When the Clock Broke

Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

By: John Ganz

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, 2024

Long-listed, Boston Globe Best Books of the Year, 2024

Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2024

"John Ganz is the most important young political writer of his generation—just the one our dark moment needs."—Rick Perlstein

"Lively and kaleidoscopic."—Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker

"John Ganz belongs to a species of public intellectual that is almost extinct . . . When the Clock Broke is the first of what I hope will be a shelf of books that help us uncover the true history of our times."—Jeet Heer

A lively, revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era—and their dark legacy today.

With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2024 John Ganz (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Lucid and propulsive . . . [When the Clock Broke is] woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary . . . Ganz's dry with is ever-present . . . This is a revelation."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"With his combination of immense erudition, independence of mind, clarity of expression, and honesty in reckoning with the terrifying weight of history, John Ganz belongs to a species of public intellectual that is almost extinct. To place him in his proper category, you have to rope in James Baldwin, Garry Wills, and Joan Didion. When the Clock Broke is the first of what I hope will be a shelf of books that help us uncover the true history of our times."—Jeet Heer, national affairs correspondent for The Nation

"When the Clock Broke locates the origins of our strange political age in the crack-up of conventional wisdom at the end of the Reagan era and the Cold War. Ganz's clock sounds the alarm on some of the most ominous and entrenched aspects of the American political condition. Unlike many observers these days, he also finds absurdity and humor in our national pageant. Sometimes we need to laugh as well as cry—Ganz's book helps us do both."—Beverly Gage, Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University and author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

Amazing history of the early 90s

This is an important history of the early 1990s. For those of us millennials who remember that time period but were too young to have been engaged with the issues in a meaningful way (I was in elementary school during the relevant time period), this is a great resource. The author showed where many of the trends that we are encountering in 21st-century politics originated. I think this is an important primer to understand culture and politics in America. This is also a highly engaging and entertaining book.

The best book about Trumpism to date barely even mentions Donald

An absolutely brilliant book painstakingly tracing a whole tapestry of threads in the early nineties that constituted early symptoms of the cancer of MAGA fascism with which the American body politic has been afflicted since 2016. Many of the connections are so subtly drawn that a reader/listener who has not paid close attention to the horrors of the Trump years may miss some of them, but it is food for thought for all.

There’s David Duke’s mainstreaming of Nazism, John Gotti making NY gangsterism fashionable, right wing police thuggery in LA and NY, Ross Perot building a populist movement on the basis of POW-MIA conspiracy theories and a billionaire’s cash, and more. Honestly the best book on the MAGA phenomenon yet, with its creatively assembled mosaic of the movement’s prehistory. Should be a model for studies of contemporary American politics moving forward.

Either an exercise in trust of the reader or bathetic petering out

Covers its subject very well until it doesn’t. The last chapter leaves dangling threads of extremism and semi-fascist figures, culminating in a brief, telling remark by a pre-politician Trump. There is no attempt to wrap-up or offer a comprehensive theory of the case. Ganz ends his book in the same tone and from the same narrative height at which he spends most of it. There is a great deal of factual information that is useful to understanding contemporary figures, but the book rarely transcends journalism. This is not necessarily a slight, but in his other writings, Ganz frequently tilts towards ideological history and big patterns. In this book—as my review title gestures at—he leaves it to the reader to infer the major thesis. Or perhaps the desired summation is contained in the introduction, but after 14 hours of listening, the reader understandably perhaps desires a restatement.

Our political establishment gamesmanship revealed

This was a deep look into the political games and scandals of the years I lived through. The author’s deep dive into the political gamesmanship and the characters involved were eye opening. Many questions I had at the time were addressed. Interestingly, many of the political conflicts we see today had their genesis during those years.

Provides a bridge from Prequel (or Ultra podcast) by Rachel Maddow to the present day

Listen to Heather Cox Richardson about the Civil War and Reconstruction and then Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast. Or readRachel‘s book Prequel. Then listen to this book. How we got to where we are with the extremist right won’t be a mystery anymore.