When The Clock Broke by John Gantz

This is the long story of how we in the United States got to where we are today, which is a country where the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 was an avowed white supremacist fascist who advocated the violent overthrow of the government if he couldn't win legitimately and the race was literally too closed to call. That does not, however, capture what the book is about--it is largely a political recapitulation of 1992 in the U.S. The author's angle is that the populist resentments of today’s MAGA America were present in that late-recessionary year, in which the country, having emerged triumphant in the Cold War, turned in on itself. It is an interesting proposition to contemplate--and for me, it was a lot interesting to read in such detail. I was, after all, alive and well during this period, and (apparently inappropriately relieved) to have a third candidate break the stranglehold that Reagan had on beefing up the wealthy and gutting the middle class. He places the origins of the current distemper earlier than most others do--although some trace them all the way to Andrew Jackson in 1828, or at least to the Civil War. Some people never got over having a caste system whereby as a white person, no matter how poor and uneducated, you are not at the absolute bottom of the ladder. The Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992 and the related crack-up of the Reagan Republican Party under George H.W. Bush is a major flag for Ganz’s argument, and he mines the period for other useful omens--Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern, to name a few.