How the 1990s broke politics

If you were to write the history of modern American conservatism, where would you start? Maybe somewhere in the 1930s just before WW2? Or maybe you begin with the Cold War and anti-communism?

Cases can be made for both of those entry points, but the early 1990s offer another fascinating moment in this history. While this wasn’t the beginning of any grand conservative movement, the period is, in retrospect, a revealing flashpoint. And if you’re looking for a precursor to the weird, scrambled politics of the present, it’s an excellent candidate.

John Ganz is the writer of the newsletter Unpopular Front and the author of a new book called When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. There’s no Rosetta stone for understanding Trump, and it’s not quite right to call this book a pre-history of Trumpism, but it does something better than any other work I’ve encountered, which is to give some kind of shape to the sense of despair that defines our current politics.

Ganz focuses on the year 1992 — when the first presidential election of the decade was held — and gives a snapshot of the culture and the politics at that moment. Bill Clinton, Rodney King, Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, John Gotti — they’re all there. And it all looks and sounds a lot like today.

So I invited Ganz on The Gray Area to talk about what cracked up in the ’90s and how it laid the groundwork for what followed. This excerpt focuses more on where we’re at today, but, as always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So much of this conversation about the 1990s is really about the slow but steady transition of the GOP from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump. There’s a not terribly well-known writer you discuss in the book — Sam Francis — who you argue did as much as anyone to accelerate this transition. Who was he and what did he see in the electorate that other conservatives at the time didn’t?

Sam Francis was a Republican staffer. He comes out of the South. He works for the Heritage Foundation, a think tank created to create a policy infrastructure for the conservative movement. He works as a Senate staffer.

To say he’s part of the conservative movement is right nominally, but he doesn’t consider himself a conservative. He considers himself a man of the radical right. He believes, essentially, that there’s nothing left to conserve, that the institutions are too corrupted, they’re too overtaken by liberalism, and that they must be overthrown. A new order must be established that is a reactionary social agenda, but does not preserve much of the old ways of doing things, which he thinks are hopelessly liberal.

One thing he recognized — and this holds today — is how much a lot of regular people around the country really, truly despised cultural and political elites and that there was immense political energy to be channeled with the right figure or movement.

Absolutely. I think what differentiates what I’m talking about from the conservatism that came before is that along with that rejection of elites is also the rejection of the ideologies associated with those elites — that there were impersonal institutions that would provide a fair break or opportunities for people.

On the left, we’re basically talking about the features of social democracy: the welfare state, what was left of it after Reagan, trying to create more egalitarian parts of economic life, access to education, access to health care, those things. On the right, it’s a belief in the market and the belief that if we let the market do what it needs to do, everyone will have a crack. People will find their niche, and unchained market forces will have almost utopian outcomes.

Of course, none of that happens. Society remains highly competitive, people’s lives are very precarious. They fall through the cracks. They fear social decline, they experience social decline. So these stories, these ideologies about the rules of society that will permit people to have prosperous lives if you just obey them and follow these norms, don’t appear convincing to people. And then [the new populist right figures like Francis] come along and say, “Well, I’m not going to sell you any of that bullshit. We, the nation, the family, the race, whatever, some bounded or smaller group, need to face the fact that society’s unfair, and we’re going to take an unfair advantage and we’re going to band together to get ours, and we’re going to make sure that you, if you’re with us, get the spoils.”

You wrote something in your newsletter the other day that feels relevant. It’s a long passage but I’ll read it anyway:

Even if society is not experienced as a daily war of all against all, it can still be lonely and alienating, where atomized subjects seek out small advantages and find little in the way of warmth or solidarity. With the failure of impersonal social agencies, people want to return to personal rule. Trumpism offers the appearance of a solution. Rackets don’t just take care of the material well-being of the insiders, they are always also sources of recognition and belonging. You’re part of the clan, the crew, the family. The fuck you of Trumpism, its shock to the system might appear to be purely anti-social, a rejection of the reciprocal norms that make cooperative social life possible, but it’s actually pre-social. It speaks to the longing to return to something earlier.

Yeah. I think that what the right-wing populist or mafia populism acknowledges about society is that there are intrinsic tensions, and we’re just going to fight and win, not try to negotiate. Trump comes from a business background where you’re not winning unless you’re screwing somebody, right? And that seems to almost run counter to one’s own self-interest. Why not just make a deal where everybody’s happy? But the perception is that if we don’t assert strength, then they’ll take advantage of us next time. So I think that that’s the mentality of the movement.

Basically, racism is one way of thinking about a competitive capitalist society and offering a kind of pseudo-solution to it. It says, “Yeah, sure, there’s an intrinsic social struggle we have to fight and win” but it creates a kind of spurious false form of solidarity, which is you should work in the favor of you and your other white people and seek solidarity with them. Don’t seek solidarity, say, as workers. So there are two sides of the coin here. It has the frank acceptance of a very nasty form of social competition and even war, and also it offers a form of solidarity.

It is rather amazing that we just kind of memory-holed the fact that Trump lunged into national politics with birtherism. That was his thing. That was his opening gambit, and you could argue it was the most deliberate move he’s made as a politician. Again, this is partly what makes the incessant revisionism of “Never Trump” conservatives so silly. It’s like, “Hey, fellas, I get that you want conservatism to have a serious intellectual foundation, but this guy staked his whole political identity on a conspiracy about our first Black president being born in Kenya.” This isn’t a footnote.

No, I totally agree, and I think that that really says it all. I’ve always said that there’s one single myth underlying the ideal of Trumpism, which is that certain Americans aren’t really Americans. It was first articulated in birtherism. He knew more than other Republican elites that that’s what the message of the Tea Party really was. Other conservative and Republican elites said, “Oh, it’s about taxes, it’s about entitlement reform,” all this BS. He said, “No, no, no. Obama is not the president. He’s not a citizen. Some people aren’t citizens. People who don’t look like us, act, think like us, etc.”

And then that takes on a different manifestation in the stolen election myth. What does that say? Well, roughly the same thing. Certain people aren’t really Americans. Their votes don’t count. You, the real citizenry, are being disenfranchised and dispossessed. The actual facts of the matter don’t matter that much. What is being peddled here is a myth. It’s a way of conceiving of a certain social vision, not a statement about facts. It’s something more primal. Trump is that myth incarnate.

I’ve never identified as a Marxist, but the basic materialist conception of history always seemed true enough to me. And there’s a case in the book that the disorder we’re dealing with now is downstream of all these material and social shifts that exploded in the ’80s under Reagan. There’s always this debate about how the material world interacts with the world of ideas, and I’d be a famous philosopher if I had an answer to that, but I do wonder what the country would look like if we waved a magic wand and radically improved everyone’s material conditions so that there really wasn’t a material basis for economic or racial grievances and there was some modicum of community and solidarity, how much would it really matter? Would politics be all that different today or would we just keep spinning the same tracks, the same basic arguments, in an increasingly mediated environment where our technologies shape our perceptions of the world? I have to believe it would be different, but I’m not so sure it would be nearly as different as we think.

I think the material basis of society and the way we have these mediated relationships with each other are not separate. We are entering a world where what it means to be a person is quite different from what it meant in the 20th century, and our forms of society and association are changing in radical ways that are frankly traumatic for people.

I think that we don’t really realize it, but we’re in touch with each other’s thoughts in ways that were inconceivable. We are approaching communal life in ways that were unimaginable. We’re constantly in touch. You can in a moment hear what other people are thinking and get a sense of what the whole crowd and the whole world is thinking through social media. The effects that that’s having on the human psyche and the human self, we have an inkling of what that’s doing to change us and what a radical change that is, but I don’t think we’ve quite come to terms with it. And it’s frightening, and it’s creating disruptions on both the personal and the national and the international level. I think that the way we are turned into beings that produce and consume, that’s always going to create tensions in society.

So where do you think American politics is heading? And to be clear, I’m not asking the banal “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?” question. I’m thinking more about where these currents are taking us. The right is obviously what it is right now, and I think the left is adrift in its own way, but what’s your sense of where we’re going in the short- to medium-term?

I’m very concerned that across the world, this kind of nationalism is ascendant in a way that’s very difficult to stop. We’ve seen the surge of right-wing nationalism in Europe, and where that’s heading could be very frightening. We’ve seen Trump not losing popularity after his manifest criminality and his attempt to overthrow the government. What I’m concerned about is that this increasing fragmentation of the world into these antagonistic groups is setting the groundwork for a global war. We already see the hints of that in Ukraine and Israel and Palestine, where these nationalist wars are taking place. What I am very concerned about now is that that tendency will intensify and increase. I’m not saying we’re heading toward a third world war necessarily, but I would say my big worry is the direction of the world.

I think both of us believe the American right recognized something deep and true about the country after the Cold War. They had this Schmittian sense of the need for a new political enemy and the left, perhaps because this is just the nature of the left, didn’t or couldn’t do that, which was fine at the time. But from our perch in 2024, do you think the left missed an opportunity to redefine themselves and the country during this time, or is this something the left just isn’t equipped to do?

I don’t know. They were so defeated by Reagan, and also, the end of the Cold War seemed to really discredit socialism. I think it was just such a time when the left was not able to articulate a vision of the future, and I think it’s still struggling to do that. I think it’s pretty weak, and I think that’s why we have ascendant nationalism. The left is supposed to be the side giving the story of collectivism and solidarity, and nationalism provides a story about that that’s a lot more appealing to a lot of people than anything the left has had to offer, and that’s unfortunate.

I don’t know how to solve that problem. The left has to take nationalism as seriously as it once did. Liberals are concerned about the rise of nationalism. I think it’s the most destructive ideology that man has ever come up with, and when it turns into racial versions, it’s unspeakable in what it can do.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.