What the hell happened in the early 1990s? That’s the question posed, and (partially) answered by John Ganz in When the Clock Broke. He sees the period as a fracture point, as the postwar cultural consensus gave way and economic chickens came home to roost. Reading this book was a reminder of just how chaotic, in retrospect, the early ’90s were.

Ganz starts by explaining the financial situation many citizens faced, then swerves through the various cultural and social phenomena of the period. Globalization was already underway (and would only accelerate more later, when China joined the WTO). By the late 1980s, “Manufacturers struggled to keep up with inexpensive, high-quality imports from Japan, West Germany, and South Korea, brought in by the administration’s free trade policies and the strong dollar.”

The recession of 1991 had a long lead-in thanks to the crisis in industries like agriculture that spiraled through the ’80s, even as the image of national prosperity grew. This only created more resentment in those left behind. The only thing worse than doing badly is doing badly while being told everyone else is doing well. It was not “morning in America” for everyone. 

Japan, specifically, became the bogeyman, both in the business pages and the movies. The anxiety over Japanese dominance wasn’t entirely unfounded. 

Between 1987 and 1991, Japanese investors poured more than $62 billion into US real estate, with a special preference for such blue-chip behemoths as Rockefeller Center in New York and the ARCO Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles, prompting public backlash at the prospect of these great obelisks of American capitalism being owned by foreigners.

The real problem was not that the Japanese were investing but what happened when they stopped. Withdrawal of Japanese money was the beginning of the great sucking sound as the recession of 1991 took hold. Japanese investments dropped more than 50 percent, which as Ganz describes, “pulled the bottom out of a struggling Southern California economy.” But that economic overview is just the start. It’s the least insane part of Ganz’s account of this period. 

In the years he covers, a Klan Leader ran for office, survivalists had a shootout with the Feds, a third-party presidential candidate was cruising to double-digit support, while another candidate played the saxophone on TV, and police brutality triggered riots. That such a wild range of stuff happened in a narrow window requires a fair bit of backstory, which Ganz supplies. The political history of Louisiana brings us up to speed on David Duke’s ascension. The development of the twentieth-century LAPD serves as the background to the Rodney King case. These sections, plus the strange career of Ross Perot before his presidential campaign, mean we learn (or are also reminded of) a fair amount of unusual stuff before the 1990s. Which hints that, perhaps, this wasn’t a uniquely bizarre window. It just felt that way as the idea of a 24-hour news cycle started to take hold. 

There have always been outlandish people and events. They don’t have any influence without an audience. Everything from the political campaigns of David Duke and Rudy Giuliani to the Ruby Ridge fiasco and the LAPD crisis following the Rodney King riots came from having viewers. (King’s beating was only captured on tape because a local resident had just bought a camcorder). This was before widespread access to the internet, but all these things played out on TV.

And mainstream culture was building audiences by abandoning any sense of decorum. The average citizen could get riled up by listening to Rush Limbaugh, and watch fistfights on Jerry Springer. The phrase “road rage” was coined to describe violent incidents triggered by minor traffic disputes. But everyone had something to be mad about.

And for many, the disastrous crime rate only emphasized this. Paradoxically, John Gotti—a notorious mafia kingpin—was seen as almost heroic in a world of too-common street violence. He became a figure in the popular press in a way that few criminals are. Ganz writes about his prominence, in counterpoint to Rudy Giuliani, a crusading District Attorney trying to remove such elements from New York.

Gotti’s rise as a celebrity coincided with a period in which New York City seemed to be going over the precipice into total chaos. Newspaper editorials spoke of “decline,”“moral anarchy,” and “despair.” In 1991 New Yorkers lost a record-breaking 213,000 jobs. During the entire recession, 400,000 jobs would be eradicated, or 12 percent of all employment in the city.

This backdrop enabled John Gotti to be, to many, still a sympathetic figure. The Teflon Don, grinning in tabloid photos, represented a different vision of America.

When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority. … It wanted protection, a godfather, a boss.

You could be confident residents of his co-op weren’t getting mugged in the stairwell. 

How many people would’ve really wanted a city run by John Gotti is debatable, but it’s true a lot were turning their lonely eyes to some unlikely standard bearers. Bubbling along under the economic shifts was the paranoia that fed popular culture like the X-Files, as well as the worldview of “Love my country, fear my government” survivalists. 

The siege at Ruby Ridge, where a standoff with US Marshals left a woman and child dead, brought these issues to the fore. Randy Weaver, the husband at the center of the Ruby Ridge case, was a special forces veteran. Driven to the economic margins by the agricultural crisis, and moving in increasingly militant circles, he represented a type of person—the pissed-off patriot—who felt their country was leaving them in the dirt. When US Marshals tried to serve a warrant on Weaver, that became the catalyst for the siege. 

The ensuing disaster brought Weaver and his sympathizers greater visibility while validating their paranoia. Federal agents shooting his wife and son did not make Weaver and his colleagues look insane. It made them look right. As Ganz puts it: “Here was a man who was just trying to keep his family safe from the New World Order, and when he could not escape its clutches, they went and killed his family.” 

Many were coming to believe that the government had a bad habit of hanging patriots out to dry. A lot of less-crazy people were at least willing to entertain the idea of electing Ross Perot, who had built his political image on an obsessive search for POWs and MIA soldiers from the Korean and Vietnam wars. These ideas weren’t so fringe at the time. Ganz reminds us, “By 1991, a Wall Street Journal poll revealed that 69 percent of the US population believed that there were live POWs left behind in Vietnam and that the government wasn’t doing enough to get them out.” Action movies like the Rambo and Missing in Action franchises also kept the idea forefront in people’s minds. You didn’t have to be a backwoods weirdo to think there was some truth there, and it was a conspiracy theory with something for everyone. 

The idea that there were abandoned Americans still alive in Southeast Asia synthesized the pro-war and anti-war imagination: paranoia and distrust of government born of revelations about the intelligence agencies, Watergate, and the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia mingled with the sense that the country was stabbed in the back by cowardly and deceitful bureaucrats and liberal elites.

People on all points of the political spectrum could think the “system” was poking them in the eye, and meanwhile, in the background, AIDS was mowing down thousands of young men like a slow-motion Battle of the Somme. 

Ganz offers extensive analysis of the factional fighting among the forces of the right through the ’80s and ’90s, from the (more legitimate) intellectual pillars of conservatism and the arrival of the Neocons to the extreme fringe groups who gathered via mimeographed newsletters and small ads in the back of Soldier of Fortune. Geopolitics shifted alliances.

The sudden end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union made everything worse. Militant anti-communism had long provided the glue that bound the various factions of the right together and gave them common purpose. The loss of the USSR was so traumatic that the John Birch Society went into full-blown denial: they insisted that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a KGB ploy to get the West to drop its guard.

This kind of insight into the evolving attitudes of conservative and rightist thinkers is interesting, especially the strange bedfellows that political realignment can bring. However, while he studies the strands of the right with Talmudic intensity, parsing the schisms and personalities involved, Ganz leaves untouched much of the left, which had plenty of its own crackups.

With the declining force of organized labor in industry (even as public sector unions grew), power in the left was shifting to the technocratic elites. This change was exemplified by Bill Clinton—and a few years later on the other side of the Atlantic by Tony Blair. Clinton himself would sign NAFTA, a mechanism for disenfranchising millions of American workers, who could then be castigated as racists and sore losers for not getting with the program. The withering of influence from the union hall would lead to a withering of concern for such workers. In the corridors of power, leaders like Clinton and Democrats following him no longer needed to care very much about what the AFL-CIO thought of their positions.

In the period Ganz discusses, the spasms of realignment on the left were already visible. One major debate was between those who wanted to control immigration (to protect workers’ rights, or on environmental grounds) and those who wanted to encourage it. This issue led to some famous knock-downs, and drag-outs within the Sierra Club. But Ganz leaves this fracture point unaddressed.

He does recognize that swinging left was as much of a choice for moderate politicians as swinging right, giving the example of (former and future) California governor Jerry Brown “transforming himself from a man who once pejoratively called universal health care ‘socialist’ into an angry left populist, railing in alternative media against the Democrat-Republican duopoly.” Sadly, he doesn’t dig in further. He also ignores the more militant strands of the left, like the more than 100 “eco terrorist” attacks in the US in the ’80s and ’90s, by groups including Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front. 

I’m guessing you had forgotten them, too. The most startling thing about Ganz’s book is realizing just how much nuttiness there was going around.