First Time Farce, Second Time Dangerous
“When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.”
My reading has gotten ahead of my ability (mostly not having the spare time) to write proper book reviews, so I was going to write a few posts plugging a couple of books.
I really liked John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” Ganz gives us a panoramic view of politics in the early 1990s. He makes a very good case that the emergence of a coterie of far right figures from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to Donald Trump to David Duke prefigured much of the politics that has gone mainstream since 2016.
As someone who lived though and was politically active in those years, I found Ganz’s books a funny kind of nostalgia romp and a great refresher course. David Duke’s frightening runs for Governor of Louisiana and U.S. Senate, Pat Buchanan successful revival of “America First,” and Ross Perot (the most “successful” of them all) campaign for President in 1992, were all written off at the time as “weird” and “freakish” by the political establishment. Trump was still a tabloid joke at the time.
There were only two things that I think are missing from Ganz’s book. Because Ganz’s book primarily focuses on mainstream politics, he doesn’t talk about the popular grassroots campaigns like the “Louisiana Coalition against Racism and Nazism” that played an important role in fighting David Duke. The second is that the labor movement was flat on its back at the time and that well-entrenched xenophobia helped legitimize the bigotry of Duke, Perot, and Buchanan, even though the labor movement formally opposed them.
I remember having a conversation with my late uncle at the time Buchanan was running for president in 1992. He was a Vietnam veteran and truck driver. I asked him about the election, he told me, “I like Buchanan, but I like my social security better.” There was still a certain line that some wouldn’t cross, but it was weakening.
Read the book, you’ll like it.
The post First Time Farce, Second Time Dangerous appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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