Not quite my take

It feels petty and even a little silly to wish that an author had written a different book. It is, after all, his book. But I found John Ganz's When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s a surprisingly unsatisfying account of its time.

His subjects -- David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and their tiresome intellectual mentors and apologists like Rush Limbaugh and Sam Francis -- remain just repulsive clowns, part of the long tradition of right wing grifters who've played on racism and grievance to assume an unmerited central role in our lives. Rick Perlstein has chronicled earlier incarnations in Goldwater's and Reagan's eras. These guys and their movements fight the full realization of the country's egalitarian potential. They will do so as long as doing so remains profitable, and beyond. So does Trump today. I see no point in dignifying them; they are unserious figures as a contemporary politician has observed.

Taking them seriously means more than telling their stories for drama; what in American society makes us suckers for these characters? That's the difficult subject.

I lived the early '90s as a politically active progressive. There were plenty of countervailing events and trends that find no significance in Ganz's telling. In particular, the international campaign against apartheid came to fruition with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the beginning of democratic majority, African, rule. The GOP's St. Ronnie had opposed the South African freedom struggle -- with plaudits from Pat Buchanan.

Those years were also a pivotal time for the emergence of LGBTQ+ full participation in American life. A decade of Republican neglect of the toll of AIDS on the community helped launch gays as a political force and we've never stopped since. Though gays sang "Ding, dong the witch is dead!" on Castro Street when Clinton was elected, we did not look to national Dems for our progress. The same day, we elected an Asian American lesbian to the San Francisco school board, one tiny step in a long march through the institutions of democracy. We understood, as marginalized people always must, that we had to make our own path forward. Establishment pols will follow.

Many of the themes of that era arose from Black demands for full human dignity in American society. Right wingers thrived on pointing to the riots after a southern California jury acquitted Los Angeles police thugs who beat up Rodney King. But a combination of subsequent community organizing and prudential reforms encouraged by big business actually laid the ground work for a Black president 15 years later. Though racial atmospherics of the time were awful, the movement was forward.

Little as I liked this book, I find Ganz's substack, Unpopular Front, vital reading. I'm curious where he goes next.