Tracing the Prehistory of Trumpism
Inderjeet Parmar
THE WIRE\INDIA
'When the Clock Broke' is brilliant symptomatic history. Read it for the human drama.
GIF: An illustrative clock/Canva.
John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke is a vivid, entertaining chronicle of the early 1990s as the cultural and affective prehistory of Trumpism. With novelistic flair, Ganz reconstructs a decade of disillusionment: the post-Cold War triumph soured by recession, racial tensions, and a parade of charismatic grotesques – David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Rudy Giuliani, even John Gotti. Trump, lurking in the wings, absorbs the lessons of strongman spectacle in a crumbling New York. The book is wry, morally urgent, and dedicates itself to warning against fascism’s “structure of feeling.” It is essential reading for understanding the emotional syntax of today’s far right.
Yet, from the perspective of elite theory and historical materialism, Ganz’s account raises a critical question: does he root Trumpism in systemic and structural forces, or largely in individuals and contingent chance? The answer is mixed – but leans toward the latter. Ganz excels at conjunctural narrative, but his focus on colourful personalities, media events, and subcultural currents risks portraying the 1990s rupture as a series of accidental eruptions rather than the predictable outcome of deeper racial-capitalist-imperial contradictions.
‘When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s’, John Ganz, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
The Strengths: Conjunctural Brilliance and Affective Insight
Ganz’s greatest achievement is capturing the mood of the early 1990s. The Cold War’s end promised a “kinder, gentler America,” yet delivered junk-bond crashes, savings-and-loan scandals, urban riots, and a white middle class feeling culturally besieged and economically betrayed. Into this vacuum stepped con-men promising protection: the “godfather, the boss.” Ganz’s vignettes are masterful – Duke’s talk-show antics, Buchanan’s “culture war” speech, Perot’s infomercial charts, Trump’s Central Park Five ad as rehearsal for death-penalty demagoguery.
He traces an intellectual genealogy: Murray Rothbard’s libertarian flirtation with paleoconservatism, Sam Francis’s “Middle American Radical” thesis of a white proletariat squeezed by elites above and minorities below. These are not mere eccentrics but symptoms of a broader ressentiment – grievance weaponised into mythic nationalism. Ganz rightly sees Caesarism here: charisma suspending rules to restore “greatness,” prefiguring Trump’s script.
This affective analysis is no small feat. Trumpism thrives on feeling, not just policy. Ganz shows how the 1990s incubated cynicism, absurdity, and the thrill of transgression – elements that gestated into MAGA’s emotional core
The Limits: Individuals and Chance Over Structure
Where Ganz falters – for this reviewer – is in causal depth. His narrative privileges individuals (Duke’s ambition, Buchanan’s insurgency, Trump’s opportunism) and chance events (a riot here, a scandal there) over systemic forces. The 1990s appear as a contingent “cracking up,” a clock accidentally broken, rather than the inevitable crisis of a racial-imperial order.
Consider the economic backdrop. Ganz notes deindustrialisation and wage stagnation but treats them as atmospheric – fuel for Perot’s charts or Buchanan’s pitchforks – rather than structural outcomes of post-1970s financialisation, deregulation, and globalisation. In my view, these were deliberate elite choices: bipartisan embrace of NAFTA, China’s WTO entry, Wall Street deregulation. The 2008 bailouts merely crystallised a “corporate cronyism” both parties sustained. Trumpism channels legitimate grievances, but Ganz stops short of mapping the transnational class networks that produced them.
Race, too, is vivid but under-structured. Ganz’s Central Park Five spectacle and Duke’s dog-whistles are compelling, yet they float atop an unexamined racial state – from Wilson’s federal segregation to Clinton’s 1994 crime bill and “superpredators” rhetoric. Trumpism is not a 1990s invention but the latest mutation of America’s foundational hierarchy: democracy for whites, coercion for others.
Empire is almost absent. The Gulf War, NATO expansion, WTO – these barely register. Yet Trumpism is imperial recalibration: “America First” as harder-edged Wilsonianism, evident today in the 2025 National Security Strategy’s overt racial subtext, tariffs on China, and conditional alliances. J.D. Vance’s Munich speeches court Orbán while decrying European “free-riding” – a fusion of far-right nationalism onto the liberal blob.
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Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
Ganz’s method – narrative portraits, cultural genealogy – lends itself to individualism. Units of analysis are actors and events, not hegemonic blocs or state-corporate networks. Time horizon: 1989–1996. Causation: expression of affect, template for demagogues. This risks contingency: as if without Duke’s charisma or Perot’s billions, the clock might not have broken.
Structural Forces: Present but Subordinated
To be fair, Ganz does gesture toward structure. He acknowledges Reagan’s betrayed promises, the hollowing of the middle class, the culture wars as elite diversion. Sam Francis and Rothbard represent ideological currents, not isolated cranks. The book’s moral warning – fascism as “structure of feeling” – implies something systemic.
But these remain background. Foregrounded are personalities and absurdities. This makes for gripping reading but shallow explanation. Trumpism endures not because of 1990s con-men but because MAGA think tanks (Heritage, America First Policy Institute) institutionalise it, backed by billionaires like Musk and Thiel. Project 2025’s Schedule F and mass deportation machinery are elite projects, racialising discontent to preserve hierarchy.
Toward Synthesis: The Spark and the Powder Keg
Ganz’s 1990s are my conjuncture – the spark. My framework – Gramscian hegemony, racial capitalism, imperial statecraft – supplies the powder keg: centuries of contradiction. The complementarity is asymmetrical. Without Ganz, structural analysis risks abstraction. Without structure, Ganz diagnoses fever without naming the disease.
As of December 2025, with Trump’s second term codifying MAGA in the NSS – hard-power primacy, overt racism, transactional hegemony – the need for depth is urgent. Ganz illuminates how it felt; we must explain what it is: elite-led capture of mass revolt to sustain empire.
When the Clock Broke is brilliant symptomatic history. Read it for the human drama. But pair it with a more structural account – such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century for the inequalities of financialised capitalism, and especially Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race for the racialiased-class systemic foundations of American order – to grasp why the clock was always ticking toward fracture, and how a new hegemonic project now seeks to reset it on far-right terms.
Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil, its leading association for study of the United States. Author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, he is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.
