There’s a lot of unprecedented things going on nowadays. And with everything going on, it can be tempting to distort the moment we’re in and to view things as totally new and completely abrupt. Our guest this week has written about the source of historical continuity, particularly in the 1990s, that has brought us to our current moment. John Ganz is the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” He joins WITHpod to discuss his thesis on modern conservatism, the placid politics of the ’90s, inflection points since then and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
John Ganz: Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, a piece actually came out in 2017 by Rick Perlstein in “The New York Times” magazine, and it was basically kind of Rick saying that he had to revise his picture of the conservative movement and cranks and oddballs and fringe figures that he had thought had been marginalized and pushed out of the conservative movement were more important than he had suspected. And also around this time, the alt-right, as it was known then, was really in the news a lot because they were very excited by Trump’s victory, very excited by Trump’s campaign. And I kept on coming across the name Murray Rothbard when reading the profiles and interviews with these guys.
Now, a lot of these guys were neo-Nazis, but they all, almost to a man, talked about Murray Rothbard as the person who kind of started them on their road to the kind of political consciousness that they had then. So I was looking around at what Rothbard wrote, and I found a piece from 1992 called “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement.” And it was eerie what it said and how much it seemed to anticipate Trump and what had happened in the Republican Party.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. We live in an era of the unprecedented. You hear that a lot. I get to say it a lot on the television show “All In,” which I host on MSNBC. And it’s true, there’s lots of stuff happening that hasn’t happened before. At least since the firing of the cannons of Fort Sumter, there had been no violent attempt on the interruption of the transfer of power in the United States, not since Lincoln’s election. So that really was pretty unprecedented, certainly in our lifetimes.
There’s never been a president impeached twice. That was unprecedented. There’s never been a nominee for the presidency running who has 34 felony convictions. That’s completely new in American history. It’s been since the 19th century that we had someone running for president who had been president once before. There’s a lot of stuff happening all the time that is genuinely new, has not happened before, out past the frontier of the known world.
All of that said, of course, it is often tempting to dehistoricize the moment we’re in, to view thing as totally new and completely abrupt. And often you have opportunities to dip into some historical text. I’ve been doing this in this book I’ve been writing, where you will read something that feels shockingly contemporary, even from a long time ago. An article I was reading that was decrying the fact that everyone back in the 19th century was reading magazines and the whole family never talked to each other anymore because each member of the family had their own magazine they were looking at.
So you can find historical continuity and oftentimes that historical continuity is as illuminating as our sense of disjuncture. And my guest today is someone who has found the source of historical continuity that has brought us to our current moment, I think in a fairly unlikely place, in a fascinating place, in the era politics of the kind of end of the Cold War 1990s. I think it’s a time that, as we’ve gotten further from it, has been marked down in history as relatively placid, the emerging of this kind of global consensus about capitalism and democracy and not the site of incredible, contested, violent conflict. You know, we think about the ‘60s as a tumultuous decade. We don’t think about the 90s as a tumultuous decade in the same way. And yet it’s certainly the case that many of the precursors to the ideological tendencies and cultural dispositions that would cohere into what we think of now as Trumpism or MAGA are extremely present in that decade. And John Ganz is a fantastic writer. He writes a Substack that you should definitely check out. I don’t know anything about him. I know literally nothing about him and I love this because it reminds me of the glory days of blogs where you would find someone on the internet who wrote something really good and you’d think, Jesus, this is great. And then you’d keep reading them and you didn’t know. Maybe they were a barista. Maybe they were an econ professor. Maybe they were a software engineer. Maybe they were a Hollywood producer doing this.
You never knew. You had no idea what their credentials were or where they were. They were just writing really good stuff and you’re reading it. And John Ganz is one of these people who I started reading and this book is phenomenal. The book is called “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” John, welcome to the program.
John Ganz: Thanks so much for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: I saw a picture of you, I think for the first time fairly recently. I was like, I don’t know, the guy could be 65 years old for all I know, or he could be 15. He could be a high school freshman savant who does spends all his time reading history.
John Ganz: Somewhere in between.
Chris Hayes: Somewhere in between.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Congratulations with the book. It’s genuinely excellent.
John Ganz: Thanks so much.
Chris Hayes: Truly, truly great. Well, first tell me a little bit about yourself. Like —
John Ganz: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — why am I reading a John Ganz history? Where does all your erudition come from?
John Ganz: Well, I have a history degree with honors from the University of Michigan, which served me very well. I’ve always been extremely interested in history, political theory, social theory, you know, were a big part of my reading habits. And I wrote before the election of 2016, a little bit, mostly about art and culture, not very much about politics, although I was always interested in politics. But then I thought I had to take politics more seriously and started to write more about politics.
Chris Hayes: How did you find your way to the 1990s and the topic of this book?
John Ganz: Yeah. So basically what happened was all these events kind of fade together in my memory now, but I’ll try to reconstruct it. So shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, a piece actually came out in 2017 by Rick Perlstein and “The New York Times” magazine, and it was basically kind of Rick saying that he had to revise his picture of the conservative movement and cranks and oddballs and fringe figures that he had thought had been marginalized and pushed out of the conservative movement were more important than he had suspected.
And also around this time, the alt-right, as it was known then, was really in the news a lot because they were very excited by Trump’s victory, very excited by Trump’s campaign. And I kept on coming across the name Murray Rothbard when reading the profiles and interviews with these guys. Now, a lot of these guys were neo-Nazis, but they all, almost to a man, talked about Murray Rothbard as the person who kind of started them on their road of political to the kind of political consciousness that they had then.
So I was looking around at what Rothbard wrote, and I found a piece from 1992 called “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement.” And it was eerie what it said and how much it seemed to anticipate Trump and what had happened in the in the Republican Party. So I had this essay or this article from his newsletter, and then I tried to get in touch with people, writers who I admired.
I wasn’t known as a writer very much. I had written a couple of things, but nothing big. And I tried to send this to Jamelle Bouie, who didn’t know me at the time but now we’re friends. And I tried to send this to Rick Perlstein, same story. And you know, they didn’t get back to me. So I had to start writing about this myself, essentially, which turned out to be a good thing. So I wrote a piece about Murray Rothbard for “The Baffler.” And then shortly, a few months after that, I think I wrote a piece about the year 1992 in general and put Rothbard kind of into context of David Duke’s run for governor in Louisiana and Pat Buchanan’s primary campaign against George H.W. Bush, Ross Perot’s candidacy and a bunch of other strange things that were going on at that time.
Chris Hayes: The book sort of chronologically starts with Duke, but maybe let’s start with Rothbard because he is a fascinating figure.
John Ganz: Sure.
Chris Hayes: Son of the Bronx like myself.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Who is Murray Rothbard?
John Ganz: Murray Rothbard is one of the big figures in American libertarianism. He is one of the people who helped found the Cato Institute, but he was kind of also a marginalized and fringe figure. He was involved with the right in the 1950s and the emergence of the conservative movement, but was pushed out because of his extreme libertarianism and his continued adherence to the pre-war tradition of isolationism, which was not what the conservative movement with its Cold War hawkishness really wanted to have anything to do with.
So he led, you know, a literally very eccentric life in American politics. In the 1960s, he tried to kind of forge a coalition alliance with the new left because he shared or he thought he shared some of their critiques of the welfare warfare state, bureaucracy. That did not work out. That’s when after that episode and getting tired of the new left and the new left getting tired of him, he moved over to, you know, meet the Kochs and try to start Cato. He was pushed out of that organization partially for his personal difficulties, partially for his extremism. He’s involved in trying to, you know, match nations within the libertarian party to push in his direction.
And eventually he comes up with a kind of new synthesis that he calls paleolibertarianism with a man named Lew Rockwell, who had been Ron Paul’s chief aide. So this is kind of the Ron Paul side of the libertarian movement.
And this includes an extreme free market, laissez-faire capitalist approach with very strong social conservatism. He was very much opposed to what he called left libertarianism with their kind of hippie-ish social liberalism.
Chris Hayes: Pod and, you know, do whatever you want in the bedroom —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and abortion and things like that.
John Ganz: Yeah, he still calls himself a libertarian, but was really also a pretty vociferous social conservative. But what he does, what he comes up with after he witnesses David Duke’s run is he comes up with this strategy, this theory of politics, which he had been kind of working on for a very long time. There are a few components to it. Insofar as they actually happened, he was a bit of a victim of Buckley’s famed purges from the conservative movement. So he viewed those as a kind of betrayal and weakening of the conservative movement. He viewed himself as the continuer of the pre-war America first isolationist right.
So he thought, okay, well, our moment has arrived where, you know, the Buckleyites ascendancy and control over conservatism and the right in America is coming to an end and we’re turning to an older, healthier tradition that I’m a representative of. But he also says, and when he writes right wing populism, he says, look, let’s face it, we live in a big statist world. The government is in close cahoots with big corporations. They have these kind of underclass parasitical clients, and together they squeeze and exploit the middle class in the country.
So his strategy is not to dismantle the state so much, although that may have remained. I mean, it definitely remained his ultimate goal, but to put in a kind of big bully in the White House and to menace and smash the liberal elites that he hated. And the inspiration for this, partly, and he had been working on this theory since the 1950s, was Joe McCarthy. I think a lot of conservatives who attempted to make themselves appear respectable to liberal elites would defend aspects of the Red Scare, defend a muscular approach to the Soviet Union, but say, okay, maybe McCarthy was a bit crude and a bit of a demagogue.
And Rothbard essentially says, no, you’ve got it exactly wrong. McCarthy’s demagogy and his ability to menace the liberal elites is exactly what was good about him and this is what we should emulate.
Chris Hayes: So there’s a few strains here, right?
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There’s the sort of maybe somewhat paradoxically for a libertarian, he really likes the strong executive. He sees the presidency as a great place to sort of like wield this kind of power. Caesarism, I think, in the words of Samuel Francis, is another thinker that we’ll get to.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There’s this kind of populism. It’s driven by this resentment that goes both up and down. There’s resentment against big business and the sort of globalist elites, both the country club and the sort of Fortune 500 CEO types. And then the underclass, the clients, predominantly black and brown folks, immigrants, black people in major urban centers, particularly this kind of white middle class and its resentments both up and down. And this kind of embrace of demagoguery and also the sort of on the kind of isolationist front, this kind of rejection of some of the interventionism of the Cold War era conservative —
John Ganz: Movement.
Chris Hayes: — movement, right. Like those are some of the big strains that he’s marrying together there.
John Ganz: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So that’s Rothbard. Now, I mean, he’s just a weird intellectual who sort of bops around. But you know, his sort of eureka moment is watching David Duke’s success.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And Duke is sort of the person that puts this into practice before Buchanan and, to a certain extent, Perot. We could talk about that, but talk about Duke’s political success and what it did to the Republican Party and conservative movement at the time and what ideas it gave to some of them.
John Ganz: Well, I think basically the most interesting thing about David Duke as a parallel to what we’ve seen the past few years, I mean, David Duke was a neo-Nazi and a former Grand Wizard of the Klan. He kind of disavowed this, but not really. It was pretty thin. And he goes on to become a state legislator in Louisiana, and then he goes on to run for Senate and then he goes on to run for governor against the state and national parties. And the state and national parties were unable to stop him.
And they were really frantic in ways that kind of reminded me of the Republicans in 2016, really unable to stop Trump. Now, ultimately, Duke, freighted with his past and, you know, a certain lack of political talent perhaps falls. I mean, there’s a very big black vote in Louisiana. They’re not about to elect a former Klansman. So he loses, but he wins 55 percent of the white vote. And I think most notably, again, really gives the Republican establishment a lot of trouble.
And yes, Rothbard, Sam Francis, another one of these paleo conservative intellectuals and Pat Buchanan, all see the David Duke candidacy and the struggle that the mainstream Republicans RNC, I mean, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan both released radio ads against him. They sent the RNC staffers to fight against him when he was just running for a state legislator seat. They were spooked by him. And this was a hopeful sign to this little circle of paleoconservatives and they took this as a signal for the launching of their own political ambitions at the time.
Chris Hayes: You do a great job chronicling Duke and both his sort of vileness, but also his appeal.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And one of the things that the Republicans and even the local media keep encountering are there are two aspects that really resonate. One is that he’s an attentional magnate. He loves being on TV. He makes good TV. So people keep having him on TV. He’s constantly sort of the star of the story. He’s a good story. He’s a good copy. Right.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Former Grand Wizard runs for office. And the second thing is, once people kind of locked into him, once a certain kind of white person in Louisiana locked into him, a lot of whom were conservatives, but other people who were a little more politically unaffiliated. It was very difficult to pry them loose with, like, facts about what a disgusting monster he was.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It just didn’t work. And they kept finding themselves flummoxed by this.
John Ganz: Yeah. It was a very strange phenomenon and there’s a clear parallel. I mean, when I was researching the book, there was a focus group run by the choice of the mainstream party that the incumbent governor, Buddy Roemer, you know, and they asked people, well, what about a guy who have gotten a facelift and what about a guy who hadn’t paid taxes and never really had a real job? And they hated this hypothetical candidate. But when they were told it was David Duke, they made up a lot of excuses. They said, well, you know, only stupid people pay taxes. He must be smart, which sounds very familiar.
So, yeah, there was a certain magnetism he had for voters, and it was intensified when he came under attack by the establishment and the media. It was intensified. Now, it’s important to note that this did not make him invincible. It just created a certain base, a certain core that was very loyal to him and very hard to shake. Ultimately, you know, he loses quite badly. You know, it was a landslide election against him. But, you know, more sophisticated political observers like the people who, you know, wanted to emulate him really took very careful note of that white vote.
Chris Hayes: That he’s able to win the majority of the white vote.
John Ganz: Yes. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Actually there’s a crazy moment where he comes to the Senate gallery after his loss. So he runs. He wins the state rep seat, which is a nail biter. He wins by 226 votes or something like that.
John Ganz: Right.
Chris Hayes: He runs for state rep. He runs for Senate. He loses. He runs for governor. He loses. But he ends up in the Senate gallery during like a civil rights bill debate —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — sort of attempting to kind of personally intimidate George H.W. Bush into not voting or not signing a piece of civil rights legislation that is passed by both houses.
John Ganz: Yeah. So this bill, which had broad bipartisan support, the Civil Rights Act of 1992, which you don’t hear talk about that much, was opposed by, you know, the hard right and some also some business interests. Duke goes to the Senate gallery while they are trying to overturn Bush’s veto of this bill. And it comes close, but doesn’t work. Duke goes outside and crows to the news cameras that he’s the reason why Bush vetoed the bill because he could see that the kind of appeal that he was having was politically potent, he didn’t want to irritate this section of the electorate. And then he goes and gives an interview at “The Washington Times” and there he meets with Sam Francis, who you’ve mentioned earlier, who’s very intrigued by what Duke has to say.
Did Duke actually affect that vote or affect Bush’s decision to veto it? He certainly was not the only person on the right who did not like the Civil Rights Act of 1992, but he was a very visible exponent of resistance to it. It’s really interesting to think back about the Civil Rights Act of 1992, which, again, is a little bit obscure now, because at the time it was labeled a quota bill. And there had been a series of Supreme Court cases that had weakened employee protections for race discrimination, sexual harassment. And this was a legislative fix for those problems. Now, if you read some of the more sophisticated attacks on wokeness today, and DEI and so on and so forth, that actually try to connect it to the civil rights infrastructure of the government, they will bring up the Civil Rights Act of 1992, continuing this tradition, I guess you could call it, of opposition to it. But, you know, unless you’re an employment lawyer, you’re not going to hear very much about it.
Chris Hayes: One of the lessons about Duke that I would say Rothbard and then Francis will talk about and then Buchanan is really the big one, there’s two lessons. One is race baiting is very powerful. Racism is powerful. It’s a powerful way to attract white voters. And the idea that there are certain things that just can’t be done or said and certain kinds of backgrounds that couldn’t possibly support a politician aren’t really true. Maybe the boundaries are different than you think.
John Ganz: Yeah. I think it’s a complicated issue. I think that it’s obviously polarizing, as people might say today. You know, I think that there are both in the type of politics that say someone like David Duke practices, there are strengths and obvious weaknesses, right, so he can get a very enthusiastic core of support. But at the same time, alienates a lot of other people —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
John Ganz: — frightens and mobilizes them. So it’s a little bit of a game of chicken, a little bit. You know, how scary can you possibly be that will excite your type of voters, but it won’t scare people too much that they’ll be encouraged to really come and bash you at the polls, right? So David Duke obviously is a little bit too being a literal Nazi, a little bit too frightening, you know.
Chris Hayes: Also humorless, which I think is key.
John Ganz: He was somewhat humorless for sure. I mean, he actually, you know, people found him charming.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. He had his own appeal.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The Trump humor schtick to me is a key way that Trump pulls off this trade —
John Ganz: Right
Chris Hayes: — at a higher mathematical level —
John Ganz: Oh, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: — than Duke was able to.
John Ganz: Well, he’s an entertainer.
Chris Hayes: He’s the kind of like weird. Is he playing a character tongue in cheekness all the time that gives everybody —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — a kind of plausible deniability about just how bad he can be —
John Ganz: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: — and allows people to go there in a way that was harder with a literal Nazi, you know, in the person of Duke or even Buchanan.
John Ganz: Yeah, I think you’re right. And I also think that what I’ve mentioned recently and I don’t think it’s really mentioned enough with Trump is an organic. I mean, look, David Duke wanted to be Adolf Hitler, but he wasn’t, you know.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
John Ganz: He’s not. And, you know, he didn’t have that kind of talent or relationship with crowds. Trump has a relationship with crowds that’s very unusual in American politics. I mean, American politics, politicians are real pros. I think they would go to countries in Europe and clean up, you know.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
John Ganz: But I think Trump is different. He doesn’t shape a message with his advisers or maybe he does that a little bit, but he kind of does this on the fly. He has an organic relationship with the crowds. He sees what they want to hear. They respond to him leading them, but they know that he’s also taking cues from them. And this relationship, this dynamic is quite unique. And it explains a lot of his loyalty and a lot of the excitement he generates in people. Not any of the candidates, maybe a little bit. Ross Perot had a little bit of this. But most of the candidates I discussed in my book are more conventional.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So we talked about Rothbard. We talked about Duke.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Duke goes and meets with Francis, who’s another key figure here. Francis is at the right-wing “Washington Times” at the time, is editorial page writer. And Francis is, again, he calls himself a fascist, pronounced fascist, Italian style.
John Ganz: Yeah. Right.
Chris Hayes: And along the lines of Rothbard, you know, kind of authoritarian racist populism, essentially.
John Ganz: Yeah. Well, Sam Francis becomes involved with the conservative movement around the time of the new right, what’s called the new right and the new right is part of the kind of single-issue movements having to do with busing, gun control, abortion, taxes. And they are all kind of separate, but they sort of come together and coalesce and part of the wave that gets Reagan into the White House. But they are kind of not so intellectually coherent.
So Francis is asked to contribute an essay for a book that’s trying to give the new right kind of a theoretical underpinning and he says this represents the revolt of middle Americans, the rise of middle Americans as a kind of ascendant class. And the Reagan administration hopes is a Caesarist populist presidency that will, you know, forge a new political order that’s in the interests of these of these middle American radicals. He got this idea from a from a sociologist named Don Warren.
He and like many of his other people in the hard right, and he says, very notably in this, we can’t really call ourselves conservatives anymore. We really have to call ourselves something else. We’re radical. We’re revolutionary. We’re radical, right. We’re not conserving things anymore. The old institutions are dead. He, over the course of the ‘80s, like many other people in the hard right, who some of whom he’s quite close with, are very disappointed with the Reagan administration.
Now to us liberals and leftists, we think of the Reagan administration as a huge success for the right and a big disaster for the left. But for people on the hard right, Reagan was a moderate and a squish.
Chris Hayes: I mean, there are certain ideological dispositions that can only be disappointed so.
John Ganz: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And, you know what? Part of that —
John Ganz: That’s also very true.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
John Ganz: Yeah. That’s also very true. And I think, you know, Reagan is also temperamentally a lot different from the right in a lot of ways with his sunniness and his optimism, you know. So by the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Francis is very unhappy with what the state of the Republican Party. And like Rothbard, like Buchanan, who he has a personal relationship with, he sees that the arrival of Duke as being a sign that maybe something else is up. You know, it’s also interesting to think about is I know there’s a lot of emphasis in studies on the right put on evangelicals and on the Christian right. And I don’t think that that’s wrong.
But I will note that in ‘88, Pat Robertson tried to primary Bush. And that did not activate this button that made all of these members of the of the populist hard right kind of say, oh, maybe it’s time to go in the way that David Duke did.
Chris Hayes: So Francis and Buchanan are meeting, you know.
John Ganz: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They’re having dinner. Buchanan then, I think, kind of take some of the ideas of Francis and the ideas of Duke and he puts it into that ‘92 campaign. And people have drawn these parallels for me. That campaign really, it is a paleo campaign. It has these kinds of recognizable features in that it is kind of trade skeptical, even anti-trade, also very anti-immigrant, also very demagogic, bullying, sort of authoritarian in its kind of tone, if that makes sense, you know.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And it’s surprisingly successful again. And Buchanan’s a smart guy. I knew him a little bit back in the day when doing MSNBC with him. And he’s pretty intentional about what he’s doing. I mean, he both believes it, but also understands what he’s doing, right.
John Ganz: He’s a political professional and a media professional.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So what’s his theory of the case for that race?
John Ganz: I think he believes that David Duke’s, you know, unexpected strength, the weakness of the of the Republican establishment is a kind of go signal. But he also has his own grievances, one of which is that he believes, along with his fellows, that the neoconservatives have become too powerful within the conservative movement in the Republican Party and they need to be kind of thrown out. So his campaign, as much as an attack on H.W. Bush, who is not really a neoconservative, he had neoconservative allies and advisors, but is really like, I think in their mind, although H.W. Bush kind of moved pretty far to the right, was a Rockefeller establishment Republican kind of guy who they got to get rid of.
Chris Hayes: He was mostly just a guy who happened to be there.
John Ganz: In my opinion, yes, I think he was a professional public servant whose ambition was to rise to the highest office he possibly could. I think he was driven by a very old type of patriotism, WASP type of patriotism that is different.
Chris Hayes: And ego, you know, like everyone.
John Ganz: And ego, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
John Ganz: Which was different from the nationalism that was espoused by somebody like Buchanan.
Chris Hayes: I mean, he’s the least popular person you can imagine.
John Ganz: Yeah. He is a preppy WASP. You know, like in Kennebunkport and so on and so forth. So he views his campaign as also a war against the neocons in an attempt to reverse their power within the party or to arrest their power within the party. So that’s part of his crusade as he puts it, to take back our party and then our country. Now, the thing to note about the neoconservatives and Buchanan is Buchanan, there’s really no way around it. He’s an anti-Semite. Throughout his career, he’s evinced anti-Semitic opinions. He seems to have gotten that from his family when he was growing up.
Chris Hayes: I mean, he wrote a book basically saying more or less we picked the wrong side in World War II.
John Ganz: Right. And, you know, he views himself also as a member of this America first tradition.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So going back to Taft and Lindbergh and all those folks who were —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — very skeptical of the American war machine and also were —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — if not pro-Nazi, kind of, you know, not that —
John Ganz: Sympathetic.
Chris Hayes: — sympathetic and not that upset about them and often quite anti-globalist, which also always is difficult to disentangle from opposition to the nefarious actions of the international Jew.
John Ganz: Exactly, exactly. So he, you know, views the neocons are, look, many of them are Jewish and like with his other guys on the paleocon right, resents their kind of importation of liberal ideas into the right. Now, Buchanan’s version of conservatism, although it does undergo some changes in the 1980s, he says at one point, I think in 1989, I think to Sid Blumenthal, the biggest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan. So this is the space he sought to occupy. I mean, he knew this, you know, being a man of the right, but he definitely familiarized himself and began to speak the language of the far-right increasingly. The other thing is though, you know, he is a veteran of two White Houses, the Reagan White House where he was communications director and he was an advisor also to Nixon.
And this may not be well known among, you know, liberals and lefties today, but Nixon was not particularly well liked within the conservative movement. He was viewed as an establishment Republican, a pragmatist, a liberal.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
John Ganz: Buchanan was close to him and had a different view and had a very interesting reading of Watergate. Basically, he thought that Nixon was this tribune of middle American populism that Watergate was essentially an establishment elite liberal coup against Nixon. And the missed opportunity of Watergate was not to launch a kind of counter coup. So that just kind of tells you the tone in which Buchanan is reading politics. He has a personal crusade in a sense to retake the conservative movement and also to, you know, retake the country.
Chris Hayes: So to me, the sort of defining features of that ‘92 race, there’s sort of tonal and rhetorical ones, and then there’s substantive ones.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The tonal rhetorical ones are this just really braying and kind of bile filled populism. I mean, you know, that speech at the convention is just this, you know, sort of execrable. It’s the one someone famously quipped, I like it in the original German, and it ends on this totally kind of fascistic ending about the L.A. riots and the, and the soldiers.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You know, the sort of, that everything comes from the soldier, that that’s the true source of all sort of freedom and —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and this who’s who list of all the enemies, the feminists and the —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So there’s that. There’s just the bigotry of the demagoguery and this sort of populist, this sort of resentment that just drips through everything. Everything is resentment.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then there’s these kinds of substantive areas, three of which I think really do become that are really important because they do become, I think, they form the basis of what will be successful in 2016, which is anti-immigrant, anti-trade, anti-foreign intervention.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And those are the places where there’s real heterodoxy, real breaks with some of the establishment ideologically and are actually substantive, not just tonal changes. And all three of those are gonna be woven back together, you know, 24 years later.
John Ganz: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, Buchanan is on campaign in New Hampshire and he’s already a part of this kind of protectionist wing of the right. And he plans to run against, he thought what conservatives and Republicans would be upset about was the breaking of the no new taxes pledge, right? So Bush makes the famous no new taxes pledge and breaks it. And among right-wingers today, the story that they tell, or more conventional conservatives, the story they tell themselves is that’s why Bush lost the election.
But what Buchanan discovers in New Hampshire campaigning is that people are much more concerned about trade. So that becomes more central part of his message. He doesn’t talk about the no new taxes stuff very much. So the trade stuff becomes big. People are very concerned about, you know, what the last decade of free trade policies and then upcoming, you know, the negotiations are going on for NAFTA and what the effects of that will be. And, you know, at the time, New Hampshire is in an economic downturn because of the recession of 1990, ‘91, so yes. Then the interesting thing is, although the Gulf War was extremely popular, Buchanan, Rothbard and Francis, all opposed it not because for pacifist reasons, but because of the multilateral nature of it and the globalist side of it, that it was, you know, America’s sovereignty was threatened by these multilateral agreements.
Chris Hayes: It’s funny you say that because one of the things that would happen that I remember from my early 20s, post 9/11 when, you know, opposition to particularly the war in Afghanistan, but then the war in Iraq was a, you know, relatively marginal view, not totally marginal, but you go to anti-war events or anti-war. You know, these folks were sort of floating at the edges of it because they were the people on the right that were also kind of anti-war.
John Ganz: Right.
Chris Hayes: But there’d be like some table at the event that like some weird libertarians had.
John Ganz: Sure. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And you’d look at the table and you’d be like, huh, that was interesting. It was like the Ron Paul people, basically, and —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know, and they’d have a Samuel Francis book and then there’d be a Rothbard and, you know, there’s something about the Zionists where you’re like —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then there’s a book about how like Abraham Lincoln was a dictator —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and like suspended habeas corpus. And you’d be like, okay, all right, I got what’s going on with this table.
John Ganz: I get where this is going. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I understand this table.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But that was a real fixture of certain kind of anti-war events back in the early aughts.
John Ganz: I remember that. I remember that very clearly, Chris. Yeah. I remember seeing that kind of literature where it’s like mixture of kind of anti-Clinton. I mean, this is after Clinton is president, but there’s still anti-Clinton paranoia.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
John Ganz: And then you see like more kind of abstractly trilateral commission and —
Chris Hayes: Yes, right. Exactly. Yes.
John Ganz: Bankers and you know, like —
Chris Hayes: The Rothschild family —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know, that kind of thing.
John Ganz: I’m sure that if you ask the guy for the real stuff, he would reach under the table and —
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s right. Yeah.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right. So they all oppose the war, which again is a real thing.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, it makes them unpopular in their own party. That war, of course, is very popular. But then what’s interesting is that in some ways, you know, it’s so fascinating to me, Buchanan and Perot are different ideological figures. They’re coded at the time very differently. It doesn’t feel like at the time, having lived through it at the age of 13 and as a news junkie, even at that tender age, like a lot of continuity. But you draw out some of the continuity and really like, you know, there’s a lot there that places them in conversation with each other.
John Ganz: Well, they were both concerned about trade. Perot had also been a skeptic of the intervention in the Gulf. They both kind of were worshippers of the 1950s. I think that at the time, most commentators thought that they were, you know, part of the same kind of underlying phenomenon. Buchanan, when his campaign is flagging, he says, look, I can’t really compete with Ross Perot. Most of the people who are interested in me are now going after him because he looks like the winner. So, yes, I mean, look, race is less front and center part of Perot’s appeal. And it’s much more on the surface level, kind of universalistic. The fact of the matter is that Perot’s appeal was mostly white.
Chris Hayes: Right.
John Ganz: He had trouble breaking into minority constituencies, not helped by his extreme awkwardness around race because, you know, he was from Texas and he had very condescending and paternalistic attitudes about black people. Not as hateful, perhaps, as Buchanan, but did not help him. He gave a disastrous speech at the end of the NAACP. There’s a folksiness to Perot that is a lot less threatening than Buchanan and I think he’s angry, but it’s a different tone to the anger and it turns less people off than Buchanan or definitely David Duke.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You know, one thing about Perot is there was a sense at the time that something had changed, had happened, that this was historically important, maybe even a hinge point. It’s interesting now how much that just seems like a footnote. What was the meaning of Ross Perot? No one really even asked that question. It was just like, well, that was kind of a quirky thing we did there. But you read it as something that did signal something deeper.
John Ganz: I think it signaled a true vein of discontent with the political establishment looking for some way to express itself. It was the biggest challenge to the two-party system since, you know, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, which is almost 100 years earlier. And I think it represented, yeah, a vein of anger and disconnect at the government, you know, with sometimes extremely vague notions of what that meant. But it seemed to peter out the party establishment seemed to be victorious.
But then I think, you know, one interpretation of Trump that makes a lot of sense to me was essentially that Trump is a third-party candidate who’s kind of taken over one of the major parties, right. He’s agglomerated himself. And, you know, when he was kind of playing around with the idea of running for president in the past, you know, Ross Perot’s Reform Party was once, you know, one of the vehicles he was looking at. So he definitely viewed that world of third parties, of protest votes as a possible angle. And ultimately, you know, he attaches himself to the Tea Party, which is an internal anti-establishment faction of the Republican Party.
So I think basically Trump represents the triumph. I mean, I think of Trump as a synthesis and I think the book tries to articulate the different elements that would go on to be crystallized within Trump. And one of them is Ross Perot’s third party, clean up government, drain the swamp, throw the rascals out, middle class populism. Some of it Buchanan and David Duke’s kind of ethno nationalist race, baity, anti-immigrant stuff. And then some of it is the entertainment industry.
Trump is, you know, a creature of cable news. I mean, as is Perot and as is Buchanan to a great degree. But so I think that, you know, obviously he’s not a repetition exactly of Perot, but Perot shows that there is a great deal. There’s a large opening for someone to attack the political establishment as such, from a vantage point that that is sometimes an attack from the left and sometimes an attack from the right.
Chris Hayes: I think there’s always this search for kind of materialist, causal explanations —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — particularly on the left and I certainly do this as well. And I have my own theories and I wrote a book back in 2012 that that had something of a materialist or at least a sort of macroeconomic —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — account of some of the levels of distrust and elite failure and sort of the kind of breakdown of meritocracy as a means of explaining some of this alienation that I think has culminated in things like Brexit and Trump. But I also think there’s limitations that I wonder, like, what was it about this time and ‘20s? Is there anything or is it just that history is a kind of stochastic process? But was there something specific about ‘92 and 2016 that market it as propitious moments for the first sort of forays of this style of politics in Duke, Buchanan and then Perot and then for Trump’s success in 2016?
John Ganz: Yeah, I think my orientation is similar. I try to base this in kind of a material account. I think it does have limitations. There are other things going on. But essentially what you see in 1992 is that the way that the economy was re-geared during the Reagan ‘80s, some of the consequences of that are becoming apparent for the first time. And you have the American middle class really struggling. A lot of people are falling through the cracks. Wages have stagnated now for about a decade. You know, unions have been crushed, interest rate, and this is different from now and the last 20 years or so or 15 years, but interest rates were very high, which also encouraged, you know, contribute to wage stagnation.
And you have also a great deal of discontent with the political establishment because there’s a sense that the political elite, the political class is just working in their own interests and in the interests of, you know, of lobbies and special interests to kind of make these deals that just divide up the spoils of the government and there’s not a sense of a broader public spiritedness going on. So there’s a great deal of anger.
I would say, it’s not right to exactly understand this as a class struggle, although that’s the underlying problem. But the issue is what you see in this period is that there is a struggle essentially between the representative and the representatives. There’s a lot of irritation, anger by people against Congress, against representative government in general. And Kevin Phillips, you know, the famous Republican strategist and Nixon advisor, you know, he identifies this as a rejection of representative government as such, searching around for a plebiscitary form of government, a strong man, an authoritarian leader who can cut through the morass of special interests and kind of, you know, rule on behalf of the people.
Chris Hayes: So Kevin Phillips identifying this desire for this kind of, you know, sort of populist strong man who can cut out all the special interests who are, you know, preying on the aggrieved white middle class, right, both from below and above, and that’s a similar thing that Samuel Francis identifies. And there’s a deeper ideological thing happening here. I mean, Francis calls himself a fascist. Buchanan doesn’t, but I think has some sympathies that go in that direction.
John Ganz: For sure.
Chris Hayes: And the ideological moment we find ourselves in is a kind of rejection, a deep rejection of liberal democracy —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and its ethos. And there’s a part of the book where this synthesis and this ideological, alternative ideological vision is made plain in this essay that Francis writes about “The Godfather.”
John Ganz: Right.
Chris Hayes: And I thought this was the most ideologically revelatory part of the book. You just wrote about it in your Substack on Popular Front because it kind of perfectly captures the Trumpist model, like what Trump truly believes about to the extent he has normative political commitments about how things should be. They are embodied in this sort of mafia state vision with him as the Don. And this is something that people, you know, the Don father and all these things, these sort of mafia terms, he talks about snitches and all this stuff. So this has always been there. But Francis basically writing an ideological endorsement of this really blew me away.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Tell me about that essay.
John Ganz: That essay he writes, yeah, in 1992 is called “The Godfather is a Political Metaphor.” And essentially what he says is “The Godfather” depicts the Corleone family as a representative of an earlier form of social association. He uses the term from the German sociologist Frederick Tonnies, Gemeinschaft, which means community as opposed to Gesellschaft, which means society. Gesellschaft is bureaucracy, the rule of law, corporation, the modern state.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. All the elements of liberal democracy and cosmopolitan liberal democracy where —
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — strangers and citizens meet each other, mediated through all sorts of institutions, and we negotiate these pluralistic differences.
John Ganz: Precisely. Yeah. And Gemeinschaft community is, you know, blood ties, feudalism, family. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, exactly.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, yeah, straight up mafia, feudal kind of —
John Ganz: Right. And he says that, you know, the myth that the Godfather explodes is that we can live in an American society, these operations of mediation work, and we can leave behind force and fraud and all become integrated as free and equal citizens in this democracy of ours. And he says this is BS. Essentially, the Godfather shows the necessity of both force and fraud, even when they have tragic consequences. It shows the reality of politics.
And I think basically what unites all of the political currents that I talk about in my book and the ones that we’re seeing now, nationalism and Trump’s kind of gangster populism, if you want to put it like that, is that there’s a rejection of liberal democracy. There’s a rejection of the kind of universalistic promises of liberal democracy. So, you know, citizenship to all or as an ever-expanding franchise, no, this needs to be cut off, retained for a few. The market, the free market, well, which has like non-zero-sum outcomes and no, like what you need is an unfair advantage. We need to favor ours, like enough of this free trade bullshit and enough of, you know. You know, Trump is a capitalist, but he’s not a free marketer. He doesn’t believe in the ideology of the market.
Chris Hayes: No.
John Ganz: He believes in getting an unfair advantage.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
John Ganz: And the belief in, you know, these bounded communities that don’t have necessarily paths to infinitely expand except by, you know, force, taking over other people or bashing other people. So, you know, I think there’s an analogy, a structural analogy between, you know, the appeal to the family as a kind of basic unit of politics and society and that race, for example. It’s like you have to protect your own. It’s time to protect our own. You know, obviously in the context of the United States, which is a pluralistic society, it’s very difficult to make, you know, nationalism, although it has a has an appeal in the United States, is a hard fit because we don’t have a single ethnicity. We’ve always been a pluralistic country. But the rejection of this, that sort of patriotism that says our abstract fealty to ideals of equality and justice for all are what makes us American. No, something more elemental than that. Some bond that’s either racial, ethnic, familial, or just rejects the idea that there can be non-zero-sum outcomes. So you have to form —
Chris Hayes: Right.
John Ganz: — some kind of gang or association and get yours.
Chris Hayes: That’s right. Or in the end, right, because there’s James Caan in The Godfather, you know, that you can join the gang.
John Ganz: Right.
Chris Hayes: See, this this to me is the point and you write this in that Substack piece, that the appeal is that you can be inside our —
John Ganz: Right.
Chris Hayes: — and that you can get the unfair advantages and you can be on the inside of the —
John Ganz: Sure.
Chris Hayes: And the gang is going to take on the people that you don’t like.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And that appeal, I think, is the opposite of a kind of universalist, pluralistic, liberal conception, but it has a lot of appeal. And in some ways, it’s elementally what we’re battling against.
John Ganz: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what’s key about that is that it is a little more universalist than the sheer racism of Duke, even though it has lots of those elements, because there are people who think they could be on the inside.
John Ganz: Right.
Chris Hayes: That it leaves open the door for them to be on the inside.
John Ganz: You can be on, you know, not to take the mafia analogy too seriously, but you know, you can be an associate of the mob and not a main man if you’re not a Sicilian, for example, right.
Chris Hayes: Right.
John Ganz: So you can have some kind of relationship with the enterprise, but you’re not going to be, you know, the center figure of it. So that’s one way of looking at it I suppose. You can be a friend of mine, but not a friend of ours. But yeah, I think that’s true and I think the struggle is that I think a lot of people, you know, the assumption is that in the failure of the revelation that capitalist society is extremely competitive and people fall through the cracks is not to create institutions of broad solidarity.
Chris Hayes: No.
John Ganz: It’s to create these —
Chris Hayes: To get yours.
John Ganz: — the institutions of what I call negative solidarity or following (inaudible), which is bounded groups that are created out of opposition to other groups. And you can have pluralism. You know, what’s interesting about this new nationalism across the world, it’s pluralistic to a certain degree internationally because there’s all these little, you know, different nation states, but it’s a hostile and toxic pluralism, right? It’s a war of all against all, not a oh, well, we all have different interests, but then, you know, through the wonderful workings of the market and liberal democracy, they come into concert somehow.
This kind of rejects the possibility of civic peace in favor of a constant civic, ongoing kind of cold civil war, which might break out into more hostilities.
So, you know, that connects it again to Rothbard’s old conception of anarcho-capitalism. Rothbard also wrote about “The Godfather,” and he says mobsters are essentially anarcho-capitalists. That’s what my vision of an anarcho-capitalist society would be these kind of like family concerns that are self-regulating, but, you know, they have to take care of their own and there’s no bigger framework other than the meeting of these businesses in the kind of commission to do things. So it’s strange. It is a pluralistic vision, but it views a world of constant struggle and sometimes that’s understood to be different families fighting each other. Sometimes that’s understood to be different races fighting each other. And sometimes that’s understood to be individuals grasping for what they need.
I think that the conservatives in this country, as their counter to socialism, used to provide the market as a potential utopian tool where if it was allowed to do its thing, you would get these wonderful outcomes based on its own internal operation. And essentially what I’m describing is right-wingers who don’t particularly believe in the magic of the marketplace, who recognize the competitive nature of capitalist society, but instead of saying, well, what do we do to obviate that, they want to create an order where you say, well, some people are the winners and some people are the losers.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
John Ganz: And, you know, this is really interesting. I was recently reading for the first time, actually, “Wages of Destruction” by Adam Tooze, which is a great book about, you know, the Nazi economy. And it’s so fascinating to see how he talks about, well, we of course know that Hitler and the Nazis had this highly ideological racialized view of the world, but that was also their way of explaining Germany’s unique position in the global capitalist world and its struggles to compete with other countries, right? That was explained in racial terms.
So these things kind of turn into each other and, you know, I think that that’s what’s happening, is essentially, you know, to go back to your earlier point about the material underpinnings of this, you know, I don’t know if I’m going to get in trouble for this on MSNBC.
But, you know, as Mark said, you know, the rule of the market, the rule of law in a capitalist society is kind of just continuation in many ways of the rule of the jungle.
And conservatives or market conservatives, market liberals say, no, that’s not really true. It’s not the rule of the jungle. These institutions work. And liberals and left liberals and social liberals say, well, it is a little bit, but we can mediate. We can soften that. I think this strand that I’m describing, the political phenomenon I’m describing says it is the law of the jungle and you’re going to be the biggest beast.
Chris Hayes: John Ganz is the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” He writes the Substack Unpopular Front. John, thanks so much.
John Ganz: Thank you so much, Chris. This was great.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to John Ganz. The book is called “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” And his Substack is called Unpopular Front, which is really smart. Cannot recommend it highly enough. You can e-mail us, withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can also follow me on Threads @chrislhayes and on Bluesky @chrislhayes and on what used to be called Twitter @chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to msnbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.