Review of ‘When the Clock Broke’ by John Ganz
John Ganz is a trending young writer on the left with a history bent, and his new book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “When the Clock Broke,” is largely a political recapitulation of 1992 in the U.S. His angle is that the populist resentments of today’s MAGA America were present in that late-recessionary year, in which the country, having emerged triumphant in the Cold War, turned in on itself. (For his own fuller explanation, you can pay for his Substack feed.)
That’s an interesting proposition, placing the origins of the current distemper earlier than most others do. (Some trace them all the way to Andrew Jackson in 1828, but that’s a different discussion.) Obviously the Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992 and the related crack-up of the Reagan Republican Party under George H.W. Bush is a major flag for Ganz’s argument, and he mines the period for other useful omens (Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern).
Unfortunately, the author has a subsidiary aim and that is to find strands of fascist white supremacy in the unfolding drama back then (and naturally, now). So he references David Duke scores of times. The brief Louisiana legislative career of the former Klan wizard was ending as 1992 began, but Ganz sees his enduring influence in many places. My own memory of Duke is that he was a fluky, flaky presence in American politics, a footnote now like so many others of his kind. I had to check whether he was still alive.
That’s not Ganz’s only rediscovery. Murray Rothbard was an economist and cult favorite of libertarians for most of his career, until he veered into Southern populist swamps through the Ron Paul network. He merits a solid six pages–including a raring speech that inspires the book’s title–and a few other mentions. Just as obscure by general circulation was the paleoconservative writer Sam Francis, whose Manichean and racialist views are recited dozens of times, into the book’s final paragraphs. A forerunner of Steve Bannon? I don’t want to minimize the influence of the small, intellectual press but I don’t think Donald Trump would have ever read Francis, even if he had read at all.
I’d like to see more discussion of the angry populism of the time that was bipartisan. One target of this ire was NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Ganz notes briefly. He is good enough to record the fact that most congressional Democrats, and not Republicans, opposed the treaty when finally passed in 1993. I recall that year witnessing a union rally against the trade deal–held at the Port of Los Angeles by my own newly elected representative, Jane Harman. She would go on to rank as a notable globalist, but was not above a bit of pandering to Perotism then.
One other objection, a frequent and self-interested one of mine when it comes to pop histories of the modern American right. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages are cited once by Ganz, an apparently early (1989) gibe at Rudy Giuliani as a mayoral candidate.* The Journal was, during the period at issue, the largest-subscription newspaper in the U.S., and its opinion pages (which employed me then) were a bible for millions of conservatives. Arguably, its sentiments might have helped shape those times, in that camp at least? It is likely Ganz’s view that the “Wall Street” Republicanism often ascribed to the Journal’s editorials has been surmounted and supplanted by the movement he is writing about. That’s a fair position. But to have the Washington Times, by contrast, referenced on 16 pages is a bit skewed in this retrospective. Even if that narrowly targeted broadsheet did at the time employ the estimable Sam Francis!
Those reservations notwithstanding, I am glad to see a gifted next-gen writer draw on evidence from the analog era. Historical cycles do stretch, and then of course we are doomed to repeat them. I wonder what fruit today’s time capsules will bear. –July 15, 2024
*The actual citation is not included in the notes, but Giuliani at the time was still fresh off his prosecutorial frog-marching of investment bankers and conviction of Michael Milken, none of which endeared him to Journal editorialists.
Donald Trump didn’t spark our current political chaos. The ’90s did.
In ‘When the Clock Broke,’ John Ganz revisits the era of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot to find the roots of our populist moment
In 1992, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history.” The Soviet Union had imploded, and liberal democracy appeared triumphant and invulnerable. The placid new world that emerged might prove underwhelming — Fukuyama prophesied that it would be bereft of the “ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” — but at least it would be restful.
Alas, the ’90s were not quite as uneventful as Fukuyama predicted they would be. In a new history of the end of history, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” the journalist John Ganz shows how a country robbed of its external enemies turned inward and devoured its own. Pundits are fond of characterizing Donald Trump’s political career as “unprecedented,” but in fact he is amply precedented, as Ganz demonstrates in this wry and engaging account of the former president’s crooked and crankish forebears.
What happened to US politics?
John Ganz explores the gritty political and cultural trends that erupted in the early 1990s and set the stage for the present.
When the Clock Broke
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
During the Trump years (the first ones, at least), I experienced a new political sensation. It wasn’t anger or dismay on policy grounds—I was long accustomed to that. The only word I could apply to it was humiliation at being ruled by such cheap frauds. There have been plenty of dreadful, foolish, and venal people in power, across all the administrations of my lifetime, and plenty of the sort one thinks of as fundamentally decent and yet given, as a professional necessity, to the dissembling that pervades public life. But people with neither talent nor morals, whose skulduggery served no plausible ideological agenda, who did not try to make their lies sound convincing, and who did not even seem to aspire to mediocrity were an unwelcome novelty. How had our republic come to be at the mercy of such buffoonish amateurs?
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s has prompted me to ask instead: Why did it take so long? John Ganz, who tracks the intellectual trends of the current and historical far right in his Unpopular Front newsletter, tells a story of American public life from the last days of the Cold War to the first months of the Clinton presidency, focusing on the cynics, freaks, and losing candidates of the age. This period may appear now as the beginning of America’s unipolar moment of global hegemony and of a long economic expansion. But Ganz takes us beneath the triumphal surface to the gritty and granular political and cultural trends that were gathering under and, with startling frequency, erupting from it. It was the era of David Duke, of Rush Limbaugh and the shock jocks, and of Pat Buchanan; of racially charged local politics and riots in Los Angeles and New York; of militia movements and domestic terrorism; of an eccentric third-party candidate who briefly led in the polls and, after extensive self-sabotage, still finished with almost 19 percent of the vote. It appears, in Ganz’s telling, as an uncanny dress rehearsal for our own period: history repeating, but the first time as farce.
The chief guide through Ganz’s house of horrors is a rather marginal former Senate staffer and right-wing columnist named Sam Francis. When the mainstream of conservative intellectual life sounded the themes of Enlightenment liberalism—favoring free trade, rights-based legal reasoning, and an internationalist orientation in foreign policy—Francis turned to nationalism, searching for a blood-and-soil motif inside the dissonant chorus of American history. He coined the phrase “middle American radicals” for his imagined constituency, people who were threatened economically by the decline of industrial employment, demographically by immigration and Black birth rates, and culturally by a government and leading institutions that ignored or outright scorned their “values.” He didn’t think of himself as a conservative at all but as a revolutionary seeking to radically alter the social order from within.
Francis’s demonically insightful commentary, along with that of fellow eccentric Murray Rothbard, provides the connective tissue between Duke’s stunning appearance in Louisiana and Buchanan’s primary challenge to George H. W. Bush in 1992. Breaking from Republican orthodoxy on trade, immigration, and the cautious acceptance of the civil rights revolution, Duke, Buchanan, and eventually Ross Perot pointed toward a new synthesis that would later come to be called populism. Ganz situates the other stories of the period around this political trajectory, and they are stories that feel eerily familiar today.
Loneliness was an epidemic. No one had yet coined the term incel, but spurned, resentful men found out they could attain the power they lacked in real life by talking on the radio, whose culture of disembodied license presaged the joking rhetorical violence that would flourish online. (Limbaugh was fired from an early DJ gig for playing the Rolling Stones’ misogynistic fantasy “Under My Thumb” too many times.) Declining rural economies provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and extremist movements. Police brutality broke out into public view, prompting new calls for accountability and a counterreaction in defense of the impunity and privileges of the “thin blue line.” People disliked and distrusted the major parties and their candidates, so Perot inspired a cult of personality around his nonpolitician persona and his nonspecific policy platform. Faith in civic institutions drooped so low that John Gotti, a tacky and diminished variation on the mob boss type, became a cult hero during his trials for murder and racketeering. Crowds cheered the beating of people protesting a presidential candidate. The far right, starting with Duke, began to embrace Russian nationalism.
Hindsight can always find analogies and precursors for current events. But Ganz is after more than startled recognition. He offers an account of deep continuities in American political and cultural life.
Ganz’s project is part of a growing field of revisionist history of the American Right. Since the 2009 paperback release of Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, scholars and writers have been looking beyond presidential candidacies and mainstream publications to tell the story of the modern Right, and thus modern America, from the perspective of its obscure intellectuals, movement organizers, and little-known funders. (I encountered Ganz’s thesis about the early ’90s on the podcast Know Your Enemy, an encyclopedic examination of the American Right).
Nixon’s “southern strategy” and the backlash to the gains of the civil rights era were long treated as central to the remaking of American politics between 1964 and 1984 and the breakup of the New Deal coalition that had held sway for the previous 30 years. But by looking at figures who were, or are, one or more rungs below the daily awareness of the liberal intelligentsia, these new histories more fully describe the swirl of trends, anxieties, and transformations that connected intellectuals and grassroots movements to the electoral upheavals of the era. Racial backlash was critical, but it was only one part of a bigger, weirder story of a society losing its bearings and the people offering salvation.
It just so happened that in 1992 one of those people was Bill Clinton, who for all his flaws appears in When the Clock Broke as even more talented than conventional histories remember him. Heir to a series of blowout Democratic defeats, playing a bad hand, and at one point polling in third place, Clinton managed to do enough to accommodate the fear and hostility of the moment to slow the decisive swing of Francis’s middle American radicals to the Republican Party. Clinton’s pandering tactics have long been condemned by liberals. But a world in which Democrats conceded the restive, resentful center of American life to their opponents may well have been worse than what actually followed. Two lopsided victories, a strong economy, and a sustained drop in violent crime took the wind out of Republican populism and set the conditions for Barack Obama to become the first Democrat to win back-to-back popular-vote majorities since FDR.
The political urgency of reading the mood and doing what it takes to win in unfavorable circumstances is one lesson of the early ’90s. But Ganz’s book mostly highlights another: that the shadowed regions of the national psyche are never fully repressed or finally healed. As everything changes, they remain—from the militia movement after the Cold War back to the John Birch Society in the ’50s and early ’60s and the Klan and nativist Black Legion in the ’20s and ’30s—always saying more or less the same things about the same real and imaginary threats to hearth and home, blood and soil, livelihood and prestige. There is always a vast latent audience for their stories, however false their history, irrational their resentments, or fraudulent their cures. And even their own clownishness is not always strong enough to stop them.
Benjamin J. Dueholm
Benjamin J. Dueholm is pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in Dallas, Texas, and author of Sacred Signposts: Words, Water, and Other Acts of Resistance (Eerdmans).
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When the Clock Broke
1990s America and the foreshadowing of Trump
A few months ago I did a post recommending ten books that help explain the world right now. Several readers got in touch afterwards to say that “When the Clock Broke” by John Ganz should have been on the list. It wasn’t out in the UK at the time but serendipitously his publisher got in touch shortly after to send me a copy.
I read it and it should have been on the list – there’s a reason President Obama picked it as one of his summer reads. It’s a fascinating history of early 90s politics in the US, with the 1992 election as the focus. Main characters include Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, David Duke and many others who spotted the beginnings of the voter coalition that Donald Trump would later ride to victory.
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When the Clock Broke: by John Ganz
- Recent surveys and polls have shown that members of Gen X have increasingly grown more conservative, a development that should be greeted with less surprise than it usually is. Despite the vision of a decade populated by iconoclastic rebels and anti-corporate dropouts propagated by the music of the time and later enshrined in the televisual nostalgia of Portlandia, the years between Reagan and 9/11 were also a time of increasing right-wing radicalism, left-wing disintegration and conservative entrenchment. In When the Clock Broke, John Ganz, a shrewd political writer and cultural critic (as well as a cutting online presence), turns his incisive wit and amused skepticism toward unearthing the real ’90s revolution.
Ganz, born in 1985, was kindergarten age when the decade he’s writing about began, which gives him the historian’s necessary remove combined with the fascinated curiosity of a nonparticipating witness. He examines the outsized personalities of the era and the cultural forces that they represented, manipulated and, in some cases, were pushed into a prominence that proved unsustainable. But When the Clock Broke isn’t a history of a concerted movement. The network of think tanks, academic institutions, pundits and grassroots groups that set the stage for the Reagan administration and the delirious deregulation of the ’80s have, in Ganz’s telling, at least, been replaced by a motley assemblage of dorks, misfits and deranged provocateurs all operating independently, riding the tide of resentment that swelled in response to national deindustrialization and the consolidation of technocratic neoliberalism.
From a certain skewed perspective, the parade of canny ghouls, corporate mavericks and aggrieved citizens Ganz sets before us — KKK politician David Duke, talk-radio warrior Rush Limbaugh, nerdlinger third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot, nu-millenarian separatists Randy and Vicki Weaver, among others — reflect the developments in popular culture that commonly define the era. Like the afflicted and conflicted frontmen of alternative rock, these right-wingers rejected contemporary norms and relied on underground networks and subcultures to fashion defiantly different lifestyles. Also, like the burgeoning alternative nation, their disenfranchised anger turned out to be far more popular than anyone — even its purveyors — expected. Ganz incisively teases out the societal quirks and systemic flaws that allowed his subjects to thrive and traces the strains of economic abandonment, cultural grievance and magical thinking that tenuously bound all these groups together, or at least gave them a few common threads.
Ganz writes especially well when describing and puncturing the overarching myths that animate his otherwise disparate subjects. He devotes special attention to POW-MIA activists, who at first worked to spread awareness and support for families of American soldiers held prisoner or declared missing in action during the Vietnam War but soon began agitating for the supposed plight of living soldiers still being held in Southeast Asia after the war’s ignominious (for Americans) end. “[P]aranoia and distrust of government … mingled with the sense that the country was stabbed in the back by cowardly and deceitful bureaucrats and liberal elites,” Ganz writes. “What began as a public relations blitz had transformed into a national cult.” Those who remember Perot as primarily a budget-obsessed poindexter (immortalized by Dana Carvey’s Saturday Night Live impersonation) will be surprised to learn of Perot’s deep engagement with and astute manipulation of the Arthurian “lost soldiers” myth to burnish his profile with the patriotic working class. Ganz also takes a humorous look at how the phenomenon took hold in popular culture, in movies such as Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Missing in Action series, devolving even further into fantasy and farce, ultimately resulting in the hapless clandestine missions of Perot associate James “Bo” Gritz, who, when not unsuccessfully running for various political offices, ran DIY commando incursions into foreign countries.
When the Clock Broke began as a magazine essay and bears some of the marks of a shortish, narrowly focused piece that’s been greatly expanded. Ganz’s portrayal of the unique parochial environments that allowed such regional creatures as David Duke, LAPD chief Daryl Gates and mob boss John Gotti to attain nationwide fame is always well-researched and thoughtful, with a keen eye for human foibles. But the cults of personality built by these diverse operators, though all shared roots in ethnic chauvinism, seem like products of their own peculiar local ecosystems, far from the heartland concerns of missing servicemen and ballooning federal budgets. These separate threads, of course, came together in Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, a thesis that Ganz is too subtle to state explicitly. But it still feels like there’s a gap between Trump’s sweeping national demagoguery and these isolated figures, bent so much not on stopping the clock of progress as keeping their little fiefdoms — be they Los Angeles, Louisiana, the airwaves or the militia-infested wilds of the Idaho panhandle — outside the march of time entirely.
Similarly, Ganz seems more comfortable dissecting George H.W. Bush’s patrician awkwardness and Rudy Giuliani’s issues with the Italian community than plumbing the depths of Bill Clinton’s glib centrism or assessing New York City Mayor David Dinkins’ wobbly consensus-building. His account of Clinton’s rise is reliably astute and entertaining, with an enlightening look at the strange conspiratorial liberalism (and somewhat blinkered racial thinking) of one of Clinton’s old professors, Carroll Quigley, and how those ideas shaped the future president’s policies. But, aside from helping usher in the economic conditions that left many blue-collar workers unemployed and vulnerable to populist blowhards and xenophobic cranks, it’s hard to discern the direct connection between the Clinton administration and the emerging wingnut factions that gained institutional power and credibility in the following century.
Ganz has the most fun with culture-war issues, which began their ascendence from academic fringe fare in the ’70s and ’80s to discourse-dominating pop-culture battlefields in the ’90s. His revisit of Vice President Dan Quayle’s Murphy Brown dust-up is a necessary refresher on the eternal absurdity of “family values” debates, while his long section on Clinton’s attack on obscure rapper Sister Souljah (now a popular urban fiction author) shows how the liberals could use the right’s tactics to change the narrative at the cost of only a small segment of disgruntled voters. Though much of the events Ganz describes now seem quaint — a mainstream aversion to politicians cozying up with white supremacists, the institutional skepticism that greeted a wealthy, norm-defying tycoon running for president, a general concern over the optics of a proudly anti-democratic patriotism — the culture wars and the issues they’re fought to distract us from remain as relevant and endless as ever. Progress isn’t so much a clock that broke as an illusion that was used and then replaced by other, more malevolent mirages. The dream of the ’90s is a nightmare from which we’re trying to awake.
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July 9, 2024
The Nutty Nineties
What the hell happened in the early 1990s? That’s the question posed, and (partially) answered by John Ganz in When the Clock Broke. He sees the period as a fracture point, as the postwar cultural consensus gave way and economic chickens came home to roost. Reading this book was a reminder of just how chaotic, in retrospect, the early ’90s were.
Ganz starts by explaining the financial situation many citizens faced, then swerves through the various cultural and social phenomena of the period. Globalization was already underway (and would only accelerate more later, when China joined the WTO). By the late 1980s, “Manufacturers struggled to keep up with inexpensive, high-quality imports from Japan, West Germany, and South Korea, brought in by the administration’s free trade policies and the strong dollar.”
The recession of 1991 had a long lead-in thanks to the crisis in industries like agriculture that spiraled through the ’80s, even as the image of national prosperity grew. This only created more resentment in those left behind. The only thing worse than doing badly is doing badly while being told everyone else is doing well. It was not “morning in America” for everyone.
Japan, specifically, became the bogeyman, both in the business pages and the movies. The anxiety over Japanese dominance wasn’t entirely unfounded.
Between 1987 and 1991, Japanese investors poured more than $62 billion into US real estate, with a special preference for such blue-chip behemoths as Rockefeller Center in New York and the ARCO Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles, prompting public backlash at the prospect of these great obelisks of American capitalism being owned by foreigners.
The real problem was not that the Japanese were investing but what happened when they stopped. Withdrawal of Japanese money was the beginning of the great sucking sound as the recession of 1991 took hold. Japanese investments dropped more than 50 percent, which as Ganz describes, “pulled the bottom out of a struggling Southern California economy.” But that economic overview is just the start. It’s the least insane part of Ganz’s account of this period.
In the years he covers, a Klan Leader ran for office, survivalists had a shootout with the Feds, a third-party presidential candidate was cruising to double-digit support, while another candidate played the saxophone on TV, and police brutality triggered riots. That such a wild range of stuff happened in a narrow window requires a fair bit of backstory, which Ganz supplies. The political history of Louisiana brings us up to speed on David Duke’s ascension. The development of the twentieth-century LAPD serves as the background to the Rodney King case. These sections, plus the strange career of Ross Perot before his presidential campaign, mean we learn (or are also reminded of) a fair amount of unusual stuff before the 1990s. Which hints that, perhaps, this wasn’t a uniquely bizarre window. It just felt that way as the idea of a 24-hour news cycle started to take hold.
There have always been outlandish people and events. They don’t have any influence without an audience. Everything from the political campaigns of David Duke and Rudy Giuliani to the Ruby Ridge fiasco and the LAPD crisis following the Rodney King riots came from having viewers. (King’s beating was only captured on tape because a local resident had just bought a camcorder). This was before widespread access to the internet, but all these things played out on TV.
And mainstream culture was building audiences by abandoning any sense of decorum. The average citizen could get riled up by listening to Rush Limbaugh, and watch fistfights on Jerry Springer. The phrase “road rage” was coined to describe violent incidents triggered by minor traffic disputes. But everyone had something to be mad about.
And for many, the disastrous crime rate only emphasized this. Paradoxically, John Gotti—a notorious mafia kingpin—was seen as almost heroic in a world of too-common street violence. He became a figure in the popular press in a way that few criminals are. Ganz writes about his prominence, in counterpoint to Rudy Giuliani, a crusading District Attorney trying to remove such elements from New York.
Gotti’s rise as a celebrity coincided with a period in which New York City seemed to be going over the precipice into total chaos. Newspaper editorials spoke of “decline,”“moral anarchy,” and “despair.” In 1991 New Yorkers lost a record-breaking 213,000 jobs. During the entire recession, 400,000 jobs would be eradicated, or 12 percent of all employment in the city.
This backdrop enabled John Gotti to be, to many, still a sympathetic figure. The Teflon Don, grinning in tabloid photos, represented a different vision of America.
When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority. … It wanted protection, a godfather, a boss.
You could be confident residents of his co-op weren’t getting mugged in the stairwell.
How many people would’ve really wanted a city run by John Gotti is debatable, but it’s true a lot were turning their lonely eyes to some unlikely standard bearers. Bubbling along under the economic shifts was the paranoia that fed popular culture like the X-Files, as well as the worldview of “Love my country, fear my government” survivalists.
The siege at Ruby Ridge, where a standoff with US Marshals left a woman and child dead, brought these issues to the fore. Randy Weaver, the husband at the center of the Ruby Ridge case, was a special forces veteran. Driven to the economic margins by the agricultural crisis, and moving in increasingly militant circles, he represented a type of person—the pissed-off patriot—who felt their country was leaving them in the dirt. When US Marshals tried to serve a warrant on Weaver, that became the catalyst for the siege.
With the declining force of organized labor in industry, power in the left was shifting to the technocratic elites.
The ensuing disaster brought Weaver and his sympathizers greater visibility while validating their paranoia. Federal agents shooting his wife and son did not make Weaver and his colleagues look insane. It made them look right. As Ganz puts it: “Here was a man who was just trying to keep his family safe from the New World Order, and when he could not escape its clutches, they went and killed his family.”
Many were coming to believe that the government had a bad habit of hanging patriots out to dry. A lot of less-crazy people were at least willing to entertain the idea of electing Ross Perot, who had built his political image on an obsessive search for POWs and MIA soldiers from the Korean and Vietnam wars. These ideas weren’t so fringe at the time. Ganz reminds us, “By 1991, a Wall Street Journal poll revealed that 69 percent of the US population believed that there were live POWs left behind in Vietnam and that the government wasn’t doing enough to get them out.” Action movies like the Rambo and Missing in Action franchises also kept the idea forefront in people’s minds. You didn’t have to be a backwoods weirdo to think there was some truth there, and it was a conspiracy theory with something for everyone.
The idea that there were abandoned Americans still alive in Southeast Asia synthesized the pro-war and anti-war imagination: paranoia and distrust of government born of revelations about the intelligence agencies, Watergate, and the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia mingled with the sense that the country was stabbed in the back by cowardly and deceitful bureaucrats and liberal elites.
People on all points of the political spectrum could think the “system” was poking them in the eye, and meanwhile, in the background, AIDS was mowing down thousands of young men like a slow-motion Battle of the Somme.
Ganz offers extensive analysis of the factional fighting among the forces of the right through the ’80s and ’90s, from the (more legitimate) intellectual pillars of conservatism and the arrival of the Neocons to the extreme fringe groups who gathered via mimeographed newsletters and small ads in the back of Soldier of Fortune. Geopolitics shifted alliances.
The sudden end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union made everything worse. Militant anti-communism had long provided the glue that bound the various factions of the right together and gave them common purpose. The loss of the USSR was so traumatic that the John Birch Society went into full-blown denial: they insisted that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a KGB ploy to get the West to drop its guard.
This kind of insight into the evolving attitudes of conservative and rightist thinkers is interesting, especially the strange bedfellows that political realignment can bring. However, while he studies the strands of the right with Talmudic intensity, parsing the schisms and personalities involved, Ganz leaves untouched much of the left, which had plenty of its own crackups.
With the declining force of organized labor in industry (even as public sector unions grew), power in the left was shifting to the technocratic elites. This change was exemplified by Bill Clinton—and a few years later on the other side of the Atlantic by Tony Blair. Clinton himself would sign NAFTA, a mechanism for disenfranchising millions of American workers, who could then be castigated as racists and sore losers for not getting with the program. The withering of influence from the union hall would lead to a withering of concern for such workers. In the corridors of power, leaders like Clinton and Democrats following him no longer needed to care very much about what the AFL-CIO thought of their positions.
In the period Ganz discusses, the spasms of realignment on the left were already visible. One major debate was between those who wanted to control immigration (to protect workers’ rights, or on environmental grounds) and those who wanted to encourage it. This issue led to some famous knock-downs, and drag-outs within the Sierra Club. But Ganz leaves this fracture point unaddressed.
He does recognize that swinging left was as much of a choice for moderate politicians as swinging right, giving the example of (former and future) California governor Jerry Brown “transforming himself from a man who once pejoratively called universal health care ‘socialist’ into an angry left populist, railing in alternative media against the Democrat-Republican duopoly.” Sadly, he doesn’t dig in further. He also ignores the more militant strands of the left, like the more than 100 “eco terrorist” attacks in the US in the ’80s and ’90s, by groups including Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front.
I’m guessing you had forgotten them, too. The most startling thing about Ganz’s book is realizing just how much nuttiness there was going around.