90s Kids Remember
On John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, Slacker, and the Millennial Experience
I was probably more than halfway through Mike Davis’s 1990 portrait of LA, City of Quartz, before I realized I’d been getting its subheading wrong. It wasn’t, as I casually scanned it, “Excavating the Future of Los Angeles,” but rather “Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.” The preposition makes all the difference. Los Angeles, a smog-choked and car worshiping city devoted to driving up real estate prices, whose police department was devising ever-more intrusive and draconian tactics to terrorize the populace, was, in Davis’s estimation, a harbinger of a coming era of austerity politics, openly crooked politicians, and pervasive paranoia that would soon spread to the rest of the country. History, I would say, has proven him right.
In
’s new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, he returns to Davis’s project from the other side. Davis, whom Ganz has written about his admiration for, was incredibly prescient in his analysis about the dispiriting direction our society was headed in despite confining his view to LA. Many of Davis’s predictions have come true, and along with them have come other bizarre manifestations of a culture that’s been so long adrift that it’s hard to recall what it was like to be in the strong current of history. Now that we’re living in the ruinous wreckage of the post-historical period, Ganz has taken up the task of returning to the time of City of Quartz to expand the view and find harbingers in other characters and other places—to excavate the other clues that pointed toward the future we’ve inherited.I’m an unabashed fan of Ganz’s work and have been excited for the book since it was first announced. I am a longtime subscriber to his newsletter, Unpopular Front, and also listen to every episode of Unclear and Present Danger, the movie podcast he does with Jamelle Bouie about the political and military thrillers of the 90s. And he’s the MVP guest on Know Your Enemy, the podcast about the history and key figures of the conservative movement that’s hosted by Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, where he has joined to talk about the early 90s, the conservative fascination with Orban’s Hungary, and the conservative inability to shake antisemitism, among other topics.
Listening to the two shows in tandem over the last few years, it’s been interesting to watch the 90s come into focus as an era with a distinct identity and set of pathologies that directly influenced the present. When KYE began, their main reference point was William F. Buckley and the beginning of the modern conservative movement in the mid-50s, followed by figures like Barry Goldwater in the 60s up through Ronald Reagan. That was, for a long time, where the story ended. The 90s were, in Francis Fukuyama’s famous formulation, the “end of history,” and could often feel like the end of culture as well. It was easy to write off the 90s as an era of center-right political consensus that just sort of carried along without contributing much to the story. But we seem, finally, to have reached a distance from the decade where it’s possible to look back and take the measure of the time, to see it on its own terms, and to find the hidden forces that were churning under the placid surface.
Culture was also caught in the doldrums in the 90s. The sitcoms were great, granted, but the music sucked and fashion was starting to recycle itself. In film, there was interesting stuff percolating on the margins but John and Jamelle’s podcast is a reminder that the theaters were filled mostly with braindead action movies about terrorists and planes. In one movie discussion, Ganz described the period as the “sublime banal.” Nostalgia started to bubble up as an animating force in the American imagination in an overwhelming obsession with the 70s. The only comparable level of uncritical love for the past in living memory would be the 70s themselves, when 50s nostalgia first peaked. Out in the suburbs, everything was so boring.
As Ganz writes in the introduction to When the Clock Broke, the book is a history of losers—fringe figures, failed candidates, hatemongers—who worked without fanfare to make the United States worse. But it is equally, if not more so, an investigation into the profound malaise that swept the country at that time. As he puts it1:
This is also the history of a period whose significance hasn’t been fully understood. The president of the United States at the time called it “weird.” It’s a time out of joint with the two eras of—at least superficial—prosperity and optimism that preceded and followed it—but it may feel more familiar today. It was an era where America felt itself to be losing out: 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 rapidly gathered over the country and the national mood suddenly turned dour, gloomy, fearful, and angry. Americans were fed up. Leaders found once-loyal constituencies deaf to their appeals, the two-party system received its strongest challenge for nearly a hundred years, the country witnessed its worst single episode of civil disorder since the Civil War, and oddballs, cranks, and even crooks captured the public imagination more than staid figures of reasonable authority. Paranoia was the new common sense. The country seemed to be seeking something new, a break with the exhausted possibilities of the past but also a restoration, a way to recover what had been lost. This episode of crisis was not unforeseeable or unprecedented: it was a conjuncture where chronic troubles briefly took on acute expression, but then appeared to go into remission or repose. A lightning flash revealed a fractious and fragmented nation; the thunderclap would not be heard for some time.
The vibes were off! Without neglecting material circumstances—Ganz notes early that the prosperity of the Reagan years was quite unevenly distributed—his project in large part is to excavate and explicate this feeling, to trace how and why great swathes of the populace suddenly became ideologically adrift and ripe for initiation into a new world of conspiracy, hate, and violence.
Of course, initiation requires initiators. When the Clock Broke is, on one level, very explicitly the story of how the road was paved for Donald Trump to win the presidency. While some of the mainstream rhetoric from the time was unabashedly deranged—the Willie Horton ad, Hillary Clinton’s “superpredators” comment, the POW/MIA movement—most of it maintained an air of respectability and reasonableness. But a venerable political party doesn’t morph from the Fusionist consensus of National Review to the vicious, nationalist cult of personality it is today without members in the coalition willing to say the quiet part loud and advocate for openly isolationist, white supremacist positions, even as it cost them their reputations at the time.
Ganz begins the book with a chapter on the life and failed political ambitions of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. There are amazing details here that were new to me at least, like that Duke wore an actual Nazi brownshirt uniform around campus in college and that a major reason he was pushed out of at least one of the hate groups he founded was because he was seducing the other men’s wives. He eventually won a seat in Louisiana’s state legislature and then ran for higher offices. While the district he won was overwhelmingly white, his support was not limited to swamp trash gutter racists but crossed over into more mainstream conservative constituencies; Ganz adroitly describes Duke’s pitch as “a standard Reagan-era conservative attack on welfare and affirmative action, aside from his willingness to touch the burning racial core of the issues.”
Though Duke’s later runs for Louisiana governor and U.S. president were unsuccessful, others saw in the support he did win a demonstration that there was an opportunity to refashion the Republican party into a more hardline, reactionary, and racist organization. The most prominent figure who took up Duke’s project was Pat Buchanan. Ganz quotes a 1991 column of Buchanan’s in which he advises the GOP to outflank Duke by “tak[ing] a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles.”
Another figure spotlighted is the writer Sam Francis, about whom Ganz writes, “Identifying the thinkers who helped transform the party of Reagan into the party of Trump may be an intellectual parlor game, but if anyone deserves a prominent spot on the list, it is likely Sam Francis, whose writings and advocacy would prove startlingly prescient as well as influential.” Others include Ross Perot, a dual portrait of John Gotti and Rudy Giuliani, the LAPD broadly and its chief Daryl Gates specifically, and Rush Limbaugh. Bill Clinton hovers around the margins. There’s something very satisfying about the way Ganz has structured his story where each of these characters, once introduced, continues to pop up in subsequent chapters as supporting players, giving the book a needed sense of cohesiveness.
Ganz is skillful in using these figures to tell larger stories. In my opinion the best chapter is about Randy Weaver, who would end up in a fatal standoff with the US Marshals and FBI at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. That event was a debacle and a tragedy that would prove to be a unifying and radicalizing moment for the militia movement and other far-right extremists—Timothy McVeigh cited Ruby Ridge as a motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing—but Ganz is much more interested in how the Weavers ended up in that cabin in the first place. The most notable part of the Weavers’ story is how far they had to journey intellectually to become paranoiac conspiracists holding out against federal agents. As Ganz describes them, “The Weavers once seemed to be the most mainstream and conventional of Americans, sturdy heartland folk, yet they had moved to the very edge of the country. When they were dating as kids back in Iowa, their friends joked that they were ‘the all-American couple.’”
So what happened to them? Ganz connects their extraordinary journey toward the fringe with wider socio-economic conditions in the midwest at the time. He describes the farm boom of the 80s and its crash, which devastated family farms and led to mass layoffs in the manufacturing sector that made farming equipment. Unemployment was high and the region was in despair. All of the worst people sensed an opportunity. Conspiracy theorists, Neo-Nazis, and white supremacists of all stripes flooded the farm belt with propaganda. The region was swimming in pamphlets and newsletters pushing these ideas. The effort paid off and these hateful lines of thought gained a foothold in the wider population.
The Weavers were seekers. They moved from church to church, in search of that something that could articulate and satiate their inchoate dissatisfaction. The turning point came when Vicki Weaver read The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, the bestselling nonfiction book of the 70s. As Ganz describes it, “It was one of the primary texts of the so-called Jesus People, a charismatic movement that grew out of the wreckage of the hippie counterculture and proposed evangelical Christianity as the solution to the feeling of living in a heartless world and in a society that had lost its way. Written in the chatty argot of self-help, The Late Great Planet Earth did not augur the dawning of the Age of Aquarius: it was a book of Biblical prophecy that foresaw the Apocalypse at hand.” The Weavers were integrated into their community, had three children, and were financially comfortable. But they felt an acute lack of purpose or meaning that left them willing to grasp at any possible remedy that crossed their path.
That feeling might be the throughline of When the Clock Broke. It appears in many different circumstances and under different guises throughout the era the book covers. It’s present in voters’ sudden lack boredom with the major parties and interest in Ross Perot’s anti-establishment message; it’s present in Francis’ nostalgic dreams of a unified (white) national spirit; it’s present in the LA riots, insofar as the rioters were willing to burn down their own city rather than carry on with the way things were.
By coincidence, right around when I was reading When the Clock Broke in late April, I watched Richard Linklater’s second film, Slacker, shot in 1989 and released in 1990. Set in Austin, Texas over the course of a single day, it features a huge cast of characters, the camera following each one for only a few minutes before it latches on to someone else and is pulled in a different direction. In its characters Linklater distilled and displayed that seeking aimlessness that characterized the era.
Slacker is an intensely talky movie. It is, by and large, a series of monologues that ping-pong between serious analysis and total stoner thoughts, with little distinction or contradiction recognized between the two. Truth and falsehood mix in the characters’ minds and it seems to be an impossible task to get them sorted out again. When one character—none of them have names—is walking to a friend’s house, he attracts a kook wearing a Batman T-shirt tucked into jeans who begins walking with him and talking a mile a minute as he launches into a litany of far out ideas that include the “suppressed transmission” from the moon landing, anti-gravity technology, and the “secret group” that’s in charge of the government (three guesses who he means). But he also brings up the greenhouse effect, predicting that in twenty years we’ll be feeling its effects and the ice caps will be melting. Later in the film we meet a JFK assassination guy who also mixes the most extreme JFK conspiracy theories with stuff that has been proven to be true like Dr. Feelgood.
Most of the characters in the movie are in their early twenties. Many seem to be college students or recent graduates. Nearly all seem to be un- or underemployed. Their days are open-ended and hard to fill. When one guy gets up to leave a group hangout, his friend asks what he has going on for the rest of the day; he responds, “Oh I got some band practice in about… five hours so I figured I’d mosey on out.” In the wrong hands this could come off a bit idyllic—who doesn’t dream of having no responsibilities—but Linklater correctly diagnoses the situation as restless and unfulfilled. These highly educated young people are facing the reality that the job market and the world generally has almost no use for them or all the ideas swirling in their minds.
It’s easy to laugh at the guys near the end of the movie who are doing Marxist analysis on The Smurfs but, like, what else are they supposed to do with their degrees? These poor saps went to school and actually absorbed all that theory but American culture is so impoverished that they have nothing better to apply it to than a stupid cartoon. They have no outlet for their ideas, no means to pursue their creative passions, no avenue to satisfy the yearnings in their soul. They hardly have the language to articulate their profound lack. Take it from me, no employer cares that you’ve actually read Hegel.
I found Slacker genuinely startling on first watch because of how simultaneously foreign and familiar it felt. I felt the same way reading When the Clock Broke. As I was born in 1991, Slacker predates my existence and I was an infant during the period covered in the book. And yet both depict an intellectual and ideological unmooring that I found strongly recognizable. It seems that the early 90s were a period when people pulled down all their mental scaffolding en masse to let their thoughts run wild. I graduated college in May 2015, two months before Trump rode down that escalator and somehow again pulled down the scaffolding of a great swath of Americans in order to rebuild their worldview in his image. It has felt like a period of intense disorientation ever since.
But the discontinuities between then and now are perhaps more interesting. Looking at the various vectors of malaise that Linklater and Ganz explore—poor job opportunities, lack of faith in institutions, conspiracists beating down your door—it’s hard to escape the conclusion that things are so much worse now. The internet has supercharged the ability of hatemongers to spread their message while also decimating entire industries and deskilling workers into fake email jobs. Instead of a character talking about global warming as something that’s coming in a couple decades, it’s here, now, and it’s getting worse at a terrifying rate and we’re still not addressing it.
Fukuyama said the end of history would be “a very sad time.” It has been, indeed. I wonder a lot about what that has meant for my generation, who were born into a world where, “the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, [have been] replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns2, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” Fukuyama was wrong, of course, history has very much continued and, on one level, I believe my generation feels keenly the immensity of the work that needs to be done to avert ecological catastrophe and build a more just society. But that feeling is accompanied by a deep, deep demoralization, a demoralization fostered by a geriatric political class that refuses to give up power and a lifetime of being sneered at by our parents for playing video games and using the computer instead of playing outside. The welfare state was mostly demolished before we were born and Clinton finished the job with his reforms in 1996.
The United States slipped in a post-historical daze in the early 90s. For the generations born into it, the task must be to snap out of it.
All quotes from an advance galley copy; final text may differ
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