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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BURNING BUSH  
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Gene Seymour
July 2, 2024
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_ How the early ’90s set the stage for America’s crooked present.
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_When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and How America Cracked
Up in the Early 1990s _ 
John Ganz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374605445

AS WITH JUST ABOUT EVERY deep, wide, and candid account of American
life, race all but saturates _When the Clock Broke_, John Ganz’s
trenchant look-back-in-incredulity at American political culture in
the early 1990s. Then, as now, race is the elephant in the national
living room that many white voters wish they could look away from or
ahead of—if they look at all. Even when the subject is avoided, the
avoidance itself becomes a story, as when, for instance, parents and
school boards band together to whitewash (so to speak) slavery, Jim
Crow, and other unpleasant facts about race from American history
textbooks. Progress over time is also part of that history. But why
does it always seem that as more progress is made in racial relations,
there are also more opportunities for people to deny or altogether
ignore what came before—and what still needs doing? Such questions
are as old as antebellum slavery and as fresh as the latest bigoted
troll post. We’ve been here before and, as you may have noticed,
we’re here again. 

 

So as much as you admire the industry, audacity, and pluck in Ganz’s
past-as-prologue account, you also find yourself wondering: Do we
really need to go through all this now? Again? On top of what we’re
forced to ingest regularly in today’s toxic mediascape, do we need
an account of 1992’s gratuitous posturing, hollow platitudes, and
dangerously retrograde attitudes about not just race but also
religion, globalization, gender, and the whole damnably delicate
democratic process? Still, as much as you want to yell back at the
book and the discontents it recalls with such potent detail, you
can’t toss it aside. Because Ganz, proprietor of Substack’s
“Unpopular Front,” dredges up stuff you’d either forgotten about
or never noticed while you were scraping along that squeaky temporal
hinge between the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton presidencies—a
time so long ago that the Fox News Channel, which would later
galvanize and monetize this sour mood, was barely a gleam in Rupert
Murdoch’s eye.

 

As Ganz and other political writers have observed, those early ’90s
should have been a time of celebration and renewal, given the fall of
the Soviet Union, the United States’ successful pushback against the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the (apparent) global triumph of
Democracy and Capitalism. But the bill on so-called “Reaganomics,”
which in Ganz’s words “provided a glitzy veneer of great wealth”
in the 1980s, had come due and brought stagnating wages with it.
Bromides from the George H. W. Bush White House about a “New World
Order” and a “kinder, gentler nation” couldn’t override the
dismal, obvious facts: the rich were getting richer, the poor getting
poorer, and whatever constituted a middle class was being squeezed out
by “rapid deindustrialization” and “the elimination of
middle-wage ‘routine’ office and administration jobs.”
One would have thought these and other aspects of a confused and
anxious American body politic could fuel a progressive insurgency,
even with spoilsports like Francis Fukuyama proclaiming, in his widely
disseminated 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that any ideology
advancing progress was rendered moot by liberal democracy’s winning
streak. But in hindsight, as Ganz’s whole book asserts, the era’s
true insurgencies were animated from the right by a motley assortment
of demagogues, reactionaries, hucksters, thugs, and race-baiters
emerging from the margins of traditional politics to galvanize
fearful, angry, disaffected, and (almost forgot) predominantly white
Americans into thinking that, somehow, liberal democracy was their
enemy and authoritarian rule may be not be a bad path for their
teeter-tottering republic to follow.

As you read _When the Clock Broke_, your frontal lobe will keep
flashing “Yikes!” at the uglier manifestations of the era’s
racist and reactionary thinking, especially when Ganz provides deep
background on such dark-side emissaries as “new-jack” Ku Klux Klan
leader David Duke, paleo-conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan,
hard-case Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl Gates, and Ruby
Ridge survivalist Randy Weaver. Yet he resists using even their worst
impulses and outbursts as fodder for caricature, fashioning nuanced,
detailed portraits with astute, energetic wit. 

His depiction of Gates rings with irony: the chief abetted the
LAPD’s militarization and egregious use of force throughout the
’80s, and his tactics remained relatively unchecked until 1991, when
a video of a brutal police beating of Black motorist Rodney King went
public. Gates’s popularity suddenly plummeted, and not even the
riots that followed the 1992 verdict exonerating the officers could
restore his popularity. A referendum restoring civilian control of the
LAPD passed by a 2-1 margin in 1992. But as Ganz often shows, such
“progress” wasn’t unmitigated. (For starters, gun sales spiked
in the riots’ wake.) 

Ganz’s most revealing and, thus, more alarming portrait emerges
through the words and ideas of Sam Francis, editorial page editor of
the conservative _Washington Times_, who wrote that the Los Angeles
riots, if anything, justified the acquittal of the cops who beat King.
“In a country . . . where the leaders’ only concern is massaging
the resentments of minorities, somebody has to take nightstick in hand
[sic].”

Behind Francis’s outburst here and elsewhere was hardcore
white-supremacist ideology. He saw in David Duke’s unsuccessful 1991
campaign for Louisiana governor “a new political creed” that
“accepts race as a biological and social reality, as opposed to the
denial of race that both conservatives and liberals have endorsed.”
As far back as 1982, Francis identified a “profound social
movement” of “MARs” or “Middle American Radicals” motivated,
in Ganz’s words, “by a sharp feeling of being exploited by and
condescended to the rich and having to foot the bill for
minorities.” Throughout _When the Clock Broke_, Ganz uses quotes
from Francis’s columns to disquieting effect, demonstrating a
right-wing rhetoric that cloaked the most insidiously racist
sentiments in reasoned, if far from reasonable, language. 

Even if Duke was still a Klansman in his white-supremacist and
anti-Semitic views, Francis thought he could carry them in a slicker,
more media-savvy package that could connect with those disaffected
MARs. But here Francis miscalculated, and Duke played no better on the
national political stage than he did on Louisiana’s, pulling in
around 119,000 votes in 1992’s nationwide presidential primaries,
which wasn’t enough to gain any delegate support to challenge
incumbent president Bush. 

The less slick, more caustic and belligerent Pat Buchanan, another
Francis favorite, did better in his own 1992 presidential bid. He was
getting media attention for the crowds he drew in New Hampshire and
for early exit polls showing him neck and neck with Bush. (“Buchanan
sailed into Duke’s wind and stole it completely.”) He ended up
with 37 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. The problem
was with women voters, who didn’t like Buchanan’s opposition to
abortion and affirmative action—and didn’t care much for his bluff
public demeanor. But, as Ganz writes, “to the frustrated and wounded
American manhood of New Hampshire, Buchanan had undeniable appeal.
Even if they realized that the textile mills weren’t coming back,
Buchanan gave their despair shape and direction.” Keep this in mind
when remembering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to restore
long-lost coal-mining jobs and you understand how Buchanan’s
politics of rage and resentment may have lost the battle but would
eventually win the presidency.

Ganz excels at connecting dots. In surveying popular culture of the
era, he even manages to bring up New York mob boss John Gotti and his
1992 conviction for several crimes, including murder, racketeering,
and obstruction of justice. Gotti had by then become a folk antihero,
the “Dapper Don,” whose iron rule, however sordid and disreputable
his activities, was seen by some idolaters as a sociopolitical ideal.
The book climaxes with architect Philip Johnson (whose own far-right
authoritarian-populist disposition led to enchantments in the 1930s
with Huey Long and Adolf Hitler) reacting to Donald Trump’s
bloviations by observing that Trump would make a “good mafioso.”
Neither Johnson’s compliment nor Trump’s response—“One of the
greatest”—should spoil anything for the reader. 

It also shouldn’t surprise readers that deregulation of the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) during the 1980s, including putting to
sleep the Fairness Doctrine previously assured “reasonable
opportunities” for opposing viewpoints, helped enable the
proliferation of conservative talk radio. The bully-in-chief of this
vast echo chamber of grievance was Rush Limbaugh, whose success helped
embolden talk-radio hosts to go big and loud on political
issues—and, by the by, helped enable a third-party candidacy in 1992
for a man who had mastered the trick of making his life look like a
melodramatic tale of uplift.

Of the “con men” and “conspiracists” in the book’s subtitle,
Henry Ross Perot Sr. is at once the easiest to comprehend and the
hardest to pigeonhole. At times, this Texarkana-born billionaire
seemed caught up in the hype fashioning him as one of Horatio
Alger’s storybook protagonists, a pious striver from a hardscrabble
background who grew up to become Davy Crockett, or a fronter just as
legendary and indomitable. Other times he was willing to deflate his
puffy persona to the point of calling himself “P. T. Barnum without
the elephants.” By February 1992, the cult of Ross Perot as
“populist tycoon” and independently wealthy action hero, boosted
by his widely publicized crusade to find missing American POWs in
Vietnam years after the end of the war (casting himself, Ganz writes,
“as a messianic figure in the national cult of the undead”), had
reached a near-feverish pitch; TV interviewer Larry King compelled
Perot to admit his willingness to run for president, but only if he
could see “some sweat” from those pressing for his candidacy.
Perot embodied what would become a recurring archetype in American
politics: the successful businessman professing he could run the
country more efficiently than politicians. Though conservative, Perot
was no hardcore ideologue like Buchanan. And though no shrinking
violet, he directed his outrage toward those in power, especially the
incumbent Republican president, George H. W. Bush, who now seemed more
besieged than ever from all sides. 

A strange amalgamation was taking effect. Perot was making himself an
outlet for all the anti-government furor of those who showed up for
Buchanan’s rallies. But he was also putting forth opinions that at
one point, according to Ganz, even tugged the lapels of the Reverend
Jesse Jackson, who, though not a candidate, was de facto leader of the
Rainbow Coalition, acting as a power broker representing minorities,
the poor, and traditional Democratic liberals. “There’s a lot we
don’t know about [Perot],” Jackson said, adding: “When he
questions going too fast on free trade with Mexico, when he talks
about equal funding for all schools in public education, and freedom
of choice for women on abortion, we need to listen.” 

Jackson’s fleeting interest in Perot was generated in part by his
problems with the front-running Democratic candidate, Arkansas
Governor Bill Clinton, described by Ganz as “the talented and
favored son of a modest background.” The eventual winner of the 1992
presidential campaign was something of a political high-wire walker:
in speech and manner, he looked like a genial, glad-handing
good-ole-boy complete with the nickname of “Bubba.” But, in
Ganz’s words, “in the year of populism and voter rage and ‘throw
the rascals out,’ he was a dedicated elitist.” In any other year,
Clinton’s jaunty cocktail of centrist politics, policy-wonk
pragmatism, and slick folksiness would have made his presidential run
a relative cakewalk. But Perot’s flinty, straight-talking,
people’s-tycoon image was proving more potent than anything Bush or
Clinton could counter with during their respective primary victories.
Still, with nascent signs of Perot’s campaign growing more
“erratic” as questions about his business practices cropped up in
late spring, Clinton found a way to draw attention from both his
competitors by coming on less like what voters expected of a liberal
Democrat. Clinton had, after all, cast his lot with the Democratic
Leadership Council, formed in 1984 in the wake of “catastrophic
losses” in presidential runs by Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis,
believing, among other things, that “catering to minority groups”
had become the party’s fatal flaw. (A counterpoint: maybe the real
“fatal flaw” has been taking minority votes for granted, as
Republicans did for decades after the Emancipation Proclamation. Yes,
that actually happened a while ago.)

Three weeks after the rioting in Los Angeles following the not-guilty
verdict in the Rodney King case, Sister Souljah, a hip-hop artist and
activist, delivered the keynote at a Malcolm X celebration in
Washington, DC, where her mostly young, mostly Black audience found
communion with her assertions that their generation was “very
frustrated” with older Black leadership. In a _Washington Post_
interview, Souljah said the rioting had been “a black-on-white
‘rebellion,’ plain and simple and righteous.” Then added: “I
mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week
and kill white people.” Despite Souljah’s later protestations that
she wasn’t advocating violence, only trying to explain the
rioters’ motives, Clinton used part of his speaking time at a
Rainbow Coalition conference in June to attack Souljah’s comments to
the _Post_ and her other, similarly provocative statements.
“Jackson,” Ganz writes, “understood that he and his Rainbow
Coalition, not Sister Souljah, was the real target.” Said Jackson:
“The attempt to align me with her is an attempt to malign me with
her.” But talk radio perked up with what its constituency saw as
Clinton’s vilification of Souljah’s racially inflammatory
language. Eventually, Jackson fell into line with the rest of the
Democrats. But you can feel the acid coursing out of Ganz’s
summation of what looks in retrospect like the kind of “high-tech
lynching” Clarence Thomas less aptly accused the Senate Judiciary
Committee of committing in interrogating his suitability for the
Supreme Court. 

“Sister Souljah,” Ganz writes, “was Black, aggressive, young,
putatively the representative of a culture and a people that white
America feared. . . . She attempted to use her voice and assert
herself, but in the end her name became a symbol, a signifier, a
catchword. Her actual remarks are largely forgotten. Sister Souljah is
now known for what Clinton said about her, not for anything she said
herself.” To put it plainer, it was easier for Clinton to use Sister
Souljah to get elected than to come up with language to express
progressive ideals—or, for that matter, language as direct and
forceful as that used by the far right to ridicule and demean those
ideals. 

At this writing, another “Dapper Don” is awaiting sentencing for
his conviction on thirty-four criminal counts in a trial whose impact
on this fall’s election is in question. _When the Clock Broke_
can’t help us determine what will happen in November. But it does
show how the monsters of greed, cultural warfare, class resentment,
and white grievance were awakened and unleashed in the first two years
of the 1990s. It leaves us, or this reader, at least, wishing that
these cultural and political forces hadn’t come spilling into our
own moment, leaving American democracy teetering on a cliff. 

I don’t see it dissipating any time soon. Cons, crooks, and cranks
will always be with us. And voters may well be as volatile as they
were eight years ago—or, for that matter, thirty-two years ago, when
there was, as now, an incumbent president with whom even supporters
were underwhelmed. I’m with Mark Twain in thinking that History
rhymes more than it repeats. But I also see in the push-pull of racial
advancement and regression still another potential outcome:
exhaustion. It may not happen as soon as one would like, but I’m
betting that eventually Americans of all shades and classes will
simply get bone-tired of raw nerves, empty bluster, and white noise.
Pun, at least tentatively, intended.  

 

Gene Seymour is a writer living in Philadelphia. 

* the 1990s
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* the far right
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* deindustrialization
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* Bill Clinton
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* Ross Perot
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* George H.W. Bush
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