The Long Shadow of the 1992 US Presidential Election

3,288 words

John Ganz
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024

With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.
—Murray N. Rothbard (1926 – 1995)

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The 1992 US Presidential Election, during which the last World War II veteran to hold that office was outed, was a significant political shift. Additionally, the issues that led to challenger Bill Clinton’s victory in that election remain salient today, especially the ideas of candidates and characters on the political “fringe” of that election. John Ganz, a liberal Jew who writes for several prominent mainstream and liberal media outlets, has written an excellent book that describes the times and issues surrounding the election of 1992 as well as that election’s long-term effects.

A challenge in writing about long-term political trends is where to start the narrative. The political trends and rightist ideas described by Ganz originate well before the early 1990s. The anti-New Deal and anti-Keynesian philosophies started to gain traction in the late 1940s. Additionally, the ideas of the genuine far-right came into full maturity during the Korean War, which is when Soviet aggression and the drawbacks to communism could no longer be hidden.

Ganz starts his narrative during the Reagan administration of 1980 to 1988. Ronald Reagan was indeed a great president. When looking over the writings, speeches, and sermons of the men and women of the genuine far-right during the Cold War then aligning what the rightists discussed with what he did, it is clear that Reagan was influenced by such thinkers. He also surrounded himself with very solid and professional anti-communist activists who carried out several strategies to roll back communism. These strategies worked. The Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union imploded, but unexpectedly.

The Post-Reagan Unraveling

Unfortunately, Reagan’s greatness came with several significant drawbacks. The first drawback was economic. There was the farm crisis and then, more seriously, the collapse of American manufacturing. Reagan’s neo-liberal economic reforms allowed CEOs to shut down factories in upstate New York and other places in what is today called the Rust Belt. The factories reopened in Asia. The trickle of deindustrialization which started around the time of the Korean War was a flood of factory shut-downs as Reagan’s second term came to an end.

The Reagan years were also saddled which what can be called “cultural issues.” Reagan did very little to unravel the “civil rights” order whereby sub-Saharan blacks had a string of legal supports which enhanced their position in society. He also continued to tolerate a crime wave mostly fueled by young black men that started in the early 1960s. The crime wave increased in late 1980s due to the arrival of crack cocaine. Reagan also enacted amnesty, which made the already problematic post-1965 immigration situation worse. Amnesty was Reagan’s biggest mistake.

Meanwhile, the negatives of the sexual revolution were apparent to all by 1988. The black family had reverted to African norms; woman-headed households with no father present. Post-”civil rights” sub-Saharan blacks didn’t marry – they sexually coupled in temporarily relationships. The whites who married experienced the divorce revolution. Latch-key kids and daycare centers appeared everywhere.

The sexual revolution also allowed for the hyper-promiscuous homosexual bathhouse culture and the AIDS epidemic naturally followed. The gay men stricken by the disease organized and became very visible. During the late 1980s, every intersection, off-ramp, and public park in Washington DC had an encampment of gay men protesting for more AIDS funding and government support. The most powerful gay group at the time was ACT UP, whose activists gained attention through a variety of egregious actions. In addition to the sense of crisis caused by illicit sex, Reagan’s final months in office were overshadowed by the Iran–Contra scandal. Ronald Reagan is probably the only president with a special prosecutor out to get him who might have broken the law.

When Bush 41 took office in 1989, the far-right supporters of Reagan felt they’d only achieved a small foothold in Washington and made modest gains despite their enormous efforts. This sense of failure set the tone for what has followed. Ganz writes,

When [Christopher] Lasch wrote that the “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action,” he was expressing something nearly identical to the account of a “crisis of authority” or “crisis of hegemony” put forth by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: a period when “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.” Writing in the 1920s, Gramsci maintained that such crises “were situations of conflict between representatives and represented,” and that when the “ruling class has lost its consensus,” the populace feels that the existing political and public institutions no longer provide a vision of national leadership, but merely dominate and coerce, serving their own narrow self-interest. In such a situation, both politics and the economy take on the aspect of a zero-sum squabble between competing factions and cliques. The sudden loss of faith and credit in the American system was the acute onset of just such a crisis of hegemony. Gramsci had written that “in every country the process is different, although the content is the same,” with such upheavals occurring 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 (war, for example.)” In this period, that failed political undertaking was the project of Reaganism: the reorganization of the economy for short-term gain and sharp upward redistribution and its unexpected and expensive victory in the Cold War. The electorate believed Reaganism’s promise and sunny optimism, but it left the country battered productively and rudderless ideologically. (p. 18/9)

The Civil War on the Right

The most significant problem of a rudderless ideology appeared within the political right. The end of the Cold War separated the neoconservatives from the paleoconservatives. The break started before the Berlin Wall came down, however. The first skirmish between the two factions was over the appointment of M.E. “Mel” Bradford, a scholar within the Southern Agrarian tradition as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities just after Reagan took office. Bradford had plenty of support, but he was thwarted by neoconservatives Irving Kristol and his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. The neoconservatives’ candidate for the job was William Bennett. The neoconservatives convinced Reagan that Bradford’s Old South and Lost Cause views wouldn’t fly in the Party of Lincoln.

Ganz is a liberal Jew, so his perspective of the far right is different from what an average reader of this website will be. Ganz views the fight between the neoconservatives and paleoconservatives along the lines of the tyranny of small differences with more Jews among the neocons and more heritage Americans among the paleocons. The two factions did have ethnic crossovers, however. There were two prominent Jews among the paleoconservatives, Murray Rothbard and Paul Gottfried. The latter wrote a book called Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002) which is worth mentioning here. Ganz sees the fight over Bradford as well as other matters as a cynical fight within the right-wing for the spoils of patronage.

The paleoconservatives saw themselves in a bitter fight with a mortal enemy, however. The most talented of paleocon was Sam Francis. He was a member of the Todd family which included Mary Todd Lincoln, the First Lady during the Civil War. Francis was on the staff of John East, the conservative US Senator for North Carolina until the Senator’s death, and he wrote for the conservative Washington Times. Throughout this time Francis was moving away from conservativism, into radical territory. Indeed, Francis was guiding the direction of the emerging New Right. Ganz writes,

…[W]hat made Francis stand out from his fellow New Rightists was his abandonment of the idea of “conservatism” altogether. “Viewed in this sociopolitical perspective,” he wrote, “the New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.” While the New Right’s “social and cultural values are indeed conservative and traditionalist… unlike almost any other conservative group in history, it finds itself not only out of power in a formal sense but also excluded from the informal centers of real power. Consequently, the political style, tactics, and organizational forms of the New Right should find a radical, antiestablishment approach better adapted to the achievement of its goals.” (p. 64/5)

The Patrician President & His Troubles

Abroad, the 41st US President was wildly successful. The Persian Gulf War, a deadly serious conflict with long-term ramifications, appeared to be as splendid a little war as a war could be when it ended a little more than a month after the shooting started. Bush also overthrew Panama’s drug-dealing government and successfully presided over the dismantlement of the Soviet Union.

Domestically things were looking bad, however. When Bush 41 took office, he was faced with dedicated activists within his party who were disappointed, frustrated, and at war with each other. Bush also inherited an economy which was damaged by debt. There was a real estate boom in the 1980s that was based on investments in commercial properties. Unfortunately, there were no businesses to fill the empty offices. The mortgages couldn’t be repaid. The economy started to unravel. The first shock came when the savings and loan industry collapsed and required a government bailout.

This economic news dogged President Bush but his troubles were briefly overshadowed in the media when David Duke entered politics in 1988. Duke was a former Klansman who’d been radicalized as a teenager after reading Race and Reason: A Yankee View – Ganz convincingly shows that Duke likely read the book as part of Louisiana’s mandated school curriculum requirements. Duke was not a morose ex-Klansman who claimed he’d repented and now accepted the color-blind vision of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. He didn’t disavow any of his pro-white beliefs. As a result, Bush and the Establishment Republicans worked tirelessly to defeat Duke’s political ambitions, but he was elected to the state legislature in 1989 anyway. Duke ran for the US Senate in 1990 and for the state’s governorship in 1991 but was defeated in both elections. It might seem that Duke was a throwback to the Jim Crow ideas prior to the establishment of the “civil rights” order, but Duke was setting a trend for increased white-focused activism. Duke won the majority of the white vote in Louisiana in all of his elections despite Establishment Republican hostility.

Although Duke didn’t win any more elections, his ideas continued to spread. Duke’s metapolitical success was partially due to the Rodney King Riots. The sub-Saharan black-caused riots were touched off officially by the acquittal of four LAPD officers for excessive force against a black motorist (who was driving drunk, resisting arrest, was on probation, and had a string of “priors”) but the economy of LA at the time had collapsed so there was a large, unemployed and distressed population with little to do.

LA’s hitherto abundant defense jobs were vanishing as the Cold War wound down and each layoff in the defense industry caused a cascade of layoffs in other economic areas. This downturn impacted culture. LA’s sub-Saharan black community produced the nihilistic gangster rap genera. Gangster rap created a moral panic, and provided an example for other blacks to emulate, further fueling the crime wave of the time. White despair produced a musical genre too, Seattle’s grunge sound.

The Rodney King Riots led to an unusual media firestorm over a popular sitcom. The neoconservatives advising Vice President Dan Quayle didn’t want to pin the blame on the economic despair, the police, or race more generally. Instead, writes Ganz,

Single parenthood was [made the] main villain. [To further expand this idea, Dan Quayle said], “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong and we must be unequivocal about this.” Then, the line that launched a thousand op-eds and late-night jokes: “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown – a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’”[…]An entire ideology lurked behind this comment. Whether he knew it or not, Quayle was referencing the “new class” – a pet idea of Quayle’s neoconservative handlers. Essentially, the notion was that the bureaucracy, academia, the media, and the professions had been captured by a liberal class who opposed “traditional values” and propagandized for their own “permissive” standards. One of the main architects of the theory was Irving Kristol, godfather of neoconservatism and actual father of William Kristol, one of Quayle’s closest advisers. New-class theory enabled the right to attack “elites” without attacking “big business,” the cultural critic Christopher Lasch had tersely put it a year earlier in his book The True and Only Heaven. And now it provided a path to fight culture wars while avoiding racial provocations: “single mother” need not mean a poor Black woman. Perhaps it was really the fault of the liberals, anyway: they were selling “permissive lifestyles” to people who couldn’t afford them. Whether or not the “new class” had the subversive role the neocons gave them, they could not resist the flattery of being attacked, if even by fictional proxy. (p. 218/9)

Bush believed in “civil rights.” He’d supported the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (which allowed for “fair housing”) and supported immigration for economic reasons. After some pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that spread to the rest of Congress, the President signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1991 that allowed women and minorities to more easily sue their employers. Industry leaders opposed the law, fearing continuous lawsuits. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 is part of the reason why HR has become a nightmare, and the workforce is unnaturally feminized as a result. Bush’s “civil rights” actions led Pat Buchanan to run against Bush in the primaries. Bush’s different primary challengers in the Republican primary represented the long-term political trends in America. Buchanan’s ideas in particular, have turned out to be very significant.

Buchanan was squarely on the paleoconservative faction of the American political right. In addition to mentioning the problems of immigration and (black) crime, Buchanan put the problems of deindustrialization at the center of his campaign. It proved to be a winning strategy in the New Hampshire primary. Ganz writes,

By the end of 1991, unemployment in the Granite State was above the national average, and bankruptcies were up by 86 percent since the previous year – they had grown by 538 percent since 1985. The FDIC had to bail out five of New Hampshire’s biggest banks, and twelve more failed outright: some 25 percent of all New Hampshire banking assets were on the books of the banks that collapsed. There were larger forces at work, too: globalization was winding down a textile industry that had grown up with the Industrial Revolution, and the end of the Cold War was killing defense jobs. Pease Air Force Base closed, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard laid off 700 workers and threatened to lay off 1,800 more, and Sanders of Nashua, which built the radar jammers that allowed the air force to rule the skies over Iraq, laid off 1,200 workers, more than a third of its workforce. New Hampshire was set to lose more than 20,000 jobs for the third year in a row. Former white-collar professionals found themselves forced into doing manual municipal labor to pay off loans from local welfare officials. (p. 85/6)

David Duke also primaried Bush, but Buchanan quickly vacuumed Duke’s potential primary votes and Duke’s campaign collapsed. Another fringe candidate was Bo Gritz. He had gone to southeast Asia to search for Americans who were widely believed to be held in prison camps by the communists. While he was there, Gritz came to believe that senior officials in US Government, including a favorite of Bush 41, Richard Armitage, were involved in smuggling drugs. Gritz’s story was believed by Ross Perot, a tech billionaire.

In addition to his attention-grabbing stunts looking for prisoners in Laos, Gritz helped out the FBI during the Ruby Ridge standoff, where a white separatist named Randy Weaver had moved to raise his family after the economy collapsed in Iowa. The affair at Ruby Ridge was not the first shootout between law enforcement and pro-white activists. It was the first shootout, however, where the public eventually felt some sympathy towards the pro-whites, indicating the spread of Duke’s ideology.

Initially, the Ruby Ridge affair was not part of the national conversation. The news at the time was focused on Hurricane Andrew. However, right leaning media outlets were in-place and mature. Right wing messaging spread in part to due the end of the “fairness doctrine” whereby radio stations were required to devote time to talking points of both Republicans and Democrats. The “fairness doctrine” ended in part because it was impossible to enforce. Information technology had expanded – cable tv and satellite communications had the potential to make every disc jockey a national figure. Two of the most prominent in the 1990s were Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. The latter was from a prominent Republican family in Missouri, and he supported the GOP throughout the remainder of his life.

Clinton & Perot

The election of 1992 is unique in that the race was between three candidates.

Bush defeated his primary opponents, but Pat Buchanan was allowed to speak at the Republican Convention. Although not apparent at the time, Buchanan’s speech damaged the Establishment Republicans, who were comfortable with military intervention abroad and a finance driven economy.

A notable Democrat in the primary was the Paul Tsongas, who also ran on a platform opposing deindustrialization. In the end, Bill Clinton rose to be the Democrat’s barely accepted candidate. Ross Perot also did well on the protest vote side of the ledger. His candidacy vacuumed up Buchanan’s protest voters and added more.

Perot’s campaign was drama-filled and included accusations that Bush was spying on him and threatening to release lewd, computer-generated photos of his daughter. At the time, Perot’s accusations seemed wild and baseless, but it is very likely that Bush was carrying out these dirty tricks. Perot, through Bo Gritz, was only one degree of separation from Ruby Ridge’s Randy Weaver.

Clinton won in ‘92. Part of his victory was because he tapped into pro-white concerns. Clinton disavowed a marginal rap artist named Sister Soulja, who had some anti-white lyrics in her songs, and he triangulated against Jessie Jackson, the Democratic Party’s de facto leader of the black voting bloc and die hard, old-style New Dealers, during a speech at one of Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition events. Clinton also presided over the execution of a low-IQ black criminal in Arkansas. Clinton’s presidency was a success, but he was bedeviled with sharp domestic controversy over race and culture.

All the issues which came up during the US Presidential Election remain, and Donald Trump ran on them and won in 2016 and 2024. Ganz shows, unwittingly perhaps, that issues that are important to Wilmot Robertson’s American Majority continue to drive American society. He also very deliberately shows that the ideas of the far-right Americans are extremely influential and understanding those ideas are critical to understanding what happened in the past. Ganz quotes the paleoconservative Chronicles magazine throughout the book as well as Wilmot Robertson’s Instauration Magazine. When the Clock Broke is the most engaging book about the time and the election that I’ve read.