Edith Cook
Dear Friends and Readers,
A snowy day in January is a good time to write.
The column below discusses John Ganz's 2024 book that examines 1990s America, "When the Clock Broke," which bears the subtitle, "Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Open in the 1990s."
In the heady days of the Reagan Administration the book discusses, I was a young emigrant from Germany transplanted to California, married to a man who became a lawyer despite his working-class background. From the time of Reagan's governorship of California, Darold was devoted to the former movie actor, who owned a horse ranch we passed whenever we drove from Arroyo Grande to Santa Barbara, where we liked to shop.
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Published January 10, 2025, under the Editor’s Headline, “Comparing Reagan and Trump”
When then-President Reagan ordered the 32 solar panels removed that had been installed in 1980 under his predecessor Jimmy Carter, I was angry. Yet I said nothing to my spouse, a Reaganite through and through, even though our home outside Arroyo Grande sported early solar panels; a client had installed them in exchange for legal services. Compared to today’s panels, these panels were heavy and had to be hooked up to the home’s water supply, essentially providing solar-heated water. Back then, Reagan, to me, seemed a narrow-minded ideologue, thumbing his nose at Carter’s efforts.
Naturally, then, I was interested in John Ganz’s 2024 book, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Open in the 1990s.” Ganz begins by exploring a movement that evolved with President Reagan’s farewell speech in January 1989: the movement wanted to “break the clock” of progress and return to the ideologies of an earlier time, be it “nationalism, populism, racism, antisemitism, and even fascism.”
Americans were fed up, writes Ganz, when this should have been a moment of triumph: America had won the Cold War; the Berlin Wall would soon fall; the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. It looked like democracy and capitalism were the only viable political and economic systems prevailing. Ganz cites from Reagan’s final speech: “Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech, and turning away from the ideologies of the past.”
His successor and former Vice President, George H. W. Bush, took office “just as the bubble popped and the bills started to become due.” By 1988, mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts formed fully half of Wall Street’s profits. The entire 1980s ran on “borrowed money and borrowed time.” Consumer, corporate, and government debt exploded, not the least because, writes Ganz, “The military spending and tax cuts of the Reagan Administration had racked up a $3 trillion national debt.”
The restructuring of the American economy of the 1980s provided a glitzy veneer of great wealth while the underlying reality showed that wages stagnated, and “the power of the unions [was] all but broken.”
Ganz quotes from a George Will column: ”During the Reagan years, a particular social stratum had gotten a lot. The people who get income from property benefitted . . . .”
Indeed, while the top fifth of Americans saw an increase of 50 percent, and the income of the top 1 percent grew by almost 75 percent over the decade, the average income of “80 percent of American families declined between 1980 and 1989.”
As the rich got richer and the poor, poorer, the middle was being hollowed out. A high rate of business failures and bankruptcies matched the foreclosures and personal bankruptcies within the middle class. The Reagan Administration, however, “preferred to devolve responsibilities to the state level: this contributed to a regional race to the bottom among the states . . . .”
Yet the new President, George W. H. Bush, “desired the status quo above all.” However, when Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the skyrocketing price of oil pushed the new administration into a reluctant war. “It’s not about oil,” claimed the new president, but about “Hussain’s human rights abuses.”
From a tactical viewpoint, the war was successful. Saddam retreated from Kuwait, his army crushed, “and Bush’s job approval soared to 87 percent.” But conspiracists abounded, from Pat Robertson’s book on the New World Order to “The lluminati, the Freemasons, the New Age movement, and the Trilateral Commission . . . .“ The war in the gulf had failed to stem the tide of recession at home, which brought a decline in consumer confidence.
Criticism of the “failure of the Regan settlement” came from conservative activists and intellectuals alike, who saw a “crisis of authority” and a betrayal of their economic interests. The Democratic Party benefitted from the popular discontent, but the Clinton administration continued many of Reagan’s policies, which contributed to the crisis, “reducing or redirecting the welfare state, finance, and pursuing free trade agreements.”
Ganz then switches his focus to the 2016 election of Donald Trump that, to the author, represents “the politics of national despair“ of the Republican Party, while “in the swamps of the Deep South,” a creature emerged in the person of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi who presided over a group that called itself the National Association for the Advancement of White People. In Louisiana on January 21, 1989, the day after the George H. W. Bush inauguration, Duke, running as a Republican, finished first in an open primary for the state’s eighty-first legislative district.
“We will do everything to defeat this man,” vowed RNC chief Lee Atwater to the Wall Street Journal, to little avail. Duke won the run-off a month later and entered the state legislature. Once there, he aspired to higher and higher office. While his causes and campaigns remained only marginally successful, they “suggested deep structural failures in American society and its political system.”
Ganz repeatedly focuses on the Trump antics even as he acknowledges that certain thinkers “helped transform the Party of Reagan into the Party of Trump.” Duke, in November 1989 on ABC’s Primetime Live with Samuel Donaldson and Diane Sawyer, defended his selling of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” out of his office, and having drawn a map “setting aside Long Island as a homeland for the Jews.” A day later on the same venue Donald Trump, an “arriviste from the outer boroughs’ dwellings from the lower-middle class” into the “canyons of Manhattan,” ranted about Japanese investments in the U. S. economy under the headline, “Who Owns America?”
Then Trump became part of the ‘80s debt craze: going bankrupt, and defaulting on payments for his Atlantic City Taj Mahal Casino.
Called before the House Subcommittee on Urgent Fiscal Issues, he opined that “I truly feel that, right now, this country is in a depression. People are kidding themselves when they think it’s a recession.” By 1992, Trump’s efforts collapsed under the weight of unserviceable debt, “a victim of his own prodigality as the recession deepened.”
Ganz’s ending page returns to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. A week after the election, “technically without assets because of his bankruptcies,” Trump is in conversation in a limo with Philip Johnson, a world-famous architect, Trump ranting as usual.
“You’d make a good mafioso,” Johnson says to him.
And Trump replies, “One of the greatest.”
Patti Sherlock
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Miss Edith
www.edithcook.com
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