The Thirty Years Culture War

The whirlwind of events of the last several weeks have displaced more familiar political analyses in much popular media. An apparent attempt at assassinating former president Donald Trump on the eve of the Republican convention, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, and Vice President Harris replacing him at the head of the ticket would each have been unusual, striking events individually, but taken together sent commentators and analysts in search of precedents.

Yet amid or in spite of the unusual events, some things quickly reverted to normal. Despite a professed “toning down” of violent language from Republicans, Trump and newly anointed elegiac hillbilly VP candidate JD Vance “doubled down” on violent language, especially that directed at migrants and immigrants. And with that, some things were back to “normal,” at least as far as Republican candidate sound bites were concerned.

What had in the runup to the events of mid-July seemed newly bold right-wing rhetoric pervading Republican party communications has been treated by some commentators as something new. Certainly the January 6, 2021 riot represented a new level of violence in the nation’s capital. To find a precedent for the placement of bombs one must look back to the 1983 bombing of the Senate side of the Capitol building, ostensibly to protest US involvement in Grenada. In its conception and coordination, however, January 6 most closely resembled the so-called Brooks Brothers riot in Miami in 2000, largely coordinated by Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, but including future Trump partisan Roger Stone and others who would become members of the George W. Bush administration. Like the January 6 riot, the goal of the Brooks Brothers riot was to stop a vote-counting process, resorting to violence if necessary.

In his recent book When the Clock Broke, writer John Ganz locates the origins of multiple aspects of our current political and cultural environment in events, people, and actions from the 90s. For example: the mythologizing of criminal figures as popular outlaws he associates with legendary mafioso John Gotti; the trend toward political movements that purport to oppose political movements he associates with the quixotic campaigns of Ross Perot; the rightward shift of the Republican party he associates with one-time grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, and serial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

In February 2016 Trump was asked on CNN if he disavowed white supremacists groups including the Ku Klux Klan. His response was that he needed to do research first. Earlier that month former Klan leader David Duke declared that voting for anyone but Trump was “treason to your heritage."

As Ganz recounts, Duke emerged somewhat gradually on the national political scene, starting with winning a seat on the Louisiana state legislature in 1989 as a Republican, despite the national party’s best efforts to defeat him. As a student Duke had organized the White Youth Alliance, affiliated with the openly neo-Nazi National Socialist White People’s Party, and in 1974 founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana, becoming its Grand Wizard. The Anti-Defamation League credits him with pioneering the now widespread practice of dressing up racist ideas in “hot-button issues like affirmative action and immigration, successfully appealing to race and class resentments.” Ganz chronicles the emergence of what he calls “American fascism” from serial authoritarian regimes in Louisiana. “The state’s experiments in anti-democratic rule,” dating back to its time as colonies of the monarchies of France and Spain, he writes, “sat atop a society that was exceptionally underdeveloped and poor as well as extraordinarily fractious and hard to lead.” This inherent instability was fertile ground for Huey Long’s dictatorial rule. Long held a series of quasi-governmental offices, eventually becoming governor in 1928. Supported by small landowners and business people rather than laborers, Long’s opposition to labor unions, child labor laws, old-age pensions, and anti-lynching legislation, his invocation of martial law, and his denigration of the “lying” press prefigured right-wing rhetoric one could pull from today’s headlines. Fundamentalist preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, who Ganz calls “furiously antisemitic,” became what one contemporary self-identified fascist labeled Long’s “Goebbels.” Elected to the US Senate in 1932, Long was assassinated in 1935.

Long had railed against Standard Oil’s presence in Louisiana while at the same time negotiating a tax rebate in return for their sourcing 80% of the oil processed at the company’s Baton Rouge refinery from wells within the state. David Duke’s father, an engineer with Royal Dutch Shell, moved the family to New Orleans in 1955 after a brief stint in the Netherlands. At age 14 Duke sought out the office of the Greater New Orleans Citizens Council – an organization that emerged in the 50s to oppose school integration and voter registration – in search of a book titled Race and Reason by segregationist Carleton Putnam. In the book and a later addendum Putnam tried to argue against desegregation based on his assertion that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. In Duke's book My Awakening, which the Anti-defamation League calls an “autobiographical and disjointed polemic,” he credits Putnam’s writing with beginning his “enlightenment.”

Duke ran for president in 1988, receiving 0.5% of the vote, and the following year entered the special election for Louisiana House District 81. The election required a runoff, which Duke won. At his victory party his supporters assaulted Black and Jewish reporters. A Republican National Committee vote to censure Duke was ignored by the Louisiana Republican party. In a 1989 appearance on ABC television Duke avoided direct answers that would have exposed his racism and fascism, although he did declare that there was a difference in IQ between whites and blacks. This was a notion that was gaining a following at the time, as evidenced, for example, by Charles Murray’s appointment at the American Enterprise Institute where he would shortly produce The Bell Curve, a now widely discredited work that purports to document race-based differences in intelligence.

In 1991 Duke ran for governor of Louisiana, but fumbled media appearances, eventually losing to Democratic candidate Edwin Edwards who was buoyed in part by a high turnout of black voters. Duke, says Ganz was chronically caught between “attempts to simultaneously gain mainstream recognition and respect and be the predominant leader of the fringe subculture of the Klan and neo-Nazism.” In a passage that echoes recent analyses of Trump, Ganz writes:

Duke’s paradoxical effort to be a public Klan leader was born from a narcissistic personality that couldn’t be satisfied with the rulership of an “invisible empire” and therefore craved public recognition, at the same time still desiring the frisson of ghoulish power that flows from conspiracism, secret societies, and terrorist machinations.

Ganz identifies journalist and political writer Samuel Todd Francis as someone whose writings helped “transform the party of Reagan into the party of Trump.” Francis worked for a time at the Heritage Foundation, which Ganz calls “a Brookings Institution for the pugnacious heartland social conservatives that called themselves ‘the New Right.’” The New Right turned out to be in Francis’ words “less an objectively identifiable class than a subjectively distinguished temperament.” Ganz describes the temperament as based in “a sharp feeling of being exploited and condescended to by the rich and having to foot the bill for minorities.” Moreover, Francis’ characterization of the New Right rejected the whole idea of “conservatism,” including devotion to free-market economics. Instead, Francis called for what was effectively government economic support, in the form of investment in construction and industries prevalent in the Sunbelt such as energy, defense, aerospace, and agriculture. To achieve this, in Francis’ view, would require a rejection of traditional conservative reliance on Congress and courts, to be replaced by “a populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchical establishment….”

Francis’ ideological godfather, Ganz suggests, was ex-Trotskyite and National Review editor John Burnham. Burnham subscribed to a distorted Marxism in which the social order was not transformed by the workers of the world, but by a managerial elite that would dominate economically and politically. As Ganz describes it, Burnham lumped together Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Roosevelt’s New Deal as manifestations of this phenomenon. But where Burnham advocated a centrism such as that of Nelson Rockefeller or Charles de Gaulle, Francis held more extreme views. In a 1985 essay Francis described right-wing militants such as the groups and individuals responsible for the then-recent murder of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, the bombing of abortion clinics, and and the killing of four Black men on a New York subway, as “articulating … a national myth, rising above and overshadowing private interests, to which a revolutionary right can adhere, and for which its adherents would gladly spill their own blood and that of others.”

The slow-motion collapse of the Soviet Union, culminating in  Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation in 1991 accelerated the split on the political right in the US between what came to be known as “paleo-” and “neo-” conservatives. Francis identified with the paleoconservatives, who regarded the neocons as not conservative at all. Describing the neocons as “huddled around their magazines” – Commentary, helmed by Norman Podhoretz, and  The National Interest, led by Irving Kristol, Ganz notes that “neocon” became a codeword for “Jew.” Sam Francis and his cohort, who identified with the paleo faction, regarded the neocons as stragglers from “bourgeois liberalism.” “If the neocons held up mid-century New York as the height of US civilization,” Ganz writes, “the paleos wanted to go much further back: to the 1920s at least, and preferably back to the world before Lincoln and the Civil War.”

In August 1991 in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, writer and politician Pat Buchanan staked out his turf as a paleoconservative when he declared on the McLaughlin Group TV show that the only advocacy for war in the Middle East was coming from “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” Buchanan’s remarks drew accusations of antisemitism, especially from New York Times executive editor emeritus, Abe Rosenthal, who reminded readers of Buchanan’s history of antisemitic statements. But opposition to the war in the Middle East brought Buchanan together with Sam Francis and fellow paleo Joe Sobran, who wrote for William F. Buckley’s National Review. Ganz describes their columns as beginning to “echo each other,” adding that Sobran and Francis encouraged Buchanan to run for president.

In October 1991 the US Senate passed what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The act expanded on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, providing for a jury trial in discrimination cases, added emotional distress to the set of damages covered by the law, and provisions to address sex-based discrimination and harassment. In his opinion column the following week Buchanan declared that the “Poppy” Bush administration had betrayed both “small business and Middle America.” He resolved to run for president. David Duke joined the race as a Republican before Buchanan could formally announce.

The recession of the 90s hit New Hampshire particularly hard, and it was there that Buchanan sought to make his initial foray. Sam Francis advised him to eschew the label “conservative,” and avoid “hangers-on,” by which he meant the professional consultants, publicists and technicians who constituted modern political campaigns. Buchanan’s message was “America first.” He labeled “Poppy” Bush a globalist, declaring himself a nationalist. At a January 1992 meeting of the John Randolph Club, named for an 18th century pro-slavery Virginia congressman, Buchanan was endorsed by the club’s president, economist Murray Rothbard. Rothbard, who rejected the Communist political leanings of the Russian Jewish community of the Bronx where he grew up, once argued that American Jews had brought anti-semitism upon themselves. He became an advocate of the theories of economist Ludwig von Mises. Von Mises was an archetypal “classical liberal,” advocating free-market laissez-faire (i.e. unregulated) economics. Von Mises’ theories rely on the principle of praxeology – the assertion that human behavior is purposeful rather than reactive. This position rejects the empirical study of economics, because (among other reasons) empiricism requires repeatable experiments which may not be possible in the realm of economics.

Ganz summarizes Rothbard’s political-economic theories as a belief that the core class struggle is between “taxpayers and tax consumers.” In a 1977 paper written in connection with the founding of the libertarian Cato Institute Rothbard had cited Mussolini and Hitler as what Ganz calls “instructive examples” – Mussolini for his use of propaganda, and Hitler for a “clear distinction between good guys and bad guys.” At the John Randolph Club meeting Rothbard endorsed Buchanan, urging a rejection of what he saw as the complacency of “conservatism,” in favor of “right-wing populism.” The title of Ganz’s book is drawn from Rothbard’s rousing conclusion: “We shall break the clock…” of social democracy, of the Great Society, of the welfare state, of the New Deal. “We shall repeal the twentieth century,” he concluded.

The period from the 70s to the start of the 90s in the US had been marked with social and cultural change. Ganz highlights (1) an increase in the divorce rate, aided by the spread of no-fault divorce laws, and (2) the rise of talk media, both television and radio. Politicians on the right blamed the rising divorce rate on feminism, but, as Ganz points out, the no-fault laws were really about making it easier for couples who had agreed to dissolve their marriage. While not having initiated the no-fault divorce trend, feminists initially welcomed the laws, only to discover over time that the no-fault settlements tended to reduce women’s standard of living while raising that of the men involved.

Ganz characterizes the rise of  talk media as a culture-wide attempt to counteract increasing social isolation that was to some extent represented by the divorce statistics. He points out that daytime talk radio was timed to be viewed by housewives, while so-called “shock jocks” could often be heard during the evening commute hours when (typically) men would be driving home from work.

In 1992, among the divorced individuals who sought connection via a radio talk show was Donald Trump, who, Ganz reports, was a regular caller to the Howard Stern show while in the process of divorcing his first wife, Ivana.

Talk show hosts were recipients of gratitude at an opportunity for expression and companionship, but also outrage. The height of the latter was possibly the assassination of liberal talk radio host Alan Berg in 1984. Berg was shot outside his home by members of the white nationalist group The Order, which Sam Francis had cited in 1985 as an example of “new radical energy.”

Technically, shock-jocks’ discussions of controversial topics or ad hominem attacks on individuals should have run afoul of the FCC regulation known as the Fairness Doctrine, which required equal broadcast time for opposing points of view, and for individuals to respond to personal attacks. Ganz notes that in the 70s most FCC decisions not to renew licenses had been related to the Fairness Doctrine. But in 1987, during the Reagan administration, the FCC voted to stop enforcing it. Congress passed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act in 1987, but then-President Reagan vetoed it. An attempt to resurrect the legislation in 1991 failed when George H.W. Bush threatened a veto.

It was Larry King Live that arguably launched the national political career of H. Ross Perot. In a February 20, 1992 appearance, King asked Perot if he was going to run for President. Perot said, “No,” but implied that if there was a citizens’ movement to put him on the ballot in all 50 states he would.”

In 1949 Perot had been appointed to the Naval Academy out of junior college by retiring Texas Senator W. Lee O’Daniel. After the Korean War he served as a shore patrol officer, as Ganz describes it – chasing after drunken sailors in brothels or bailing them out of jail. Perot tried unsuccessfully to resign from the Navy, but in his final year of service, while working on an aircraft carrier he was offered an interview by an IBM executive who had been invited by the secretary of the navy. Perot went to work as a salesman for IBM, and went on to found Electronic Data Systems (EDS). in 1962. EDS’s business was running computer systems for other companies. In the early 60s the market for running giant computer systems was apparently small, and Perot took a second job at Texas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which was located in the same building as EDS. This turned into a windfall for Perot when Congress passed laws creating Medicare and Medicaid. Management of these programs was a huge task naturally suited to computing solutions, and Perot apparently used his connections at Texas Blue Cross Blue Shield to arrange for them to contract with EDS for processing Medicare claims.

EDS became, in Ganz’s words, “a privatized section of the bureaucracy,” all the while charging a 200% margin on processing claims, and perhaps double counting some as well. EDS was also accused of discriminating against Blacks, with some Texas managers reportedly calling Black male employees “boys.” In the late 60s Perot inveigled EDS and himself with the Nixon campaign, helping publicize the plight of Vietnam POWs, and investing in failing brokerage firm F.I. Dupont, Glore, Forgan, and Co., the latter credited with averting a Wall Street panic.

Perhaps beginning with EDS’s 1976 contract with the government of Iran, over time Perot and his firm grew increasingly involved in what Ganz calls the “privatization of foreign policy.” When Iran descended into political unrest in 1978, Perot hired mercenaries to try to free EDS employees in Iran. The mercenaries initially bungled the operation, but the employees were saved by the return of Ayatollah Khomeini when revolutionary forces freed prisoners across Iran. In a highly fictionalized version of the rescue written by Ken Follett, the EDS employees were freed in a gun battle with the revolutionaries, the rescuers destroyed an Iranian air base, and all met up with Perot after crossing the border – none of which happened.

Building on this mythic episode, Perot went on to promote the debunked narrative that many of the 2,500 unaccounted-for servicepeople from the Vietnam war were still alive as POWs. But raids led by former Green Beret James “Bo” Gritz that Perot helped organize were so mishandled that he and the US Government would ultimately deny any connection.

Perot’s exploits fueled the image of government as what Ganz calls “shadowy cabals of bureaucrats and politicians,” spawning several Hollywood fictional depictions of POW rescues. When General Motors bought Perot’s EDS at a ridiculously overvalued price – reportedly so that Perot would “go away” – he continued to hype unverified claims that POWs lived on in southeast Asia. Granted increased access to military intelligence, Perot’s paranoia only grew. He embarked on an unsanctioned mission to Vietnam, believing he could buy back the POWs he thought were being held, although what he returned with was a letter from the foreign minister of Vietnam authorizing joint business ventures. Publicity surrounding Perot’s serial adventures in foreign policy apparently fueled popular support for a run for President.

Perot’s 1992 appearance on Larry King Live energized the movement to draft him as a candidate. Many of the volunteers who initially sought signatures to put his name on ballots had not previously been politically active. Ganz notes that “a majority identified as ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican,’ but they also supported national health insurance.” Tech nerds on the new Prodigy and CompuServe dialup Internet services also represented significant support for Perot. The vision of government that, while perhaps not articulated by Perot nonetheless became associated with him, was in Ganz’s words “one that directly represented the people through electronic media, and one that could be administered according to the principles of an efficient and profitable business enterprise.”

Pat Buchanan’s protectionist rhetoric during his campaign reflected the trending “Japan bashing” of the time – the belief that Japan was somehow responsible for economic decline in the US, and would emerge as the world’s leading economy. Paradoxically this myth fed both an increase in hate crimes against and political appeals to US East Asian communities. Japanese capital had in fact been invested in the US in substantial amounts at the end of the 80s, and its withdrawal in 1991 contributed particularly to the collapse of the economy in southern California. Declining wages disproportionately affected Black and Latino communities, while at the same time charitable funds grew scarce.

In a distorted echo of the Japan bashing, tensions grew in South Central Los Angeles between the Korean and Black communities, exacerbated by a police force that was operating like an independent militia. Into this volatile mix, in July 1991 the Christopher Commission report dropped, finding that the LA police regularly used excessive force, unconstrained by department administration. When the jury in the Rodney King case acquitted the defendants on all but one count (on which they remained deadlocked), Los Angeles devolved into a week of rioting, not surprisingly with Korean merchants disproportionately on the receiving end of the violence. The episode boosted gun sales and accelerated the trend toward assault rifles and handguns.

With the riots having largely been among ethnic groups of color, Pat Buchanan had belatedly tried to capitalize on white resentment, giving a speech in Los Angeles and traveling to the US-Mexican border, where he was heckled by a figure even farther to the right – White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger. Prefiguring Trump’s border wall rhetoric, Buchanan called for the Army Corps of Engineers to build a “double-barrier fence.” “Poppy” Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, used the occasion of the riots to promote another right-wing canard: that the root of social evils was single parenting. Ganz notes that this was consistent with Irving Kristol’s notion of the “new class” – the idea that “the bureaucracy, academia, the media, and the professions had been captured by a liberal class who opposed ‘traditional values’ and propagandized for their own ‘permissive standards.’”

1992 saw “multiculturalism” cross over from the academy into public discourse about school curricula. The Afrocentric theories of Temple University’s Molefi Asante offered middle-class Black young people an alternative to what Ganz calls “mainstream Black civil and political society.” Sam Francis somewhat ironically compared the Afrocentrism movement to David Duke’s “uniting … clusters” of otherwise disconnected people “and informing them with a new understanding of who they are and what destiny they should seek.” Into this fray stepped Democratic political candidate Bill Clinton, who speaking at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition leadership conference in June 1992, denounced remarks rapper-activist Sister Souljah had made to the Washington Post in which she invoked the Code of Hammurabi while characterizing the LA riots that occurred in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. Ganz notes that Clinton was using a strategy sometimes referred to as “counterscheduling” – speaking not so much to the immediate audience, but making remarks intended for national consumption. The incident opened or exacerbated a rift between Jackson and Clinton that ultimately redounded to Clinton’s benefit as journalists and commentators, including Blacks, framed his stance as a rejection of extremism.

Initially supportive of Buchanan’s campaign, Sam Francis eventually soured, declaring him “too bourgeois.” Similarly Francis dismissed Perot as an “empty vessel.” Francis decried the populace’s dependency on what he called “mass organization” – multinational corporations, labor unions, and a bureaucracy that in his view increasingly blurred the boundaries of state, economy, and culture. These dependent Middle Americans, in Francis' view, were “at once the real victims of the regime and the core or nucleus of American civilization, the Real America, the American Nation.”

In June of 1992 the Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v Casey. Planned Parenthood had challenged provisions of a Pennsylvania 1982 law requiring informed consent, spousal notice, parental consent, and other conditions before an abortion could take place. Commentators speculated that the case would lead to Roe v.Wade being overturned, although attitudes toward that possibility were somewhat convoluted. Anticipating the current political climate to some extent, pro-choice activists while not wanting Roe overturned in the abstract, would have preferred that, if it had to happen, it would happen in an election year, turning the election into a “public referendum.” In the end the right to abortion was reaffirmed, and then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s undue burden standard was established, namely that if the effect of an abortion restriction was to prevent a woman’s access, it should be considered “undue.” In a prescient comment, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) president Kate Michelman warned that the ruling had left Roe “an empty shell that is one Justice Thomas away from being destroyed.”

1992 was also the year of the siege of the Weaver family compound at Ruby Ridge, in Boundary County, Idaho. Federal Marshals had come to the compound to serve Randy Weaver with a warrant related to allegations that he had sold sawed-off shotguns to an ATF informant. Weaver had been of interest to federal law enforcement since the late 1980s when he attended meetings of the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist group, at Hayden Lake, Idaho. In 1985 the FBI and Secret Service initiated investigations of Weaver on charges that he had made threats against then-President Reagan and other officials.

On August 21, 1992 the Weaver’s dog discovered a US Marshal surveillance team on the Ruby Ridge property, and Marshal Art Roderick shot and killed the dog. Weaver’s son Sammy returned fire, and was killed by marshals. This incident turned into an 11-day siege. Weaver was shot in the arm; his wife was shot in the face and eventually died. Weaver and his associate Kevin Harris were subsequently acquitted of all charges related to the siege, and Weaver was convicted only of failing to appear for the hearing on the original firearms charge.

For Ganz, Weaver and the Ruby Ridge episode seems to exemplify an escapist cultural trend, often with quasi-religious trappings, that had been prevalent since the 80s. Some Evangelical Christians, including especially a loosely defined group that came to be known as the “Jesus People,” had seized on Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, as a stand-in for a sacred text, and came to believe that it showed that current events had in fact been predicted in the Bible. Lindsey’s thesis was an update of so-called “premillennial dispensationalism” – a set of doctrines that emerged in the 19th century, including that Jews must return to the Holy Land before the Second Coming of Christ can occur, and that the faithful can be “raptured” away into heaven at any time. This separation of what the Christian History Institute refers to as “the two peoples,” apparently allowed the Weavers and like-minded disaffected Americans to compartmentalize their attitudes toward the people of the Old Testament, while aligning their belief systems with the Aryan Nations.

The farm crisis of the 80s had created receptive audiences for political propaganda such as the conspiracy theories of  Lyndon LaRouche, who The New Republic recently referred to as “the godfather of political paranoia.” LaRouche was a difficult-to-categorize political extremist, probably grounded in Trotskyism, at least in his own mind, but had progressed to training paramilitary groups and developing his own brainwashing techniques. Along with LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees grew the “Christian Identity” movement, which asserted that white people were the true Israelites of the the Bible, and the “Posse Comitatus,” which believes that state and federal laws are unconstitutional and ignores them.

Says Ganz:

Neo-Nazi propaganda successfully tapped into the mythic core of American society…. The alternate world … was not built to be a harmless fantasy of a few eccentrics out in the wilderness; its intent was the wholesale destruction and replacement of America with another America.

1992 was also the year that federal law enforcement finally convicted Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. In a miniature funhouse mirroring of the breakdown of norms that had led to the events at Ruby Ridge, a placard outside the US District Court Building in Brooklyn proclaimed Gotti's prosecution “Another Government Conspiracy.” US attorney Andrew Maloney blamed the media for elevating Gotti’s public persona: “You made him … a folk hero,” he declared at a post-sentencing press conference. Ganz describes Gotti’s celebrity as “becoming a political phenomenon.” Not unlike revelations at Trump’s trials for sexual abuse and election interference, evidence presented at Gotti’s trial for murder and racketeering painted a picture inconsistent with his cultivated popular image. FBI surveillance tapes showed an anxious Gotti worried about everything from car payments to extended health insurance coverage, while complaining about and criticizing his underlings. And while the early 90s had brought recession, crime, and the AIDS epidemic to New York, romanticized images of organized crime were popular. It was amid this turmoil that Donald Trump contracted with mob bosses Tony Salerno and Paul Castellano for concrete to build Trump Tower. Salerno, Castellano, and Trump shared lawyer Roy Cohn of McCarthy hearing infamy. Ganz notes that right-wing economist Murray Rothbard described organized crime as “a productive industry trying to govern itself.” Similarly Sam Francis found the world of The Godfather movies something to aspire to: “[T]he truly natural, legitimate, normal, and healthy type of society is that of the gangs.” Rudy Giuliani, who had mounted an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York in 1989 chimed in “... America was born as a kind of revolt against authority.”

Also in 1992, father of critical race theory, Derrick Bell, published the fictional Faces at the Bottom of the Well. In it he argued that anti-Black racism was a “permanent fixture” of American society, and that equality was “impossible and illusory.”

In his speech accepting the Democratic party nomination, July 16, 1992, candidate Bill Clinton invoked his Georgetown teacher Carroll Quigley, who advocated “inclusive diversity,” although pundits questioned how Clinton would reconcile rural America with the establishment.

Pat Buchanan’s reward for having won close to 25% of Republican primary votes was a prime time speaking slot on the first night of the Republican convention. CBS’s Dan Rather referred to the speech as “red meat.” Among  Buchanan’s choice rhetorical flourishes he ridiculed Democratic vice presidential candidate Al Gore for advocating that the environment should be the organizing principle of government, and declared Clinton and Gore “the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” The speech was popular, but the convention as a whole was apparently something of a let-down for delegates. Ganz cites Garry Wills comment in a New York Times op-ed that “The crazies are in charge.”

As the campaign season progressed, for a time it looked like Perot was gaining popularity. But the reality of the Perot campaign’s top-down organization turned off volunteers, and Perot would not cooperate with the professionals he eventually hired to run it: Carter associate Hamilton Jordan, and Reagan staffer Ed Rollins. Always susceptible to a paranoid tendency, the Perot campaign devolved into the mess of contradictions that had always existed under the surface, and Perot’s popularity declined. In July he officially withdrew as a candidate, only to re-enter and  resume campaigning in October. He chose as his running mate retired Admiral and former prisoner of war James Stockdale. Perot reportedly spent $65 million of his own money on his political campaign.

The Bush campaign eventually became little more than “dirty tricks” operations, promoting allegations that Clinton’s 1969 winter trip to Russia was somehow connected to the KGB.

Toward the end of the campaign season all three campaigns turned to economic themes. Bush had famously broken his 1988 campaign promise of “no new taxes,” Perot had campaigned against the North American Free Trade Agreement, promising to reduce national debt. Clinton emphasized that the Reagan era, while benefiting the wealthy, had created a $300 billion deficit. But as Ganz describes it, voter concern about the economy was a stand-in for concern about the country as a whole, and that the simplistic image of hard work leading to a comfortable life was broken.

In the end, although Perot secured more popular votes than any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt, Clinton won the Electoral College by a huge margin, 370 to 168. The following year would see the first World Trade Center bombing, killing six and injuring over 1000, and the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX, killing and injuring a number of ATF agents, and seventy six civilians. Speaking at Pat Buchanan’s American Cause foundation in May 1993, Sam Francis explicitly urged the American right to adopt Adolf Hitler’s strategy of creating “an entire series of party institutions that paralleled those of the existing state.” As Francis would write later in 1995 book Beautiful Losers, “Abandoning the illusion that it represents an establishment to be 'conserved,’ a new American Right must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. The strategy of the Right should be to enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent regime, not to build coalitions with the regime’s defenders and beneficiaries.”

Ganz concludes with the image of a bankrupt Donald Trump dictating The Art of the Comeback into a tape recorder, meanwhile contracting with architect Philip Johnson – one of the better known students of American fascist Lawrence Dennis, and possible Nazi spy – to redesign the entrance to the Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.

Trump’s vision for the casino, which Ganz does not mention: a drawbridge and a moat with live alligators.  In 1992 the US Senate identified Trump's VP of marketing for the Taj Mahal, Danny Leung, as an associate of Hong Kong-based organized crime group 14-K Triad. In 2015 The Taj Mahal's parent company paid a $10 million fine for violating laws related to money laundering. In 2017 the property was purchased by Hard Rock International, and reopened the following year as the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, providing Trump with a solution that was both a rock and a hard place.