In 1992, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history.” The Soviet Union had imploded, and liberal democracy appeared triumphant and invulnerable. The placid new world that emerged might prove underwhelming — Fukuyama prophesied that it would be bereft of the “ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” — but at least it would be restful.
Alas, the ’90s were not quite as uneventful as Fukuyama predicted they would be. In a new history of the end of history, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” the journalist John Ganz shows how a country robbed of its external enemies turned inward and devoured its own. Pundits are fond of characterizing Donald Trump’s political career as “unprecedented,” but in fact he is amply precedented, as Ganz demonstrates in this wry and engaging account of the former president’s crooked and crankish forebears.
“History, as the cliché goes, is written by the winners,” Ganz begins, “but this is a history of the losers.” The losers include such simultaneously risible and menacing figures as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, thinly veiled white supremacist and all-around reactionary Pat Buchanan, and kooky populist maverick Ross Perot, all of whom ran for president in 1992. The resultant election cycle was a circus, but it was also a warning that the establishment ignored at its peril, with disastrous — if delayed — results.
The era’s would-be demagogues were able to gain traction because history was far from over for most of the country. While elites congratulated themselves on winning the Cold War and went on conducting bureaucratic business as usual, the working classes suffered. Eight years of Reaganomics had yielded catastrophic inequalities. “The average income for 80 percent of American families declined between 1980 and 1989, while the top fifth of Americans saw an increase of nearly 50 percent,” Ganz writes. Meanwhile, jobs that had been mainstays for much of the population were rapidly vanishing: Manufacturing work was disappearing in the wake of deindustrialization, and white-collar administrative positions were hardly more viable. Throughout middle America, family farmers struggled to compete with big agriculture.