In a new book, “When the clock broke“, writer John Ganz examines how the politics of the Trump years were launched in the early 1990s. This strange period included a brief but powerful recession, civil unrest in Los Angeles following the acquittal of police officers who brutally beat Rodney Kingand the rise of unlikely political figures such as neo-Nazis David Duke and paleoconservative nationalist Pat Buchanan. A sense of hopelessness and dissatisfaction with the government and the direction the country was heading culminated in the 1992 presidential election, in which Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush for the Republican nomination, and a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, received almost twenty percent. percent of the vote – the largest number in more than three-quarters of a century. Through figures such as Buchanan and Duke, Ganz attempts to understand why and how right-wing extremism flourished during these years. “It was a time when America felt like a loser,” he writes: “losing its dominant place in the world, losing the basis of its security and wealth, and losing its sense of itself, as if a storm cloud were to gather quickly. across the country and the national mood suddenly became dour, gloomy, fearful and angry. The Americans had had enough. »
I recently spoke by phone with Ganz, who also publishes the Substack “Unpopular Front.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the strangeness of that 1992 election, what David Duke meant to the far right, and why the debate on the question of whether Donald Trump is a fascist continues to be important.
You think the early 90s have been underdiscussed in conversations about where America is politically in 2024. Why?
At the time of Charlotteville, there were a lot of articles interviewing people about what was then called the alt-right. All these guys who turned out to be Nazis kept talking about Murray Rothbard, this libertarian Jewish economist from the Bronx; they said that it was he who had put them on their path.
These were Nazis talking about a Jew in a different context than we usually hear.
Exactly, it was a kind of admiration, which I found really, really strange and remarkable. Trump had become president fairly recently, and people were trying to figure him out. I found this essay by Murray Rothbard called “Right-Right Populism” and it was his response to David Duke’s unsuccessful bid for governor of Louisiana in 1991. David Duke had been a former – or “former” – Klansman and neo-Nazi, and he lost the race for governor, but he won the majority of the white vote. He won the Republican nomination against the wishes of the Republican establishment. I thought it was a wild and weird prediction of the kinds of things you started hearing from Trump and his surrogates, and from extreme people about Trump.
What can you tell us about Rothbard?
He had an incredibly strange political life. He grew up in a communist environment in the Bronx, but his father was a free-market libertarian conservative, and he became even more interested in that. At Columbia, he was the student leader of the Strom Thurmond group. But he saw himself as a holdover from the old pre-war, America First right, which was very isolationist and didn’t really like the hawkish nature of the conservative movement as it appeared during the Cold War. In the 1960s, Rothbard came to associate with the New Left because he saw their anti-statism as potentially compatible with his own. He became a founder of the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, but was later expelled, in part for being too strange and extreme.
Basically what he is saying in this essay is that David Duke’s campaign against the right-wing establishment, which Duke believes has become too enmeshed in this global oligarchy of liberal elites, should be the future strategy pursued by people who are truly right-wing. wingers, not these crushing conservatives. He has this strange (for a libertarian), almost Marxist class analysis, which has a racial component, I wouldn’t even say subtext, a racial component, in which he says that corporate thugs and the state are wick, and that they have a lower class constituency and they exploit and oppress working class people and middle class people. And that’s what you started to hear from people around Trump – people who were able to express Trump, to the extent that he had a coherent ideology or political message behind him.
Rothbard also wanted the right-wing populist to be a demagogue. So he said that like Joseph McCarthy If you did, you need to go directly to the masses and threaten these liberal elites. And he said everyone was wrong about McCarthy. People say, “Oh, he was a rude guy, but the anti-communist side was right.” » He said, “No, we did it backwards.” His threatening and demagogic nature was the best thing about him; that’s what was powerful about him.
David Duke has already been talked about as a Trump antecedent, as has Pat Buchanan, two major characters in the book. What did you learn about them that was new or surprising?
I think with Duke, it was his uncanny ability – for at least a little while – to have this Teflon quality with his fans. No attack could really work on him. The other thing about Duke that reminded me of Trump was how much he scared the Republicans and how hard they had to contain him. With Buchanan, I think there was little appreciation of the extent to which he understood Duke’s viability as a signal that perhaps his own moment had arrived. He procrastinated and flat out lied, saying, “Well, I don’t really have much to do with David Duke.” But in other places he simply said, “Yes, his candidacy really made me think it was time to launch my own.” »
While reading your book, I had to pause to remember that neither of these two guys was even close to being president. We can go back and look at them as backgrounds and curiosities, but somehow, even though they are both hateful and horrible characters, they don’t feel dangerous in the same way Trump does right now . What changed?
The conditions that Duke and Buchanan took advantage of deteriorated or became more acute. The country is a lot less white than it was back then, and the issues that raises for people are more intense. The other thing is that the country has experienced strong deindustrialization; the composition of the workforce and the way people earn a living have changed significantly since that time. The book takes place after a recession which, at the time, was very bad for people, but in historical hindsight it had nothing to do with what happened in 2008.
I think the loss of memory between big moments and small moments is really what my book is about. This 1992 election is not considered the same as 1968, or 1932, or even Obama’s, and certainly not 2016. It is not really considered an important period in the American history. But I think if you read it a certain way, you start to see the direction the country was going. You can see the beginning of many things that took a more dangerous form.
I also think that Trump is a synthesis of many things that in the book are still scattered and unfinished. So Trump is not just Big David Duke; it’s not just Big Pat Buchanan. It obviously has some aspects of their appeal, but it also comes from a different world. He comes from New York politics. He comes from the tabloid world, the entertainment world. He was a constant guest on talk shows. Pat Buchanan was someone that political junkies really knew and liked, but he was too bourgeois and too Beltway. He was still too DC. And Trump speaks a very different language. Buchanan – even though he is in many ways a thug – quotes Yeats in his speeches and so on. Trump doesn’t do that.
Can you tell us more about the 1992 elections themselves? I think people now understand that Bush lost the popularity he gained after his great success in the Gulf War because the economy collapsed. And then you have this original Ross Perot figurine. But why do you think it was so important?
This election, I believe, demonstrated a crisis in American politics in which both parties struggled to convey a message that could generate and rally a majority. And many people turned to the protesting candidates. Pat Buchanan was a protest candidate within the GOP and, in some ways, within the Conservative Party.
With Ross Perot, that might not have been possible, but there were times during this election when it looked like he might actually win. His candidacy reflected a sense of rejection from both Republicans and Democrats as out of touch, insensitive and only caring about other business elites or various lobbies. Perot comes in and says, “I’ll take care of all that.” I’m going to go out there and deal with it, and I’m going to tell these two corrupt parties what’s going on, and I’m going to tell the corrupt Congress what’s going on. Drain the swamp, essentially. He represented the Caesarist solution that many people now see in Trump, and part of Trump’s attempt to play with the idea of a presidential election played out in Perot’s Reform Party. He saw a path that Perot was blazing.
