When the Clock Broke

With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated and US power at its zenith, the early s promised a kinder, gentler America. Instead, it was a period of punishing economic hardship, rising anger and domestic strife, setting the tone for the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.The early s climate of despair was weaponized by con men, conspiracists and racists notably the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke both in the wider culture and at the ballot box. In other words, they sought to break the clock of progress and repeal the twentieth century. They gave Americans resentment a shape and direction, and forged a new kind of paranoid, conspiratorial politics where harmless roguishness and vicious hate became mixed up, as well as declaring a culture war on liberal elites. It was in this moral confusion that the indigenous American berserk, as Philip Roth put it, took on new and ever-wilder forms.In this rollicking, original and often hilarious book, John Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of the conspiratorial politics that birthed Donald Trumps America.