When the Cold War Came Home

An Oligarchy in Search of a Dictator

In 1991, the white supremacist intellectual Sam Francis asked readers of the Washington Times “whether the failure of the Reagan experiment means that conventional conservative policies can be implemented in a mass democracy.” One of the early architects of contemporary right-wing populism, Francis provided the intellectual backbone to Pat Buchanan’s bid for the presidency. He was also an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential activist organizations in the world. Now, with the Foundation’s notorious Project 2025 on the horizon, it seems that Francis’s suggestion has been heard: To implement so-called “conservative” policies, democracy itself must be overthrown. These are the stakes, we are told, of supporting the “liberal” candidate in November’s election – whoever that candidate may be.

Francis and Buchanan are characters in

John Ganz

’s new and energetic history of this strange period in American conservatism, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. While the book drifts backward into the early eighties and forward into the mid nineties, the bulk of these shifts in the far right’s attitudes and strategies takes place during the four years of the first Bush presidency. Without Reagan’s charisma in the White House, the eight-year fantasy of his policies crumbled. Suddenly, all one could see of the Reagan era were its results: “Reaganism preferred to devolve responsibilities to the state level: this contributed to a regional race to the bottom as states struggled among one another to attract capital with generous business incentives that strained their fiscal capacity.” This left people and banks and businesses everywhere vulnerable to financial ruin. Many were ruined, in fact, and the media was starting to tell us about it.

With Reagan’s policies untethered from “the West Wing of Oz,” as Joan Didion called the administration, and with the Cold War collapsing alongside the USSR, the American right needed a new strategy. They found it in identity politics: “Only through the negative solidarity of opposing domestic enemies,” Ganz writes, could American society, for the right, “regain its coherence and meaning.” Ostensibly, this is what When the Clock Broke is about: the early development of “negative solidarity” as a political tactic before its widespread manufacture and implementation in our own time – most visibly in Donald Trump. On what in 2024 feels like the precipice of civil war and a fascist coup, Ganz’s book tells the history of the moment that cultural and economic paranoia turned inward, against Americans. The Cold War hadn’t ended, the right advised itself; in fact things were more dire than ever, and the enemies were all around us – Black musicians, NEA-funded artists, people with AIDS, Satanists, college professors, college students, single mothers, rockstars who wore pantyhose, people with piercings, addicts (cigarettes and coke excluded), women with office jobs, and every genre of queer (this was before the modern exceptions).

Part of what makes the Cold War era such an anomalous period in American history is the federal government’s enormous investment the arts, whether through grant programs, museums, and education, or through the CIA’s manipulation of what flourished as “American culture”¹. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand III singles out the American university as a vanguard institution in consolidating and “managing” culture, all made possible through immense access to funding: “In 1946, federal grants to high education amounted to $197 million; in 1970, it was $2.682 billion.” What this meant was that the university, in many areas throughout the country, “supplemented or replaced ‘Bohemia’ – communities like Greenwich Village, Provincetown, and North Beach – as a space for independent art and thought… The university had also largely replaced the prewar world of little magazines and ad hoc political organizations.”

What’s more, as Menand’s book makes clear, this was also the era of the middle class, a demographic that could afford books, magazines, and even some art. They aspired to conversation and discernment, and in cities across the country had leisure time to read, go to movies, see plays, and attend concerts (and watch TV, of course). With an economically influential middle class, as well as a federal government intent on exporting a homegrown culture – from its most avant-garde paintings to its dullest of blockbuster movies – American art, music, literature, philosophy, science, and entertainment caught up with (and in some cases surpassed) Europe’s centuries of intellectual lineage in only a few decades.²

But once the USSR collapsed and Russia became an oligarchy, those who’d concerned themselves with communists redirected their aggression to the very people the government once championed. If a handful of Russians were openly enriching themselves off the immense suffering and poverty of their country, so too could American businessmen. This became the new mutually assured destruction between the superpowers. In the race to maximize profit, American culture was suddenly a liability. What was the point, any longer, of American expression if that expression can only slow down or intervene in the consolidation and enrichment of American business? So the Cold War turned into the Culture War, its battles fought every day on television. Bush’s major error (among many) was to fail to see this strategy as early as the radical populists he openly derided: especially Pat Buchanan, who ran against him in the primaries, and Ross Perot, who – as Ganz makes clear – was frankly insane.

Buchanan’s candidacy is the most instructive and prescient of the era. As if to signal the end of communism as the specter of evil, one of Buchanan’s advisers – another white supremacist intellectual named Murray Rothbard – didn’t hesitate to reach across the aisle to beef up his populist rhetoric. He advised, Ganz writes, “the libertarian movement to adopt the strategic plan of Lenin’s Bolsheviks to carry out their revolution: they should keep the ultimate goal of abolishing the State always in mind, while pursuing practical, intermediate projects as well; ‘purity of principle, combined with entrepreneurial flexibility of tactics.’” Despite the political differences, this paired well with Rothbard’s other “instructive examples: Mussolini and Hitler. He notes with particular interest Mussolini’s use of ‘myths’ and emotionally stirring propaganda to route the masses, as well as Hitler’s adoption of a clear distinction between ‘good guys and bad guys.’” Later, at a John Randolph Club meeting, Rothbard delivered a speech that “reveled in chaos and darkness. He told his crowd not to be afraid to frighten. His proposal for a right-wing populist strategy was precisely the rejection of the politics of prudence… in favor of rage, resentments, menaces, and affronts… Rothbard encouraged them to embrace the power of despair.” With Rothbard and Francis laying the intellectual groundwork for a right-wing movement, Buchanan – who had a hideous charisma and a preternatural instinct for getting attention – was able to provide “a mythic narrative of national redemption.”

This conscious deployment of myth is, I think, the real subject of Ganz’s book – and the crux of what might be the most fateful turning point in American history since Vietnam. A mythic narrative is an ahistorical narrative; and fascism, as a movement, cannot gather momentum in a society that understands itself historically. This is why the American right has spent decades investing not only in revisionist history – bringing back the “lost cause” narrative of the Confederacy, the “agitator” cliché of the Civil Rights movement – but fabricating and disseminating conspiracy theories. The target, as many have said, is truth itself, and history along with it.

Fittingly, while recounting Buchanan’s tendency to deny and downplay the Holocaust – one of his many vile (if contemporary) traits – Ganz quotes a scathing editorial from an actual conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer:

What ultimately and irrevocably discredited fascism was the Holocaust, the fact that the denouement of the fascist idea produced the supreme act of human barbarism. Buchanan, child of the pre-war right, confronts this unpleasant fact simply: He wishes the Holocaust would go away. Ergo, he finds himself, perhaps even despite himself, moved to debunk Treblinka, demean survivors… and defend those who were part of the genocide machine.

When Republicans today move to “honor” or “remember” the Confederacy – when they assert that it was a “lost cause” to defend state’s rights – they are engaging what is a very American version of Holocaust denial: They are intending to restore credibility to an apartheid government that enslaved human beings, with the tacit understanding that a modern one wouldn’t be so bad. This is the same reason, incidentally, that both Republicans and Democrats are quick to condemn any criticism of Israel despite its repeated war crimes and its thoroughly documented genocide against Palestinians. To admit that fascism in Europe culminated in the extermination of six million Jews would be to admit that fascism is not a credible form of government; and to admit that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine would be to discredit the efficacy of an apartheid system – particularly when that system operates as an economic satellite of our own neoliberal empire. To restore credibility to repressive and genocidal states, one cannot rely on history. That is why fascists and imperialists turn to myths. That is why we are invited to “make America great again.”

As an ahistorical form of politics, fascism trades in myths, images, and symbols. Three days ago, the former president and current Republican candidate was shot – in the ear. (Surely he won’t miss it; he’s never listened to anyone in his life.) Inexplicably, this serial coward found the courage to turn to the cameras, face streaked with blood, and raise his fist in a gesture of defiance. The myth of Trump – that he brings order, that he speaks the truth, that he liberates Americans from a corrupt “deep state” – is reinforced by an image like this: He won’t, the photograph says, be stopped.

One myth I’d like to retire is that Trump – or anyone in his party, at this point – is a conservative. These are deeply radical people, more radical than any political party in the United States. Even anarchists are more closely aligned with the original principles of the nation’s constitution. And this requires, too, that we retire calling his most visible opponents “liberals.” A party that seeks to keep things as they are, that allows corporations to enrich themselves while ordinary citizens grow poorer and poorer and have fewer and fewer protections, that sends an unending supply of bombs to a nation openly committing genocide, is not a liberal party. A party leader that stands up and says, “There is no place for this kind of violence” after the nation’s most infamous inciter of violence is shot in the ear is not a liberal leader – especially since he’s fomented and supported unimaginable violence during his own four-year administration. These are conservative people.

Given the choice between a conservative party that seeks to keep democracy on hospice and a radical party that seeks to abolish it altogether, the choice is clear. But as many have asked, why does this have to be the choice? France is France, of course, but the French were able to restructure and align their liberal and leftist parties in a matter of weeks, preventing the far right from taking power. Because our Democratic leaders are so intensely conservative, I don’t see political will as an avenue for this kind of rapid reimagining, for mounting not just a defense, but an offense against the right-wing vision for America. Because the radical party does have a vision – it even has a marketable name! – and the conservative party does not. An alternative vision for America would resist this threat. And the only way, I fear, to get leaders to take this demand for a vision seriously is to exercise not political will, but economic will.

Larry from Kill Bill said it best: “Fuckin’ with your cash is the only thing you kids seem to understand.” The kids in question – the Democrats and their donors – have an enormous (and unethical) investment in keeping things as they are. If it becomes, instead, expensive to maintain this status quo, they will change their politics. This is of course why people on the internet are always threatening to boycott, but “getting out” a boycott isn’t all that different from getting out the vote. It’s a serialized, individualistic expression – a speech that rarely reaches all that far.

Another myth I’m tired of hearing from politicians and newspapers is the idea that there is a “radical left” in this country. Almost all terrorism and other forms of extremism, from mass shootings to bombings to arson to driving into crowds of protestors, has been the radicalized product of the domestic right-wing imagination. In fact, you can always tell when terrorism doesn’t come from the right because the government actually responds with force (up to and including invading a country that had nothing to do with it). All one has to do to discredit this paranoia is look around. That oil pipelines are largely intact; that the internet is rarely interrupted; that commerce continues without the slightest hiccup; that warehouses are never seized; that entire server farms don’t go dark; that an entire online retailer doesn’t just disappear for 24 hours; indeed, that the experience of being a consumer need never be interrupted with even one political thought – all of this makes the total benignity of leftist resistance in this country profoundly obvious. And maybe the first step toward ensuring that our political leaders put forth a vision, that they offer us something resembling a future, that they give us something to vote for rather than against – maybe that first step is making this absence a little less obvious.

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1. Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire is largely about the CIA’s hand in establishing the MFA programs and literary magazines that guided and propagated an artificially apolitical style of American fiction, making the writing of poetry and novels about “craft” rather than about art. As another example, the postwar celebrification of Abstract Expressionist painters was another way for media, museums, and Congress to signal to the rest of the world that America was so free that its most celebrated artworks didn’t even have to resemble anything.

2. This is the dream scenario, of course. The image of America was easier to project than its reality. Because the Civil War ended, for the Confederacy, with a mere slap on the wrist (and hundreds of commemorative statues), the Civil Rights era quickly became the era of assassinations, riots, double standards, and civic abandonment. Vietnam and Watergate cost the government its credibility, and Reaganism stripped away its authority – as well as its income. As the USSR eroded from within, so too did the United States. But the Soviet Union was the first to collapse, so we declared a bankrupt and precarious capitalism the victor.