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. (more…)
Gritz on the campaign trail in 1992.
Gritz on the campaign trail in 1992.
2,408 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
In 1991, as the Cold War was ending, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed a New World Order, but failed to define what the term actually meant. It came to be seen as a negative by men such as Bo Gritz — i.e., those who were valorous, accomplished, white, and politically to the Right. (more…)
Ross Perot (photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
Ross Perot (photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
3,613 words
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Soviet Union suffered a catastrophic meltdown in April 1986. The disaster was too big to ignore, and it shattered the prestige upon which the Evil Empire was built. Thereafter the entirety of the Communist bloc in Europe started to collapse. (more…)
3,305 words
John Podhoretz
Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies, 1989-1993
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993
Hell of a Ride is a witty, funny, insider view of a White House whose chief occupant was confused about “the vision thing.” Whose speeches and actions were contradictory and tepid. A Yale graduate who far too many times sounded inarticulate, once saying, in a moment predating Bidenesque boo-boos, “Message: I care” — speaking not from the heart, but from his teleprompter. (more…)
2,110 words
Even the weariest presidential campaign winds somewhere to the sea, and this month, as the ever dwindling number of American voters meanders into the voting booths, the sea is exactly where the political vessels in which the nation sails have wound up. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. (more…)
Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot at a 1992 presidential debate
Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot at a 1992 presidential debate
2,310 words
Perhaps the greatest irony of the periodic political revolutions that occur in American democracy is that most of the voters who make them possible have not the foggiest notion of what they are doing. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won the White House by running on a platform that promised to balance the budget and reduce the scale and power of the federal government, and there is no doubt that most of the Americans who sent him to Washington supported him simply because of the desperate economic straits in which they found themselves and their country, not because of any passion they shared with him for the socialist and internationalist experiments that he and his brood immediately imposed. (more…)
Patrick Buchanan in 1992
Patrick Buchanan in 1992
2,003 words
Nothing churns the entrails of the professional democracy priesthood more than the rancid taste of a little real democracy. Since one of the main dishes on the 1992 political menu has been a generous serving of authentic popular rebellion, the sages have spent a good part of the last year lurching for their lavatories. (more…)