The Interregnum

Almost half a century ago, the historian of China Ray Huang wrote a profound, eccentric book called 1587: A Year of No Significance. Studying the emperor and half a dozen of his top administrators as they went about their routine duties, Huang made vivid a Ming dynasty being drawn into terminal decline by problems too small and a process too gradual for contemporaries to take note of: budget shortfalls, the corruption of the court by eunuchs, poorly managed trade relations with Portugal, occasional Japanese piracy, and so on. Two generations later, in the 1640s, the dynasty would meet its end in plague and insurrection.

The journalist John Ganz is attempting something similar. When the Clock Broke describes a few months in the administration of George H. W. Bush, roughly from November 1991, when the libertine ex-governor of Louisiana Edwin Edwards returned to the gubernatorial fray to drub the former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, until August 1992, when Pat Buchanan declared at the Republican National Convention in Houston that a “religious and cultural war” had broken out between two political factions—two Americas, even. Whatever was going subtly wrong then, maybe it will help explain what is going dramatically wrong now.

Ganz writes a stylish Substack newsletter called Unpopular Front, where he focuses on history, hypocrisy in high places, the menace of fascist ideology, and Donald Trump, often in the same breath. His book expands on an article he published to acclaim in the excellent small magazine The Baffler in 2018. In the modest flowerbed of 1991–92, as Ganz sees it, ideological seeds were planted that would grow into the lavish jungle of Trumpian malgoverno. This is more a political essay than the history of a time: there is no room for Paul Tsongas or Tom Foley or Pat Schroeder here, let alone for Magic Johnson or William Kennedy Smith. Ganz’s intuition is excellent. In this sad, stale period when America was transitioning out of Reaganism, the Cold War, and analog technology, there is indeed a clue to what followed, even if it is not quite where Ganz thinks it is.

Ganz captures the America of the early 1990s through a set of portraits, the most important of which concern three men who challenged the system frontally. He begins with David Duke, the most extremist individual to campaign for national office in the late twentieth century, and possibly the weirdest. Yes, he had been photographed in a Nazi uniform in his youth. Yes, he had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—which he’d left on rancorous terms a decade earlier amid allegations he’d stolen and sold their mailing list. But he had also written a filthy pseudonymous advice book about how to please a man in bed. He frosted his hair. He had been a Democratic candidate for president in 1988.

Louisiana has a two-round French voting system that rewards extremism, including the Huey Long–style left-wing populism that is its local specialty. The deeper Ganz delves into the state’s traditions, the less important, representative, or worrisome Duke seems. Nonetheless he did get fifty-nine percent of the white vote in a Senate race that he lost to the Democrat J. Bennett Johnson in 1990. Running for governor the following year, he won the vote of poor whites, but lost by twenty-four points to Edwin Edwards, who took the state’s large black vote almost unanimously and won whites earning more than fifty thousand dollars per year. In retrospect, Duke never threatened even Baton Rouge.

Ganz implies he was a harbinger all the same. “Tonight Louisiana defeated the darkness of hate, bigotry and division,” Edwards said at his post-election celebration, “but where will the next challenge come from? Will it be in another campaign in Louisiana? Or in a campaign for governor in some other state? Or a campaign for president of the United States?” If you hate Trump, this deftly placed citation will sound thrillingly portentous—as if Duke’s truth were marching on in the person of our ex-president.

Pat Buchanan decided to run for president at the end of 1991. President Bush, as he saw it, had betrayed Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution. Buchanan didn’t get far: after taking thirty-eight percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Republican primary, he faded. But in retrospect his candidacy was a watershed. The onetime Nixon and Reagan aide was a rare pre-Trump populist who had excelled at the highest level of mainstream politics. (Ron Paul was arguably another.) He was serious.

And he ran in the teeth of an operation to ruin him. Buchanan was not just criticized but mocked for having warned the year before that to invade Iraq in the name of a “new world order” and American “values” was to set a dangerous course. For arguing that the United States was meeting Israel’s strategic needs at the expense of its own, he was attacked as an anti-Semite—unsurprisingly, perhaps, but unjustly. Buchanan was a newspaper columnist—all of his opinions were expressed colorfully, provocatively. He wrote, for instance, of Israel’s “amen corner” in the U.S. Congress. He also wrote about Jews as a voting bloc and a political force, the way his colleagues routinely did about blacks and retirees. He could certainly be accused of undue interest in Jewish subjects, but not of especial malevolence. His skepticism about the U.S.–Israel relationship, in fact, was mild compared to what one can read today in the pages of the very newspapers that pilloried him.

The worldview Buchanan was espousing in 1992 was the one he had carried through the Nixon administration: the country was a republic, a republic required citizens of a certain character, and that character was eroded by paternalism of all kinds. But two historic changes had modified his outlook. First, the paternalism that had been introduced after 1964 to solve the American race problem had not just fallen short of expectations; it had given government a new power to censor. Progressive opinions were coming to have the force of law.

Second, while he continued to revere Ronald Reagan as a leader, Buchanan had reconsidered his free-market policies, concluding that they had gone too far. Buchanan’s 1992 speech in Houston is today remembered for its “culture war” notes—its allegation that on matters of race, sex, and religion the American government had become the adversary of the American people. True enough, but the real innovation in the speech was its dramatis personae: factory workers terrified of being laid off, a single mother who says, “I’ve lost my job; I don’t have any money, and they’re going to take away my little girl.” These were people certain Republicans brought up only to make fun of. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, would chuckle on air about the homeless with Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s rollicking “Ain’t Got No Home” running as a soundtrack.

“My friends, these people are our people,” Buchanan told the crowd. “They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. . . . They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.”

There is your harbinger of the present time. The Republicans in the Astrodome may have been too swaddled in ideology to understand what they were hearing—Buchanan only took a quarter of the Republican vote that primary season. But the people who did understand it received the message like an electroshock. The Republican party would live on as a racket for its networkers. But it would not be taken seriously by its base again until it figured out what Buchanan was talking about. That process would take twenty-four years.

Inspiring though he was as an orator, readable though he was as an historian, Buchanan was not a system-builder. To explain this inchoate Republican rebellion, Ganz turns to Buchanan’s friend Sam Francis, a lonely and introspective man who worked as an editorialist and columnist at the Washington Times until 1995 and died at the age of fifty-seven a decade later. Francis approached politics in a more ideological way: he is a kindred spirit to Ganz himself, whose narrative lights up whenever it encounters him.

Francis doesn’t figure much in public discussions these days—his Wikipedia page describes him primarily as a “white supremacist,” as if that were a job description. But he offers Ganz the key to an intellectual world operating beyond the view of the intellectual world. For Francis, who was from Tennessee, the core of Reaganism was not what Manhattanites and Washingtonians supposed it to be. The core was dispossession:

Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural, and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.

If we look at the popular discontents out of which Reaganism arose in the late 1970s, this makes a good deal of sense. There was a worry that civil rights agitation, strengthened by the full might of the federal government, was becoming a means to boss people around and grind the faces of the white poor. A worry was all it was—it was not yet a grievance. But for Francis the writing was on the wall. He believed that the damage had already been done, and that the yeomanry’s will to self-rule had been broken. “We neither want a republic,” he wrote, “nor could we keep it if we had one.” He called the result “totalitarian,” perhaps prematurely. He became a Duke enthusiast. It is worth noting, whatever one thinks of Francis’s ideas, that at no point did the Republican party espouse or even entertain them.

The final anti-system rebel seemed at the time to be the most historically consequential. The C.N.N. talk show host Larry King drummed up support in early 1992 for a third-party run by the diminutive Texan book-keeping mogul H. Ross Perot. He would take nineteen percent of the vote nationwide, the best showing for a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Perot was a martinet and a paranoid. To advance in the face of his own rebarbative personality and self-destructive campaign management required attractive issues. Perot had them. He opposed the budget deficits that had arisen under Reagan and threatened to capsize government finances. He opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and the war in Iraq. He claimed to be fighting corruption—oddly, since he himself had made his fortune overcharging the government for computer services, and the George H. W. Bush administration, flawed though it was in other respects, may have been the least corrupt in American history. (Its worst moral reprobate was Bush’s chief of staff John Sununu, who was rumored to indulge secretly in philately. Indeed, on June 12, 1991, in New York City, he was caught diverting the White House limousine to a stamp auction that he had been excited about attending, possibly costing the federal Treasury a couple gallons of gas.)

The Perot vote allowed Bill Clinton to enter the White House through the back door, with forty-three percent of the vote. Most newspapers, exuberant about the Democratic victory, dismissed the idea that Bush would have triumphed had the “conservative” vote not been split. The idea that Perot drew evenly from both sides has hardened into conventional wisdom. Ganz doesn’t quite buy it. “Perot’s vote,” he writes, “had become steadily more male, more conservative, less educated, and less well-off as Election Day approached.” It looked like the nucleus of the twenty-first-century Republican party. Clinton was the first of many Democrats to benefit from its emergence.

Ganz is a really good writer. His literary gifts far outclass those of today’s run-of-the-mill political historian or pundit. He is witty. He is light-handedly allusive. The Midwestern conservative sage Russell Kirk’s suggestion that some neocons “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States” was met, Ganz writes, with “neoconservative tsuris.” He refers to the disruptive street demonstrations of the Policeman’s Benevolent Association, led by Phil Caruso, as “Caruso’s operatics.”

And he is a good reader. Almost everyone who has written about the campaign of 1992 has noticed the benefit Bill Clinton drew from his attack on the rap lyricist Sister Soulja, who had ruminated about killing white people. But few have taken the trouble, as Ganz has, to read her memoir, in which she attacked welfare dependency in terms that were positively Clintonian. Few have spent a lot of time poring over the Washington Times, today a paper too lacking in resources to make an impact even on the right, but thirty years ago a mighty force in the capital. Wherever a policy issue is complicated and liable to facile generalizations, Ganz is well-informed and sure-footed—on the so-called savings and loan crisis, for instance, in which the Reagan administration tried to shore up a failing set of car- and home-lenders by freeing them to make ever riskier loans, bringing on the worst banking catastrophe since the Depression; or on the lobbying battles over the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine and its “indecency” standard, both of which wound up being scrapped to serve big broadcasting moguls.

This being the case, there are places where Ganz unaccountably over-eggs his story and gets the deeper reality of the period wrong, even when he gets the facts right. He asserts that the mafia boss John Gotti, ratted out by Sammy “the Bull” Gravano and standing trial for murder, “was on the cusp of being something more than a gangster: he was wooing and apparently winning public opinion. He seemed to be becoming a political phenomenon.” No, he wasn’t. No, he didn’t. The only people Gotti was important to, outside of his famiglia, were the people who drew up headlines for the New York Post, where Gotti was a fixture alongside various local celebrities and scoundrels, many now utterly forgotten: Bess Myerson, Al Sharpton, Donald Manes, Keith Hernandez, Ivan Boesky, Vernon Mason, Donald Trump. It was perhaps in chasing the last of these through the Post’s archives that the author formed his exaggerated idea of Gotti’s contemporaneous importance.

The subtitle of this book serves it poorly, implying that politics is interesting only to the extent that it is madcap, zany, and unfathomable. If we put Ganz’s still photographs in the context of the moving picture that that era actually was, much that appears portentous and mysterious reveals itself to have been unlikely to happen any other way. Part of the gloom hanging over 1991 is nemesis from Ronald Reagan’s mistake in selecting George H. W. Bush as his vice president in 1980. Reagan’s consultants, who had cut their teeth in the presidential election of 1964, thought Bush might shore up support among liberal New England and Wall Street Republicans, a constituency that had nearly evaporated in the interim. A decade later, with Reagan gone, Bush had nothing to offer the party or the country, and the baleful consequences would ramify from there. George H. W. Bush left office with a claim to have been one of the worst presidents in the history of the republic. Within two decades history would arrange a vindication of sorts, such that today he is not even remembered as the worst president in the history of his immediate family.

Usually a lot of myth-making and consensus-manufacturing shapes American political life. The few months Ganz describes were an exception, an interregnum between two big, brassy projects: Reagan’s Free World with its “unleashing” of entrepreneurs and Clinton’s Rules-Based International Order with its start-ups.

The first Bush era, by contrast, was a silence in which Americans could mull over what the country had actually become: a soft despotism (to use Tocqueville’s phrase), operating under a system that journalists baptized “political correctness” during the 1989–90 school year. This is the America of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing and the invention of sexual harassment. Momentum was building towards the Republican landslide of 1994, starting with the election of Republicans Christine Todd Whitman as governor of New Jersey and Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York City in 1993. It is the same America that saw the publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve in 1994, O. J. Simpson’s murder of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994, and his acquittal in 1995. Without falsifying Ganz’s diagnosis of economic Reaganism, these episodes brought a hardening in the country’s cultural Reaganism. The mood Ganz picks up in 1991 lasted until mid-decade, seemingly burning itself out in a matter of weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. That was when two long-awaited and largely despaired-of transitions finally seemed to “take.” First, the draconian War on Drugs, a project of mass incarceration launched a decade before by Reagan and pursued with unflagging zeal by Bush and Clinton, at last brought an astonishing drop in crime. Second, primed by the post–Cold War “peace dividend,” the bet Clinton had placed on Silicon Valley’s innovation brought a new, post-industrial, pollution-free, and generalized prosperity—generalized, at least, among the opinion-forming classes.

The problems were solved and the era had ended. By the time similar problems rolled around again, a generation later, America would be a different country, operating under different rules, and with a different ruling class.

Ganz’s reading is more theoretical. As he sees it, there had arisen a “crisis of hegemony” of the sort described by Antonio Gramsci, in which a ruling class finds itself unable to win the consent of the public for a major political undertaking. What had failed was “deregulation, tax cuts, high interest rates, and scaled-back services”—in a word, Reaganism. This is broadly correct, as long as we accept Gramsci’s understanding that hegemony can persist for a very long time while a new world struggles to be born.

Because, at the level of policy, this failure would go undiagnosed for decades. Buchanan, as we have noted, was jeered out of the ruling party. Perot found no place in it. The elder Bush was abandoned by the electorate partly because he raised taxes to cover the deficit Reaganomics had opened. What is more, the wild electoral success of Reaganomics led Democrats to emulate it. It took a non-economic event—the Iraq war—to open the door to political iconoclasm, which began with the campaign of Howard Dean in 2004. Only at the start of the last decade did the “Age of Reagan,” as the historian Sean Wilentz calls it, really come to an end. Obamacare, the Tea Party, Jerry Brown’s passage of taxes on Amazon in California—these were the turning points.

The failure of Reaganomics did not mean the abandonment of Reaganism, for the reasons Sam Francis mentions and John Ganz cites. The cultural part of Reaganism was more important than the economic—and this is because it addressed, however tentatively, a considerably larger failure, a regime crisis, in fact, which was already of long standing in the early 1990s and which continues today. This is government’s glaring failure in the years since Lyndon Johnson’s reforms of 1964 and 1965—especially in civil rights and immigration law—to recover anything like the freedom, self-rule, and fellow-feeling of the America they overthrew. If you understand that this—and not a few tax rates—is the real Gramscian crisis, then things about American politics in 2024 that baffle smart people become much more explicable.

There are many aspects to this crisis. The one that should loom largest in the period this book covers is crime. Ganz has a blind spot about it. He cites numbers but doesn’t really put two and two together. At the time of the L.A. riots of 1992, it was frequently mentioned that Rodney King, whose beating by police occasioned the riots, had been convicted of an armed robbery, something Ganz describes as “a rather pathetic 1989 attempt to hold up a Korean shopkeeper with a tire iron for $200.” People back then would have been simply incapable of mustering that blasé tone. In 1990, New York had two thousand two hundred sixty-two murders (five times as many as today) and three thousand one hundred twenty-six rapes (more than double). There were six times as many robberies and ten times as many burglaries. The impression this made on people went beyond just prompting them to say, “Wow, that’s a high number.” It was visceral. In 1991 the median American house price was a little more than one hundred forty-seven thousand dollars and it was falling. For better and for worse, citizens were not as segregated by class as they are today. Everyone, it seemed, even those who lived on a farm or belonged to a country club, knew someone whose sister had disappeared walking home late after work and been found three weeks later in the trunk of an abandoned car. Or some such thing. Yes, crime eventually went down. But until it did, no one had any reason to expect it would.

Radical politicians tend not to be pied pipers. They are effects of systemic failure, not causes. Ganz may be right to say of David Duke that “his platform was undeniably shot through with thinly veiled anti-Black racism: he denounced ‘welfare dependency,’ affirmative action and minority ‘quotas.’” But if so, the racism is in Duke’s heart, not in his policy proposals, because, outside of the learned-nothing-and-forgotten-nothing wing of the Democratic party that Bill Clinton was just then leaving behind, everyone denounced welfare dependency, affirmative action, and minority quotas. Nor have any of these things grown more popular in the decades since.

There is a lot in the sad early 1990s that recalls our time. But today’s sometimes majoritarian populism is not yesterday’s fringe discontent. The most arresting thing about the thinkers and demagogues Ganz so vividly brings back to life is not their extremism but their Reaganesque triumphalism, their cockiness. A much-consulted book of the time was the journalist Peter Brown’s Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond. Sam Francis, for all his disappointment with Republicans, didn’t think of himself as fringe or schismatic. He claimed to speak on behalf of “a profound social movement that reflects the dynamics of American society and promises to dominate not only politically, but also perhaps socially and culturally.” One seldom hears a Trumpian talk this way. Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot were tribunes of an angry people that nonetheless still had reason to think of itself as the best people. Unless it put up an energetic resistance to the drift of events, they warned, it would end up a radically diminished people. In this, at least, they proved right.