John Ganz, _When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s_

 THERE IS ALREADY a small library of books trying to account for Trump and MAGA. I have read a few--David Corn, Jeff Sharlet, Luke Mogelson--as well as some of their Cassandra-like precursors of the late Obama era, like George Packer (The Unraveling) and Arlie Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land). I am going to declare John Ganz's book the best of the lot. Even though it is concerned with events and people of thirty-some years ago, it does the most persuasive job of explaining how we got here. Ganz's key point is that we have been headed here for a long time.

A lot of the people and events to which Ganz devotes attention might not show up even in a trivia contest these days, but he makes the case that all the key features of the MAGA world-picture surfaced in one or another manifestation in the 1990s. A political player willing to bring the dog whistles of racism well down into the audible range? David Duke. The hope that a businessman in the White House will save us? Ross Perot. Culture wars? Pat Buchanan. Unapologetic police violence? The beating of Rodney King and the trial that exculpated the officers who beat him. Adulation of tough  guys? John Gotti's elevation to icon. The idea that the United States government is an oppressive occupying power that has to be resisted with firearms? Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge.

Ganz explains his title in the opening pages. Left-leaning people lazily assume that social and cultural progress occurs naturally, linearly, as time proceeds, and that reactionary forces cannot, so to speak, "turn back the clock." But maybe the clock can be broken, if those who feel excluded by and resentful of progress decide they have nothing to lose. We can certainly see that willingness to burn it all down in the Trump era, and Ganz forcefully shows that we had been seeing it, without quite recognizing, for decades.