Professor Andrew Busch reviews John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Professor Busch’s review is published as “The Outsiders” (behind the CRB paywall). Although the book is not one that I will ever read, Professor Busch’s conclusion is worth reading all by itself:
Driving Ganz’s analysis is a particular way of thinking, captured neatly in his list of the “good guys” of the early ’90s: Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, Jerry Brown, Harris Wofford. His partisan leanings lead him to make observations that he is unable or unwilling to process fully. Clearly, he fears demagoguery and authoritarianism—at least from the right—but he simply equates democracy with egalitarianism, never pairing it with constitutionalism, rights, or the consent of the governed. Yet, it is precisely democracy untethered to constitutionalism or fundamental rights that is most vulnerable to demagoguery and authoritarianism. Once that door is opened, any unscrupulous actor can walk through. Ganz quotes Huey P. Long as claiming, “There is perfect democracy [in Louisiana], and when you have perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship.” Long might well have read Aristotle. But, sincere or not, Long was nothing if not a voice for egalitarianism—the veritable Bernie Sanders of the 1930s.
Professor Busch is associate director and professor at the Institute of American Civics in the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
