
You can now pre-order When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s here!
As I mentioned earlier, I’m coming very close to completing the manuscript of my book. I’ve talked a bit about it, but haven’t gone into much detail, so I’ve decided to give paid subscribers a little bit of a sneak peek into the project as a whole. I’m turning off comments for this one: I’ve come too far and worked too long to argue with someone who wants to reject or qualify the thesis. If it sounds wrong to you, just wait ’til the book comes out and then you can post all you want about it.
The origins of the book go back to 2017 when I was trying to figure out Donald Trump. I found an article from 1992 by the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard called “Right Wing Populism.” It was written shortly after Klansman and neo-Nazi David Duke had lost his late 1991 run for governor. Duke lost in a landslide to lovable Cajun crook Edwin Edwards, but he won a majority of the white vote. Rothbard saw in Duke’s failed candidacy a potential strategy for the right. What he wrote seemed eerily prescient to me:
The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of "corporate liberal" Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America. Therefore, the proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is a strategy of "right-wing populism," that is: to expose and denounce this unholy alliance, and to call for getting this preppie-underclass-liberal media alliance off the backs of the rest of us: the middle and working classes.
What would the program be for the middle and “working” class? A familiar suite of hard-right positions: slashing taxes, gutting the welfare state, attacking affirmative action and “the civil rights structure.” Rothbard might be nominally a libertarian but he wrote: “Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment.” This would include not just a war on crime but on homelessness: “… Unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?” While he didn’t exactly call for protectionism, he also called for an “America First” economy: “Come home America. Stop supporting bums abroad. Stop all foreign aid, which is aid to banksters and their bonds and their export industries. Stop gloabaloney, and let's solve our problems at home.” Also, included was an attack on public schools and a call for parental control.
I was very excited to discover what I believed at the time was the ur-text of Trumpism and I sent it to a bunch of writers and historians. Fortunately as it turns out, no one was particularly interested. This was during the big White Nationalist public breakthrough that took place in the wake of Trump’s victory. I noticed that almost every single one of these guys started as libertarians: They almost all credited reading Rothbard with their move rightward. Rothbard was so dedicated to the free market that he called himself an anarcho-capitalist, yet here were all these free marketeers becoming national socialists. What was going on there? After Charlottesville, where profiles of many of the leading figures revealed the Rothbard connection again, I wrote about the “libertarian to alt-right pipeline” for the Washington Post. Then I did a profile of Rothbard for The Baffler. About a year later, my wonderful editor Chris Lehmann at The Baffler asked me to do a piece on right-wing populism in the early 90s in general, and that became the basis of the book project.
Rothbard was not just a voice in the wilderness: he was part of a movement of other cranks and malcontents that called themselves “paleoconservatives.” They were bitterly disappointed with the Reagan years, angry at the shape of the Republican party and its domination by their rivals the neoconservatives. They were furious about the direction of the entire country. They understood themselves to be continuing the tradition of the pre-War, “America First” right, the right before it had been taken over by alien interlopers. Looking to David Duke for inspiration, they launched Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge to George H.W. Bush that would cripple the President’s reelection chances. But they were only a part of a larger story: it wasn’t just the conservative movement that was undergoing a crack-up, the entire country was. This might seem strange because the country had just won the Cold War, beaten the hell out of Saddam Hussein, and should’ve been feeling pretty good about itself. Instead, there was a pervasive sense of national decline and the need for a radical solution to reverse it. The entire country seemed gripped by rage and despair.
A giant speculative bubble in real estate and finance burst revealing an economy that no longer worked for most Americans. Millions of voters rejected the two-party system by backing Ross Perot, a tech entrepreneur who turned himself into a billionaire populist taking on the establishment—after years of enriching himself through government largesse, of course. In L.A, the country saw its worst episode of civil unrest since the draft riots in the Civil War after the beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the cops who did it. In New York, people rioted when mob boss John Gotti was sentenced to prison and then the cops, egged by mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani, rioted and tried to storm City Hall. I kept identifying little reflections of the present era in the past.
What I believe came briefly to the surface in 1992, and then was largely papered over in the superficially prosperous ’90s, was what Antonio Gramsci called a “crisis of hegemony.” This is when the ruling classes “lose their consensus” and “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.” This crisis expresses itself as a conflict between “represented and representatives” and there was certainly a ton of that at the time: a shared sense that the system was no longer representative and had become narrow and self-interested. Gramsci wrote that “in every country the process is different, but the content is the same,” they occur when “the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (a war for example.)” In this period, that failed political undertaking was the end of the Cold War and Reaganomics: the reorganization of the economy for short-term gain and the strange and expensive victory over the Eastern Bloc. The electorate believed in its promise and sunny optimism, but it left the country battered productively and rudderless ideologically. Gramsci famously remarked that such a crisis consists in the fact “that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” My book is a history of the emergence of those morbid symptoms, which Gramsci thought would include the opening for “violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’”
It would take many more years for those “unknown forces” and “men of destiny” to come fully to the fore, but I believe one can see them beginning to crystallize in the brief period I focused on. I hope it will contribute to understanding our recent past and the present era. And I hope you will enjoy it, as well. I don’t have a publishing date to share yet, but will pass it on to you as soon as I can.