When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority than the type Giuliani had represented up to that point. It didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit. The institutions had failed, the welfare state had failed, the markets had failed, there was no justice, just rackets and mobs: the crowd didn’t want the G-man dutifully following the rules, and it didn’t want to be part of the “gorgeous mosaic”; it wanted protection, a godfather, a boss, just like the undertaker at the beginning of The Godfather. Gotti was not really a figure of revolt and anarchy at all, he was a symbol of order, the old order that many longed for still, an order more real and deeper than the law, upheld by brute power.
Amid this brimming cast of characters, the real protagonists of When the Clock Broke are the thinkers who gave white rage shape and form, a coherent sense of political direction: not only Rothbard and Buchanan but also writers like Sam Francis and Joseph Sobran. Their growing influence was a feat of words—Rothbard, Francis, and Sobran were all prolific writers with regular columns in the right-wing press—as well as networking: Francis, Sobran, and Buchanan convened for a monthly dinner outside of Washington, D.C., for a decade from the early 1990s. Sobran, a Roman Catholic traditionalist employed as a senior editor at National Review, had a flair for flouting the orthodoxies of mainstream conservatism: He was a consistent critic of both Israel (the pro-Israel New York Times, he felt, “really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update”) and the “globalism” that led the United States into the Gulf war. He also felt that, with the Soviet threat dispatched, “we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.” Buchanan and Francis shared this conviction. The real trouble with popular rule was the people, especially those who came from somewhere else: During his 1992 primary campaign, Buchanan famously called for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to stem the flow of new arrivals.
Anti-Israel, antiwar, anti-democratic, sharply critical of Reaganomics, and acutely conscious of the social devastation wrought by what’s now known as neoliberalism, these thinkers distinguished themselves as much by the unpredictability and ecumenism of their politics (a splash of xenophobia here, a dash of anti-corporate cod socialism there) as by the theatricality of their rhetoric. Francis, the intellectual inspiration behind the New Right of the self-styled “Middle American Radicals,” emerges from When the Clock Broke as the great prophet of the age. He saw that the type of politics he and his collaborators were advancing could have no truck with the establishment. “The New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one,” he wrote. The Middle American Radicals for whom this New Right claimed to speak, though in practice mostly white and working class, were “less an objectively identifiable class than a subjectively distinguished temperament,” in which feelings of resentment, exploitation, and suspicion of established authority freely mixed. Excluded from power both formally and culturally, this new movement could only take back the country, Francis felt, through rejection of the politics of civility, a clean break with free-market fundamentalism, and the embrace of raw executive power. He spoke of putting “America First,” a “new nationalism” that could defeat globalism, and the far-right quest for “cultural hegemony.” To contemporary ears, the recipe may sound familiar. This was Bannonism in the days when Steve Bannon was still an investment banker and aspiring film producer.
Even amid the far right’s setbacks of the early 1990s, Francis saw the successes to come. Reflecting on the Buchanan campaign after its suspension before the inevitable renomination of Bush, Francis wrote that Buchanan “may not be The Terminator, but he can still be the Godfather of a new political and cultural movement that can leave Mr. Bush’s party where it lies and take back our country.” Throughout Ganz’s account, what’s most striking is how utterly sure the founding fathers of Trumpism felt of their ultimate victory. Whether via a reverse-Gramscian long march through the cultural institutions or a successful bid for the White House, Francis, Rothbard, Sobran, and co. never appeared to doubt that history would vindicate them in the end.
