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We Need a Better Cultural Narrative
The proper strategy for the Right-wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. . . . We need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.
Those are Murray Rothbard’s words, taken from a talk he gave to the John Randolph Club meeting in 1992, where he advocated for then–presidential nominee Pat Buchanan.
You probably haven’t heard of Rothbard. For political commentator John Ganz, that’s the point. His book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s is a genre-crossing work of history, journalism, and cultural criticism that revolves around one main idea: fringe voices from the early 1990s prefigured the post-2016 American Right.
If you believe Donald Trump’s election was a mixture of ethnic grievance, populist rage, and Rush Limbaugh rhetoric overlain with a bit of Ross Perot’s entrepreneurial spirit, you’ll nod along with Ganz throughout his tour of the ’90s. If that story sounds to you like a liberal attempting to describe a movement he doesn’t like, well, trust your gut. Ganz’s post-convention Substack post about JD Vance is titled “This Land Is Mein Land.” The critique is less than subtle.
But two things can be true at the same time. It’s undeniable that Trump drafted off the momentum of populist forces from the ’90s. And yet, squishing together a collection of fringe characters and cringeworthy quotes into one disconnected narrative from 30 years ago is—we might say—an inadequate approach to explain this historic transformation in American politics.
So while Ganz’s core argument is uneven and biased from the outset, his book is an auspicious launch point into understanding the cultural conditions that led to our fraught political moment.
From Moral Norms to Class Warfare
In the early ’90s, the Religious Right was a powerful voting bloc aligned with other Burkean social traditionalists. Both groups believed that transcendent religion inspires moral virtue, a precondition for a functioning republic. Together, they sought to combat the rising social liberalism.
Sam Francis, an eccentric intellectual of the New Right, didn’t believe the primary problem with the Left was an apathy toward religion and tradition. Francis’s target instead was the ascendant managerial class whose interests contradicted those of “traditional Americans.” His interpretation of Reagan illustrates the point:
Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural, and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what [it] will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for [it]. (104)
Whereas social traditionalists advocated for universal moral norms, Francis advocated for the interests of a particular cultural class. And Francis won the fight. The Right’s transformation from pro-life family values to anti-woke values is its glowing endorsement of class warfare. The case in point here is immigration. Republicans are united on that issue because it is central to the interests of “the people who face political, cultural, and economic dispossession.” George Bush–era compassionate conservatism isn’t the center anymore; anti-elite frustration occupies that space now.
Francis’s triumph was deleterious for the conservative movement and the country more broadly. For when politics shifts from debating broad issues to advancing specific interests, the conversation shifts from an inquiry into truth (what’s the correct view) to an argument over power (whose interests should reign). This is why our politics increasingly inhabits a Nietzschean world, where all values are secondary to power.
Missing Narrative
In the ’90s, the story of America as a land of economic opportunity, religious belief, and family values became increasingly strained. As many Americans saw their country’s identity changing, their status as characters within America’s story became threatened. In a gesture of empathy, Ganz shows how this loss of narrative led to a rise in conspiracy thinking:
Mainstream American society had stopped providing them with a plausible story . . . the churches had nothing to say to them, materialism could not fill the gap and all around them were signs of decay. . . . The family itself was in danger, surrounded by a seductive world of vice and corruption. The world they grew up in and took for granted no longer existed. (306)
Confusion about the American story—with its resultant anxiety and anger—is perhaps the most direct connection between the ’90s and today’s world. In the narrative vacuum, both Left and Right have defaulted to nihilism, where, according to James Davison Hunter in Democracy and Solidarity, “every group defines itself against some other group, the net effect of which is the destruction of common life” (335). To be a Democrat is to be anti-MAGA; to be a Republican is to be anti-elite.
Our politics increasingly inhabits a Nietzschean world, where all values are secondary to power.
America is now a society without a story. That absence strains the fabric of our life together, beyond just political differences.
Recovering Truth
A society without a grounding narrative lacks resources for personal identity (e.g., a mental health crisis), social cohesion (e.g., loneliness and polarization), and an epistemological foundation (e.g., a “post-truth” age and a trust crisis). Addressing the lack of a coherent narrative is an evangelistic opportunity for the church in our moment. The gospel is the story that can establish identity, bond communities, and solidify truth.
The anger and fear around us—painful symptoms of a life without meaning—are deeply unsatisfying counterfeits for abundant life in Christ. We must never forget that the gospel is the story the world longs for, the happy ending too good to be true—and yet it is.
We must never forget that the gospel is the story the world longs for, the happy ending too good to be true—and yet it is.
The book ends abruptly without solutions. Ganz’s purpose is to explain why the Right is despicable, rather than to find a way forward. The book would have been better if, like Yascha Mounk’s critique of the Left in The Identity Trap, it pointed to something like a societal reliance on classical liberal principles as a remedy.
Nevertheless, When the Clock Broke is somewhat helpful because it explains why the shared story crumbled and points us toward our opportunity to offer the gospel as a superior cultural narrative.
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