Review: When the Clock Broke. Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism, by John Ganz

The 1992 US Presidential election campaign saw the Republican incumbent, George H.W. Bush, go down to defeat against his Democratic Party opponent, Bill Clinton. As Bush (the ‘caretaker’ of the ‘Reagan revolution’) ceded power to Clinton (who promised to breathe life back into an ailing economy), politics in the USA had a business-as-usual appearance. But on the analysis offered by John Ganz in When the Clock Broke, a force that would reshape it dramatically was beginning to manifest itself. This force was populism of the sort that would carry Donald Trump into the White House in 2016.

Ganz finds support for this analysis in a ‘wave’ of populist sentiment that, in 1992, was plain to see in H. Ross Perot's unsuccessful campaign for the Presidency as an independent candidate. Ganz detects in Perot's campaign intimations of a ‘Caesarist’ approach to the exercise of executive power that would become more obvious in 2016. Moreover, he forges a link between this analysis and the idea of a ‘science of power’ as James Burnham elaborated it in his The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943). According to Burnham, the ‘human appetite for power’ is ‘limitless’. Here, Ganz could, as we will see, have forged a further link with Henry Luce's account of ‘The American Century’ (Life, February 17th 1941).

Perot was a businessman who had grown wealthy in the data processing industry. He presented himself to the electorate as someone attuned to its concerns—for example, criminality—and equipped to counter the problems of governmental ‘gridlock’ and a $4 trillion deficit. More particularly, he declared that he would make ‘the free enterprise system work’ and ensure that the USA did not, relative to its allies, shoulder a disproportionate ‘defence burden’. Alongside Perot, Ganz sets two further avatars of populism, Pat Buchanan (a conservative who unsuccessfully challenged Bush in the 1991 Republican primaries) and David Duke (a member of Louisiana's House of Representatives between 1989 and 1992 and a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).

During Richard Nixon's Presidency, Buchanan worked in the White House and coined the phrase ‘the silent majority’. In the 1980s, he concluded that ‘the greatest vacuum in American politics’ lay ‘to the right of Ronald Reagan’. Under Buchanan's influence this space became the terrain of ‘paleoconservatism’. Conservatism on this model was committed to winding down welfarism of the sort that found expression in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Moreover, it should, according to Buchanan, ‘expropriate’ issues from Duke— like the need to counter illegal immigration.

Ganz adds depth to his analysis by dwelling on a group of thinkers who exerted influence on politics in the USA in the early 1990s. He identifies Murray Rothbard and Samuel Francis as having shaped paleoconservative thought. Rothbard dismissed the idea that it would be impossible to ‘turn back the clock’ on big government. In 1992, he declared that the time had come to ‘break the clock’ of ‘social democracy’ and legislation that had carried the USA in that direction. Francis pursued a complementary theme. He argued that government should be attentive to the interests of ‘middle American radicals’—that is, people who saw big government as imposing unjust tax burdens on them.

Ganz contrasts the contributions of Rothbard and Francis with the influence exerted on Bill Clinton by Carroll Quigley (a professor in Georgetown University). Quigley presented Clinton with the idea of ‘future preference’ and identified it as a form of ‘secularised Puritanism’. In 1991, Clinton sought to bring this idea into sharp focus when he declared that ‘the future can be better than the present and… each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so’. A year later, he used a chorus line from the rock band Fleetwood Mac (‘Don't stop thinking about tomorrow’) to encourage in voters the belief that they could move into a better future. These and his other efforts to secure the Presidency were successful and checked populism's advance.

Ganz argues that populism remained an ‘inchoate’ political force until Donald Trump gave it a more definite, ‘authoritarian’ shape. Here, Ganz could have refined his analysis by drawing on Luce's account of the American Century (which appeared shortly before the USA's entry into World War Two). According to Luce, the term ‘the American Century’ encompasses two prominent considerations. First, it has to do with the pursuit of ideals with universal appeal. These ideals include the rule of law, democracy and freedom. Secondly, it relates to a context in which the USA is a global hegemon or ‘powerhouse’.

The relevance of the American Century to Ganz's book is easy to explain. In the Cold War's immediate aftermath, George H.W. Bush identified the USA as sitting at the centre of a ‘New World Order’ in which it would exert a benign influence on the wider world. But as Bush spoke in these terms, his critics raised doubts about the USA's ability to sustain itself as the powerhouse Luce had described half a century earlier. Perot, for example, called attention to ‘a giant sucking sound’ as jobs and investment moved out of the USA and into other countries.

In this statement and in Perot's concern with the onerous defence burden borne by the USA, we see an emphasis on considerations that threatened to compromise the USA's position as a hegemon. When Perot made these statements, he exposed a point of vulnerability in mainstream political thought. This point of vulnerability is apparent in, for example, Bush's complacent assumption that Americans could expect to sit at the centre of a secure New World Order. In this way Perot and other contributors to the populist wave of 1992 were able to sow seeds of doubt that still had a place in the political life of the USA when Trump ran for the Presidency. Consequently, when Trump urged voters to ‘Make America Great Again’, his words quickly gained traction. Moreover, we can see in Trump's successful campaign a moment when the USA pivoted away from ideals in an effort to maintain or foster the power necessary to sustain itself as a hegemon.

In the context that Luce brings into focus, such a pivot is unsurprising. On this point, it is regrettable that Ganz did not make more extensive use of Burnham's reflections on a science of power. If a strong desire to preserve or regain power is part of people's make-up, a search for means by which to do so is what we would expect to see. People in the grip of such a desire may, for example, be ready to embrace government on a model that is Caesarist and that presents itself as attuned to their concerns.

Ganz does much to light up the road that leads from the populist wave of 1992 to the first Trump Presidency. Moreover, when he associates government on a Caesarist model with tendencies towards authoritarianism, he makes a point that it is impossible to gainsay. But, at the same time, it is possible to situate Trump and the populist wave of 1992 in the context that prompted Luce to talk of the American Century. This is a context in which the relationship between ideals and power can become fraught with tension.

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism, by John Ganz. Penguin Books. 432 pp. £10.99