"A history of the right-wing political figures who defined the early 1990s"-- "A high official in the Department of Defense is accused of running a drug trafficking operation in Laos that uses POW/MIAs as slave labor, and the rumors reverberate. Mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani incites a riot among police officers in Lower Manhattan (Mutiny! reads the headline of the next day's New York Post). The ex-Klansman and neo-Nazi David Duke runs for governor of Louisiana and wins a majority of the white vote. "If the ideals that I stand for are addressed, then I will only be a footnote in history," he prophesies. "But if the deterioration of the white middle class continues, then I will be president." With the Soviet Union dissolved and Saddam Hussein defeated in Operation Desert Storm, the early 1990s promised a restoration of American confidence and primacy -- as if Ronald Reagan's vow to bring "morning in America" was finally to be fulfilled. It didn't turn out that way. As the economy contracted and anxieties about crime, immigration, and Japanese competition rose, the national mood notably darkened. America: What Went Wrong? was the title of a major bestseller. A reclusive but influential group of conservative thinkers rejected "globalism" and called for a "populist-based presidency" that would save the American way of life. They sought to "break the clock" and repeal the twentieth century." In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed writer John Ganz dissects a country in extremis. Here are the shock jocks, tough-talking police chiefs, gun-toting survivalists, and conspiracy theorists who forged a new paranoid style and politics of cultural despair. When the Cold War consensus failed to survive, Americans exhumed old demons and created some new ones. A culture war was declared on liberal elites, free trade was equated with the "giant sucking sound" of jobs lost to Mexico, and rowdy talk radio hosts forged bonds with audiences undergoing an "epidemic of loneliness." Increasingly, the Republican Party was the haven of the alienated and angry. When Bill Clinton won the presidency, it seemed the center had held -- temporarily. Ranging from Ruby Ridge and the L.A. riots to a Chinese restaurant in Virginia where "paleoconservative" intellectuals devised a new politics for "Middle American Radicals," Ganz offers a rollicking exposé of the end of the post-World War II order -- and the advent of a new, more berserk America." -- Provided by publisher. Jacket flap.

Introduction : The end -- Swamp creature -- Winter of discontent -- Chaos and old night -- The voice of America -- Little Caesar -- Rage -- The thin blue line -- Keeping America American -- "We're at war" -- "Buying the country back" -- The howling wilderness -- The mosaic -- "...The economy, stupid."