Donald Trump

Brian Doherty | 6.18.2024 7:00 AM

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pages, $30

When the Clock Broke, by the progressive essayist John Ganz, is a solidly educational and entertaining work of political history. While Ganz winningly doesn't bash you over the head page by page with the larger point he's trying to make, the stories he chooses to tell about the early 1990s are meant to hit home how elements of American political, cultural, economic, and ideological life back then laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement today.

His title derives from an obscure 1992 speech by a figure most progressive readers have likely never heard of: the libertarian-movement founding father and gadfly Murray Rothbard, an economist who also explored political philosophy and history as he built a case for a totally stateless society.

Most libertarians' amour-propre might be wounded seeing their movement fingered as having meaningfully paved the way for Trumpism. But in May, the management of the Libertarian Party, dominated by a caucus that sees itself in the Rothbardian tradition, invited former President Donald Trump to speak at their presidential nominating convention, where he tried to make the case that their votes rightfully belonged to him. Whether or not it makes philosophical sense, there is something to Ganz's attempts to link anarcho-capitalist Rothbard with big-state caudillo Trump.

MAGA does at times seem to wear the mantle of smash-the-state anarchism in its rage against the modern progressive state, though Trump's regime managed a state pretty much as big and intrusive as its predecessors' (except for some tax and regulation reductions that were GOP orthodoxy long before Trump). And the Rothbardians' state-hatred can make any punctiliousness about the institutions of democracy and peaceful change of power that Trump threatened seem besides the point: If the state is pure rapine and murder, who can get too upset about whether or not power is exchanged politely?

Since most of this book about the tumult of the early 1990s has nothing to do with Rothbard or libertarianism, readers may wonder why they are hearing quite so much about things like what that eccentric economist in Las Vegas thought about Woody Allen's love life, or why his statement underlies the book's title. Ganz's choice here seems to imply that the clock-breaking Rothbard advocated actually happened.

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