A historian outside the academy and a political journalist without a staff job, Ganz invites comparisons to Rick Perlstein, who is thanked in the acknowledgments and whose cover blurb proclaims Ganz as “the most important young political writer of his generation.” Like Perlstein, Ganz tends to use an immersive approach to writing about the past: When the Clock Broke not only recounts but seeks to approximate the experience of living through 1989 to 1993.
Functioning almost as a sequel to Perlstein’s acclaimed multivolume history of the conservative movement from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, When the Clock Broke is similarly concerned with the nation’s rightward drift and wants to understand where it came from. “American democracy is often spoken of as being in peril. This book by and large agrees with this thesis,” Ganz writes. “Others point out that democracy in America never fully existed in the first place: for them, it has always been a nation enchained by great inequalities and ruled by an unrepresentative system designed largely to keep those chains in place. This book also agrees with that thesis.” In When the Clock Broke,Ganz pursues both of these arguments, emphasizing throughout not only the emerging villains but also the circumstances out of which they emerged. The origins of our times, he reminds us, have their own origins in the longue durée of American history.
In accounting for the rise of the Klansman turned congressman David Duke, for instance, Ganz feels compelled to acquaint readers with the deep roots of Louisiana history: “The alluvial plains and dense swampland of the Mississippi Delta were less like a [laboratory of democracy] than a hothouse or a petri dish of inchoate American fascism,” he writes in a characteristic passage, before briskly recounting the region’s French and Spanish colonial history, its brutal 19th-century planter class, its corrupt urban politicians, its vigilante-enforced white supremacist social order, and the boom-and-bust cycles engendered by its oil resources. Similarly, in introducing us to the Weaver family, made infamous in the 1992 Ruby Ridge shootout in Idaho, Ganz walks us through the family’s background in Iowa, in the process illustrating how shifts in technology and global commodity price fluctuations in the 1970s and ’80s drove farming communities in the Great Plains to despair—which in turn left men like Randy Weaver “even more sullen and angry, open to more radical views.”