presidential show more elections are consequential, so 92 was a consequential election. But it fails to make the case that 92 was epochal in ways that 68, 80, 2000 or 2016 were not. show less

Detailed, well written, and devastating. Clarified a lot of memories from the 1980's and 1990's, dredged up a few that I could have done without. How we got to where we are. Recommended.