Repeal the 20th Century

The​ sociologist Monika Krause, in her book Model Cases (2021), shows that social scientists have tended to base their concepts and theories on a surprisingly limited range of shared empirical instances. Images of the modern metropolis, for example, have been excessively shaped by studies of Chicago and Berlin. Political theories of populism have been heavily indebted to cases in Latin America, in particular Argentina. The sociology of work developed as a study of car manufacturing. And our thinking about professions relies on the examples of doctors and lawyers. Krause doesn’t seek to challenge this partiality (the natural sciences also use ‘privileged material research objects’, such as fruit flies) but to understand what it tells us about the practices and knowledge claims of the social sciences.

Political economists, too, have their model cases, in particular the crisis of the 1970s, which involved the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the demise of full employment as an aim of economic policy and the turn towards conservative and neoliberal arguments in favour of tax cuts and financial deregulation. In the space of a decade, one worldview was seemingly discredited and another took its place. While historians may baulk at the tidy chronology, the idea that there was during this period a paradigm shift in capitalist regulation has proved seductive, and scholars in many fields have busied themselves describing how the ideological wheel turned. An enormous amount of attention has been paid to the intellectuals and ideas of the New Right, which thrived in the 1970s; the New York City debt crisis of 1975, which afforded an early glimpse of the neoliberal world to come; the decline of Fordist methods of mass production and the rise of superior just-in-time rivals; the industrial disputes that came to a head; and so on.

There is another, less obvious, reason that the crisis of the 1970s appeals to academics: the story of ideological regime change grants a prominent role to academics themselves. The economic model that was abandoned in the crisis is usually referred to as ‘Keynesian’. Keynes himself could be described as a ‘model case’ member of the liberal elite (in a non-pejorative sense of the term), a man whose moral, intellectual and cultural passions drove him to rethink the basic principles of economic policy. The paradigm that succeeded Keynesianism was scarcely less scholarly in its provenance. Many of the intellectuals who forged the political economy of Thatcher and Reagan were also tenured academics, first in Vienna, Freiburg and London, and later in Chicago and Virginia. Its most visible representative, Milton Friedman, may have been a media polemicist and fearsome debater, but his academic credentials were impeccable. And while think tanks, foundations and business lobbies played their role, scientific credibility and respectability were vital as the new ideas gained ground, especially when it came to influencing the technocrats at the World Bank, the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and central banks.

The model case of the 1970s played a significant role in interpretations of the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath, especially on the intellectual left, which has often longed for a crisis in which fresh ideas might get a hearing. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve lost count of the number of calls I’ve heard for a ‘Mont Pelerin of the left’, a reference to the international network first convened in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek to lay down the intellectual building blocks of a neoliberal future (the Mont Pelerin Society still meets to this day). Hayek had in turn been influenced by the example of the decidedly elitist Fabian Society, which aimed to put advanced social science in the service of social engineering. The most ambitious recent attempt to overturn Hayek’s legacy was made by the Hewlett Foundation, which pledged $20 million in 2018 and a further $50 million in 2020 to research projects, largely based at US universities, engaged in mapping out a post-neoliberal future. This was one response to the shock of the first Trump victory in 2016, which brought home the need to tackle the economic, social and political decay that was eating the US from within.

It seemed to liberals that Trumpism arrived in 2016 without any intellectual backing or much of a policy script. Trump, like Brexit, was treated as a symptom of sustained economic dysfunction rather than the harbinger of a new future. The subsequent fiscal largesse of the Biden administration, partly influenced by the intellectual fruits of the Hewlett investments and heavily watered down by deal-making in Congress, was an attempt to draw a line under both neoliberalism and its apparent Trumpian death rattle. But the second Trump administration has destroyed such illusions, not only because of Trump’s own extraordinary political tenacity and reach, but because of the wealth of ideas that accompanied his revival. The notorious 900-page Project 2025 document, produced by the Heritage Foundation, collated the ideas of 350 conservative thinkers and 45 organisations to create the outline of a vision and a plan for the second Trump term.

While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a morbid symptom of a dying world, his second looks more like an attempt to enforce a new paradigm. The radical policies on trade, migration and international aid, the politicisation of federal spending and the attacks on constitutional process are made possible by the mania of the man at the centre, but they are being pursued according to an ideological agenda. As liberals struggle to get to grips with this takeover, they are forced to question some of their own presuppositions about regime change, political economy and the role of ideas in public life. To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the fact that, more and more, ideas can achieve influence and credibility by circumventing the world of academia altogether.

John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke is a study of a moment in American history that isn’t usually considered a crisis: the early 1990s, when the United States was reimagining and repositioning itself in a post-Cold War world. Pop sociology and snap history have depicted the 1990s as a period of triumph and triumphalism in ‘the West’, especially the US. Economic growth took off, the tenets of neoliberal economics were imposed across the world, investment poured into once dilapidated urban neighbourhoods and the World Wide Web made its first appearance. The period is encapsulated by the excruciating video of Bill Gates and his colleagues dancing on stage at Microsoft’s Windows 1995 launch, the equally cringeworthy video of the entire Democratic National Convention doing the ‘macarena’ a year later (both are on YouTube), or the sitcom Friends, in which twenty-somethings with casual jobs live in large apartments in Greenwich Village. Wasn’t this a time of naive optimism? Maybe, but only if you limit the story to the second half of the decade.

One of Ganz’s achievements is to have peeled back this picture of Cold War triumphalism to examine the difficulty of the transition from the Reagan era, in which the right was still largely dedicated to defending the establishment, to Clinton’s years in power, when the right began to lose its mind. Sandwiched between the two, for four years beginning in January 1989, was the hapless regime of George H.W. Bush, the dying gasp of the postwar consensus as to how politics should be conducted. Amid such events as the recession of 1990-91, the LA riots, Ross Perot’s presidential run, the rise of the ‘shock jocks’ led by Rush Limbaugh and Rudy Giuliani’s election as mayor of New York City, Ganz discovers a moment of rupture, in which a new political movement began to cohere. The characters involved weren’t a secretive cabal, or even a Mont Pelerin-style network: they were often shouting their demands on the airwaves and from political platforms. But they were too outrageous, seemingly too divorced from reality, ever to be taken seriously by the political and intellectual classes, who were in any case soon swept up by a new wave of prosperity propelled by globalisation. When the Clock Broke promises ‘a history of the losers: candidates who lost their elections, movements that bubbled up and fizzled out, protests that exploded and dissipated, writers who toiled at the margins of American life, figures who became briefly famous or infamous and then were forgotten’. One thing they all share, which might at the time have looked more pitiful than dangerous, is a sense of grievance towards the establishment. In a world before social media, the grudges and resentments of marginal figures rarely penetrated mainstream political consciousness. But as Ganz shows in a series of biographical portraits, a distinctive set of proto-Trumpian sentiments began to seep into the American public sphere no sooner than the rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away.

In hindsight, four figures in particular stand out: Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard and Ross Perot. Francis was, and remains, a comparatively obscure figure in American conservative intellectual and journalistic circles. But he was decisive in introducing to mainstream discourse the racist ideas of figures such as David Duke, which were unacceptable to the Republican Party of the time. Writing in the early 1980s, Francis already sounded like a MAGA provocateur: ‘The New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.’ Its aim, he argued, should be the restoration of natural inequalities, in which racial difference played an undeniable part. Francis reimagined nationalism not as the assertion of the nation-state (which invariably meant elevating managerial elites, who would cavort with other elites in global institutions), but as a cultural phenomenon which would defend America from immigration, liberalism and government.

Francis found little to admire in the GOP of the early 1990s, but the political faction led by Pat Buchanan was an exception. Buchanan’s ‘paleoconservatism’ was an off-shoot of traditional conservative thinking, forged in opposition to the ‘neoconservative’ project which (originating in the most fervently anti-communist wing of the Democratic Party) sought to deepen American global hegemony via aggressive foreign policy and a rhetorical defence of liberal democracy. The ‘paleos’ pulled in the opposite direction from the ‘neocons’, seeking to cut America off from the global economy and to withdraw from foreign wars and multilateral institutions, prioritising instead the restoration of national tradition at home. In the familiar manner of American populism, Buchanan spoke directly to the resentments and anxieties of small businessmen and farmers who suspected they were being screwed by coastal elites, with more racial insinuation than Bush or the Democrats were willing to match.

In his campaign against Bush for the Republican nomination in 1992, Buchanan drew on a number of tropes that would come back to haunt American politics. In the speech announcing his candidacy, he declared that ‘the people of this country need to recapture our capital city from an occupying army of lobbyists and registered agents of foreign powers hired to look out for everybody and everything except the national interest of the United States.’ Buchanan’s campaign faltered and was wound up by the summer of 1992. Francis was satisfied nonetheless: ‘Mr Buchanan’s presidential campaign was only the opening shot, and whether he runs again or does or does not eventually win the White House, he has unleashed a force in American politics that cannot be bridled.’ Buchanan’s significance, Francis concluded, was cultural as much as political, the beginning of a quasi-Gramscian ‘long march’ to restore American identity. In desperation, the Bush campaign would later ask Buchanan for his endorsement, which he grudgingly gave, though to no avail.

As the leading light of American libertarianism since the 1970s, and the founder of the Cato Institute, Murray Rothbard is better known than Francis. Born in 1926, he began his complicated political evolution as a right-wing activist after the Second World War, and spent his career setting up and moving between a series of think tanks and research institutes, largely outside academia. Eventually Rothbard came to call himself a ‘paleolibertarian’, combining a belief in natural hierarchies with opposition to the moral relativism of the New Left and a passionate hatred of government. He, like Francis, saw in Buchanan a brief glimpse of political hope. Speaking at the second annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in January 1992, Rothbard rubbished critics of the paleos for telling them they couldn’t ‘turn the clock back’:

We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal … We shall repeal the 20th century.

This wasn’t a call merely for a change of direction, but for an insurrection fuelled by rage and resentment against the establishment, no matter political affiliation. Sporadic rebellions in rural America at the time suggested the emergence of a constituency willing to take part.

Rothbard took inspiration from the Austrian neoliberal tradition (at least its more virulently anti-state wing, represented by Ludwig von Mises) but departed from them in at least one key respect, as Quinn Slobodian sets out in his recent book, Hayek’s Bastards.* In the eyes of the original neoliberals, the main threat to capitalism lay in democracy and mass society, which inclined towards socialism. Pro-market policies needed to be insulated from the masses through strategic acts of depoliticisation and de-democratisation (such as the granting of independence to central banks). Friedman et al were explicitly engaged in a project of elite capture, aiming to change the orthodoxy of economic policymaking. The paradigm shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism succeeded via existing circuits of academic scholarship, policy advice, the financial press and multilateral institutions.

Rothbard believed the opposite. In his view, it was the over-educated elites that threatened to impose socialism; ordinary folk were allies of capitalism, together with its central values of private property and personal liberty. Paleolibertarianism was an explicitly populist political project, which sought to restore freedom and self-government to the people. Rothbard’s rhetoric contained strong hints of the violence that would be necessary to bring this about, violence which (paradoxically) would sometimes have to be wielded by centralised political powers against the institutions of elite rule. The double helix of libertarianism and authoritarianism that runs through much of Trump’s programme can be traced back to Rothbard’s work. One riddle that all paleos faced in the early 1990s was how to co-ordinate a mass movement and set out a political programme even while attacking the established government, media and public institutions that would be needed to carry out such a programme. Talk radio provided part of the answer, channelling and fuelling the white male rage that was becoming an increasingly prominent force in American politics. Within twenty years, social media platforms would provide the tools for the propagation of resentment-based populism.

As for Perot, before his presidential run as an independent in 1992, his career had zigzagged between the military, the IT industry (where he had amassed his fortune, thanks to government contracts) and campaigning on a mysterious allegation that there were still prisoners of war in Vietnam, abandoned by the government. It was this last claim that elevated his political profile, enabling him to tap into paranoid anti-government sentiment. He appointed the war hero James Stockdale (praised by Rothbard as a true paleo) as his running mate, but for the most part it remained unclear what Perot stood for or what his policies were. Rather like Nick Clegg in 2010, he exploited the political privileges of the outsider, dominating the 1992 campaign season simply by not being either of the other guys.

Perot’s self-presentation as a blank canvas, onto which various discontents could be projected, was another sign of things to come. ‘We’re not interested in detailed positions,’ he said. ‘Everybody has detailed positions. Nobody implements them.’ Perot didn’t need to resort to violent or counter-revolutionary rhetoric in order to serve as a vessel for political alienation and rage. Not being a ‘politician’ was enough. A new age of anti-politics was dawning, in which the adoption of substantive political positions or policy pledges was a risk, and the best a professional politician could do was remain likeable but vague on specifics, talking as little as possible about ‘politics’. Clinton turned out to be a master of this, triangulating feverishly (at one point in the primaries he won a non-endorsement from Jesse Jackson, while insisting that Jackson didn’t endorse any other candidate either) and avoiding topics that reminded voters of politics or policy.

In the decade and a half of prosperity that ended with the 2007 credit crunch, it was possible to see depoliticisation in a more optimistic light. Ample evidence showed that trust in politicians and participation in democratic institutions were in decline, but perhaps this was a sign – precisely as someone like Friedman would have hoped – that markets were functioning so well that people didn’t need to express themselves via ideology or political parties. Consumer freedom had usurped political participation. This vision of a golden age of neoliberal globalisation was summed up by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Fed, in 2007 (before the full seriousness of the financial crisis was apparent): ‘It hardly makes any difference who will be the next president, the world is governed by market forces.’ In this picture, the 1990s was a decade of ‘posts’: post-socialist, postmodern, post-ideological, perhaps even post-political. In the UK, Tony Blair was both exponent and beneficiary of depoliticisation, ditching concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in favour of things that matter to voters, such as ‘delivery’ and ‘outcomes’.

By focusing on 1991-92, Ganz casts a different and more ominous light on anti-politics. ‘People wanted to be pissed off,’ he writes of the national mood in the run-up to the 1992 election, ‘but the specifics were too irritating and difficult: the details of urban policy didn’t get people going, dwelling on the scenes of burned-out Los Angeles was too depressing and hopeless. Reality had to be left behind.’ A centrist policy consensus would crystallise in the 1990s, backed by a (temporarily) successful macroeconomic approach, but the fact that the major ideological conflicts of the 20th century were dissipating did not mean that political discontent was too – far from it. Anger that wasn’t represented democratically would have to go somewhere, and it seems clear now that it was pushed underground. The rage that Francis, Buchanan, Rothbard and Perot hoped to direct at their enemies wasn’t sated by the prosperity that followed, it merely had fewer public representatives for a time. Rather than reading the 1990s as a decade of ‘posts’, Ganz understands them as prefigurative: pre-alt-right, pre-MAGA, pre-DOGE.

The​ case of the United States is paradoxical. On the one hand, political scientists have long spoken of ‘American exceptionalism’ to capture its distinctive characteristics, the things that make it incomparable to European nation-states. The absence of a successful socialist or labour party is taken as evidence of this, as are the elevated place of religion in its public life and its comparatively limited welfare state. On the other hand, many of us routinely take the US as a model case, developing such concepts as ‘modernisation’, ‘consumerism’, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘financialisation’ around its singular example (though perhaps this is forgivable given that the US has been actively exporting and imposing these ideas since 1945). Conservative critics think that the left has, without acknowledging it, allowed the American experience of race and identity to be treated, incorrectly, as a norm applicable elsewhere.

The characters in When the Clock Broke are shaped by a national story encompassing slavery, residual paranoia towards the federal government and humiliation and rage over Vietnam, not to mention guns. But I can’t help spotting some parallels with the less explosive chain of events in Britain, even beyond the ideological echoes of Reagan and Thatcher, Clinton and Blair, Brexit and Trump. John Major occupied a position on the right similar to that of George H.W. Bush, struggling against economic recession as well as the newer, crazier wing of his own party (the colleagues Major referred to in 1993 as ‘bastards’), whose obsession was cutting Britain off from Europe. Major, like Bush, now seems like the last of an old guard, to be replaced in the medium term by a more PR-savvy brand of politician.

But the lesson of Ganz’s account is that there is perhaps more to say about the way the ‘bastards’ and those awkward four years between the end of Thatcher’s leadership and the birth of New Labour shaped the political forces that came to afflict Britain twenty years later. Ganz and Slobodian both invite us to reckon with the political legacy of weirdos, losers and cranks, something that few conventional intellectual historians or ‘ideational’ political economists are used to doing. Hayek’s Bastards reveals the extent to which later generations of the Mont Pelerin Society were drawn towards cultural and biological theories of inequality, in common with many of Ganz’s ‘paleos’. Given the wider social, political and economic trends leading towards globalisation and multiculturalism in that period, it is unsurprising that subscribers to these (often racist) views were marginalised by mainstream institutions and liberal elites. But they didn’t disappear; rather, they organised elsewhere. One manifestation of nationalist and culturalist neoliberalism was the appearance of new Eurosceptic think tanks of the right: the Bruges Group was formed in 1989 and the Centre for the New Europe in 1993. The Anti-Federalist League (of which Nigel Farage was a member) was formed in 1991 to oppose the Maastricht Treaty; Ukip was founded two years later. In 1994, James Goldsmith started the Referendum Party, whose sole policy was to hold a referendum on EU membership.

As Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe demonstrate in ‘Neoliberals against Europe’, their contribution to the essay collection Mutant Neoliberalism (2019), Murray Rothbard exerted considerable influence on reactionary critiques in and of the EU. The image of a ‘socialist’ European superstate, trampling on national cultures and dissolving them through immigration, emerged straight after the end of the Cold War. The German economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe was a protégé of Rothbard’s: he spent time with him in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s, developing a critique of the EU that was both anarcho-capitalist and resolutely anti-immigration. (Today, Hoppe is cited as an influence by Javier Milei and the ‘neo-reactionary’ guru Curtis Yarvin.) The Centre for the New Europe, under the leadership of the Belgian journalist Paul Beliën and the German philosopher Hardy Bouillon, waged a Rothbardian campaign against the EU in defence of a European culture under threat above all, as they saw it, from Muslim immigration. Climate science and representative democracy were also in their crosshairs.

These reactionaries may be contemptible, even at times laughable, but they were deadly serious. And perhaps they understood the stakes of politics more clearly than the ‘Third Way’ liberals who for a time would consign them to the margins. Or maybe the stakes were simply more visible before all the talk of ‘globalisation’ and the ‘information superhighway’ changed the subject. One fascinating thread in Ganz’s book concerns the fate of Russia. In summer 1991, with the Soviet Union collapsing, Richard Nixon of all people privately circulated a memo, ‘How to lose the Cold War’, in which he criticised the West’s failure to support a sustainable transition out of communism for its former foe. ‘If Yeltsin fails,’ Nixon wrote, ‘the prospects for the next fifty years will turn grim. The Russian people will not turn back to communism. But a new, more dangerous despotism based on extremist Russian nationalism will take power.’ A year later, David Duke was interviewed by a nationalist Russian paper. Asked if he would support a move against Yeltsin, he replied: ‘I will support a man or a party in Russia who will help Russians become strong. I don’t care if they follow certain articles of the constitution or not. I think Russia needs a strong personality in order to overcome all the difficulties.’

Neither Nixon nor Duke was schooled in ‘realist’ theories of international relations – they just called it as they saw it. But at a time when a quasi-Hegelian, neoconservative worldview was taking hold, according to which all peoples of the world would eventually conform to the model of the US, elites took little interest in the politics of resentment or ‘strong men’. In time, that politics would take an interest in them.