Less than a year into Donald Trump’s first term as President, the political commentator and historian John Ganz began to produce the writing that now appears on his Substack, Unpopular Front. A 2017 post, titled “Libertarian ‘Democracy Skepticism’ and the Pathological Self,” elaborated on a Washington Post op-ed Ganz had written about the influence of libertarian social and political thought on the Trump-supporting alt-right.1 Over the next three years, Ganz doesn’t seem to have published much, but in January 2021, after Trump’s supporters rioted at the Capitol the try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, he decided to knuckle down. On January 23, Ganz wrote an essay criticizing a segment of the left he described as “Sorelian” — after Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist who famously defended revolutionary violence — for sympathizing too much with rioters. Two days later, Ganz argued that “Trump represents an incipient or inchoate fascism.” Two days after that, he published the first installment of what became a multipart series on the parallels between Trumpism and the late Third Republic in France. These pieces established the concerns that would animate Ganz’s writing over the following four years. The first foreshadowed a sustained interest in chiding left-wing commentators for their errors in responding to the Trump phenomenon. The post on “inchoate fascism” identified what Ganz viewed as the most serious threat to the country’s political and social fabric. And the series on the Third Republic inaugurated his practice of combing through the annals of modern European and American history in search of analogues to our current situation.
An entertaining survey of the American far right in the years leading up to the 1992 presidential election, When the Clock Broke is the culmination of Ganz’s writing and thinking so far. He announces his intentions in the first sentence: “History, as the cliché goes, is written by the winners, but this is a history of the losers: candidates who lost their elections, movements that bubbled up and fizzled out.” By “losers” Ganz means the reactionary intellectuals, media provocateurs, and politicians who could not reconcile themselves to the Reaganite mainstream of the Republican Party. These were people who rejected triumphalist conservative accounts of the 1980s, a decade they saw instead as little more than a wasted opportunity. Disoriented by the collapse of the Soviet Union, aghast at Reagan’s blithe optimism in the face of urban disorder and a shaky economy, and resentful of Bush-style WASPs’ continued dominance of American conservatism, these figures channeled their rage into what Ganz calls “the ‘negative solidarity’ of knowing who you hated or wanted to destroy.” Some of the people Ganz discusses — Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan, Rudy Giuliani, and David Duke — will be familiar to anyone with a casual interest in postwar US politics. Others, including the LAPD chief Daryl Gates and the right-wing intellectuals Samuel Francis and Murray Rothbard, may be less familiar. Ganz gathers them together in When the Clock Broke because he believes that they provide the best explanation for what happened to American politics a quarter century later. “The most salient reason to focus on the right,” he writes, “is the election in 2016 of Donald Trump, who represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate in the period of this book.”
When the Clock Broke unfolds roughly as a series of chapter-length biographies organized around a narrative account of the 1992 presidential campaign. Following a scene-setting introduction that outlines the economic anxieties and cultural resentments that characterized American life during Bush the Elder’s presidency — it is often forgotten that the recession of 1990–91 gave way to the first of our “jobless” recoveries — Ganz tells the story of neo-Nazi David Duke’s political career, which culminated in his failed campaign for the Louisiana governorship in 1991. That gives way to a chapter on Samuel Francis, the chain-smoking white supremacist columnist and editor for the conservative Washington Times. We then get a chapter on Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative firebrand who launched a 1991 primary challenge against Bush on the belief that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.” Ganz’s elegant sequencing of these narratives allows us to see how these figures helped, competed with, and learned from one another. Duke, for example, may have once again made overt racism acceptable to the mainstream of the Republican Party, but Buchanan’s superior media savvy (Duke “was pretty good at TV,” but “Buchanan was an absolute master”) allowed him to build on Duke’s initial achievements.
An earlier version of this piece misstated the launch date of Ganz’s Substack. We regret the error. ↩
