Time Is Never Time at All: Why the 1990s Matter
REVIEW ESSAY
Why the Nineties Matter
by Terry H. Anderson
Oxford University Press, 2024, 360 pages
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and
How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
by John Ganz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 432 pages
Calendars to the contrary, most people who talk about the 1990s close the decade with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This is telling: the bliss of the ’90s was American bliss, and the victory over history posited by Francis Fukuyama, Pyrrhic or not, was an American victory. It’s often forgotten that the end of the literal ’90s, which one might have counted down on a PalmPilot or discussed with friends on an instant messaging service like ICQ, itself carried the threat of catastrophe. The electronic storage of dates and times, the worries had it, was done with just two numbers for the year. When the clocks struck midnight, we would be sent back to 1900. Our Pokemon, Tamagotchis, and Neopets might not survive the trip.
The Y2K disaster never occurred, likely due to the efforts of computer programmers, like Ron Livingston’s Office Space (1999) antihero Peter Gibbons, tasked with fixing the world’s software. Nor did Americans “come unstuck in time,” like Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s series finale “All Good Things” (1994), or go back in time just to watch themselves watch themselves die, like Bruce Willis’s lead in Twelve Monkeys (1995), or allow time to be “subsidized,” whole years bought by and named after corporations and their products, as in David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest (1996). And though 1999 saw not just Office Space but films like American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix question the less-than-vital lives and almost-virtual worlds that were emerging in the American imperium, with protagonists aching to replace their creature comforts with something somehow more real, even the decade’s famous slackers—the “losers” (Beck, 1994) with “no self-esteem” (The Offspring, 1994) who were “so damn bored [they were] going blind” (Green Day, 1994) or who were “not even supposed to be here today” (Clerks, 1994)—likely breathed a sigh of relief when the millennium arrived in full and pixelated color.
More than 9/11, the Iraq War, or the 2008 financial crisis, the presidential campaign and eventual election of Donald Trump brought these fears, of time moving in reverse, back to the surface of American culture. Two recent books in fact locate the roots of the Trump years in the ’90s themselves: Why the Nineties Matter, by Terry H. Anderson, and When the Clock Broke, by John Ganz. Anderson focuses on capturing the overall feel of the ’90s, while Ganz focuses on the aspects of the decade which, in his view, most anticipated today’s Trumpian reality, especially the words and actions of populist and racist right-wingers.
At times insightful, these books also neglect major cultural trends during the period as well as major cultural changes since. And there is something a little dubious about both books’ approaches. They aim to substantiate a connection between aspects of the ’90s and aspects of today’s politics, but they leave the contemporary side mostly taken for granted. In particular, both authors view Trump as an avatar of a pernicious and growing white racial populism, occurring against a political and cultural background which, if not unchanged since the ’90s, has experienced no notable changes; both accept progressive cultural and social mores, and neither sees the adoption of such mores as anything more than the natural progress of reason in history. This, in turn, obscures much of what was interesting about the ’90s and how it relates to the present day.
There are also some flaws the books don’t share. Ganz’s writing is engaging, well-sourced, and consistent. He brings together commentary on the events of the early ’90s with commentary on the commentaries that accompanied them as they occurred. Anderson’s book, by contrast, is barely readable. He misuses words on virtually every page, reproduces paragraph after paragraph from his earlier books without giving any indication of having done so, cites sources inconsistently and incomprehensibly, makes basic factual errors, and offers shallow answers to the titular question: the ’90s “matter” because some things that happened then anticipated aspects of the Trump years, and in particular the January 6 riots. While When the Clock Broke represents the partial maturation of a feisty blogger into a serious public-facing historian, Why the Nineties Matter exemplifies the degradation of academic writing, and the best way to be generous is to assume that Oxford University Press expected no one to read it at all.
The Long 1990s
Why the Nineties Matter offers a mostly chronological story of the whole 1990s. The chapter titles give a sense of what Anderson thinks is important in this story: “Bush, Clinton, Perot, and the Crumbling Center”; “Angry White Men”; “The Nervous Nineties”; “Revolutions That Changed the World (Wide Web)”; and “Fin de Siècle @ Anything Goes America.” When the Clock Broke focuses on questionable personalities influential in the ’90s: David Duke, Samuel Francis, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich, and so on. The two books cover many of the same events and circumstances, like the Los Angeles race riots, the siege and shootout at Ruby Ridge, the 1992 election, and the rise of talk radio.
Despite its character-sketch structure and its status as a popular rather than an academic book, Ganz’s effort expresses its claims and ambitions more clearly than Anderson’s. In the introduction, he writes, “We are still working to answer why the loss of faith in the old order has registered as intensified anti-egalitarianism rather than a renewed egalitarianism, why perceptions of public corruption and criminality have led to the open embrace of corruption and criminality rather than its rejection, and why discontent with the distribution of wealth and power has fostered closer popular identification with certain types of capitalism and capitalists. I hope this book will contribute to untangling these threads or at least showing how the knots were tied.” Ganz continues, “American democracy is often spoken of as being in peril. This book by and large agrees with that thesis.” But nothing more is really said outright about any of these intriguing tensions, and this thesis about democracy is never mentioned again; the book neither agrees nor disagrees with it, though its author may. Still, these thought-provoking asides do help to frame the details that follow.
Anderson traces a different kind of connection: he writes, “What happened on January 6 had been brewing since Ruby Ridge, the Waco siege, and the Oklahoma City bombing.” If this is the message of the book, it’s hard to make sense of it. The Waco siege, for instance, lasted for over fifty days and resulted in the deaths of over eighty people. More than 160 people died in the Oklahoma City bombing. Those were enormous and enormously tragic events in their own right whose importance surely has little to do with a speculative, gestural link between them and January 6. Moreover, Anderson does not establish this link as anywhere close to causal, but rather relies on tropes and themes. Much of the argument of both books consists in vague suggestions that things seem similar to each other, but Anderson in particular does not really state a claim or thesis. He closes the book by writing, “[T]he nineties changed the course of the nation concerning politics, gender, race, foreign policy, technology, business, entertainment, and the continual fight for justice and democracy. It also changed what it means to be an American. And that is Why the Nineties Matter.” Paper stretched so widely rips apart; this explanation is little different from saying that the history of the 1990s is, to borrow a phrase, “just one damned thing after another.”
Ganz largely succeeds at showing how controversial and more publicly acceptable figures intermingled within 1990s conservatism: people talked to one another, they tried to appeal to the same voters, they read and tried to write for the same magazines and worked for the same organizations, and so on. But Ganz’s disdain for his subjects often clouds his analysis. He is perhaps at his most bilious when discussing the mild-mannered George H. W. Bush, attributing to him “the ditziness of the high WASPs”—a bit like saying I have “Jewish neuroticism” or “Italian passion” (both admittedly true)—and allowing him competence only “within small bounds and small groups,” with the examples of such small bounds and small groups being “diplomacy and warfare, those true callings of patrician statesmen.” My sense is that if you’ve got diplomacy and warfare covered, you’re doing pretty well as commander‑in-chief. Most of the snarky attempts at belittling Bush, like calling the CIA “the nation’s Super Secret Club for Privileged Boys,” belong in Teen Vogue at best. The too-frequent asides about his targets’ habits in dating and sex are often accompanied by uncomfortably visceral agitation at their successes and uncomfortably triumphant mockery of their failures, or by odd comments like “Perhaps Clinton exercised some Protestant self-restraint, after all,” regarding Gennifer Flowers’s reaction to a question about whether Clinton had used condoms during their affair.
New Enemies
The breathless fear which accompanies the many accounts of political hijinks in these books generates a broader problem of consistency. Both authors discuss conservatives’ apparent need for a new enemy after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ganz, for instance, quotes Gary Wills as saying that Pat Buchanan was interested in “turning . . . from an outer enemy to an inner one.” But isn’t When the Clock Broke precisely about an “inner” enemy in America? Isn’t the topic here precisely, in its own way, some rot in our culture, which puts democracy into the sort of peril bandied about in the introduction? Ganz gives us a Buchanan quote from the 1992 Republican National Convention: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” Likewise, for white supremacist Sam Francis, “the main enemy was at home now.” But don’t Anderson and Ganz agree? Isn’t this exactly the sort of war in which they see themselves as taking sides, in these very pages?
The post-USSR search for a new cause fired up the Left as much as the Right. Left-wing academics of the ’90s ranked the badness of various kinds of oppressions and the causal importance of various kinds of social categorizations. Race and gender eclipsed class in progressive theorizing. Why the Nineties Matter and When the Clock Broke are interesting products of these changes, but barely even acknowledge them. And, eschewing as they do anything more than gestural talk of the present, both books avoid thinking too hard about the sorts of changes that have occurred during the last thirty years. It is hard to imagine a journalist today saying that “hate rappers,” as Ganz quotes one journalist from the early ’90s, “are as sick as any Klansman,” for instance.
It is similarly unlikely that a Clintonite politician today would abandon Sister Souljah, of whom Ganz writes, “She attempted to use her voice and assert herself, but in the end her name became a symbol, a signifier, a catchword. Her actual remarks are largely forgotten. Sister Souljah is now known for what Clinton said about her, not for anything she said herself.” But Sister Souljah’s comments were stupid and pugilistic—“I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people,” or “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them”—and she walked back their implications herself. Moreover, her kind of race militancy has only grown in popularity on the American left. The sentence after quoting Sister Souljah as saying that she was part of a “race war,” Ganz describes her fans as a “young, politically-conscious crowd.” “Conscious” is a success term; Ganz must think the proponents of race war got something right. Similarly, Ganz tiptoes around what he calls “the theories of Molefi Asante,” the Afrocentricity gibberish that was popular around that time. And New York’s Crown Heights riots bring out some old-fashioned euphemisms: Ganz writes of one of their central events, “a gang of youths stabbed an Orthodox man.” The riots occasioned “a bevy of explanations and recriminations and counter-recriminations: permissive liberalism, Black antisemitism, racism, the insularity of Hasidic Jews, the unfair privileging of the Lubavitcher community above their Black neighbors, apartheid, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Ganz doesn’t give much thought to blaming the riots on the rioters, and he doesn’t show much interest in assessing the plausibility of any of these explanations.
Often a bit too stuck in thinking of Left and Right as discrete, unchanging groups, both authors miss crosscutting influences. Both books give interesting overviews of Howard Stern and shock-jock radio, for example, including a quick and funny aside from Ganz about Donald Trump’s calls to Stern amid his divorce from Ivana. It’s insightful and probably right to connect that sort of show to Trump’s demeanor, but treating shock radio simply as a prelude to Trumpism overlooks other notable issues surrounding the medium and its politics. In the 1990s, defenses of Stern’s outrages would likely be situated on the left-liberal sections of the political spectrum. Today, however, “free speech absolutism” tends to be right-coded. Exactly how this realignment came to pass, and what it might imply about other political shifts, is ignored.
Neither book really considers how contemporary American leftism or progressivism might relate to ’90s political movements—a rather surprising fact given that such relationships are the ostensible topic of both books. The fact that anti-free-trade sentiment, common on the American left of the ’90s, was part of what lifted Trump to victory in 2016 somehow does not seem worthy of mention to either author in their consideration of the relationship between ’90s politics and Trump’s presidency. This is, I think, quite characteristic of historians’ interventions in politics: the views they think are correct don’t need to be tagged, traced, and historicized, because their adoption is so natural and their reasonableness so obvious. The march of progress calls for trumpets, not for explanations.
Unstable Compromises
The great theme that emerges in these books, but gets little explicit attention, is cultural compromise. It’s there in every aspect of the détente that held in the 1990s, which kept at bay the sorts of forces and figures that terrify both Anderson and Ganz. The unraveling of this compromise may in fact be the real story of the relationship between the cultural politics of the ’90s and the cultural politics of the Trump era.
The compromise regarding abortion was that it ought to be safe, legal, and rare. The compromise regarding sexuality was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The compromise regarding race was affirmative action without quotas. The compromise regarding economics was welfare reform without Reaganomics. Even murder met with compromise: O. J. Simpson was found civilly liable for killing after being acquitted in criminal court. And Bill Clinton, the figure most associated with compromise in all senses of the word, kept to a certain kind of middle ground on the campaign trail, where he tried to get some sort of approving non-endorsement from Jesse Jackson. His affair with Monica Lewinsky infamously involved only oral sex, a middle ground Clinton had apparently decided upon. The day-to-day work of compromise in concrete politics was matched in political theory by John Rawls’s notion of the “overlapping consensus,” outlined in his 1993 book Political Liberalism.
These compromises were simultaneously a source of strength and a source of enervation. Americans were, I think, happier when they could avoid the sorts of culture wars which have consumed the past decade. But the dominance of artistic and philosophical themes of irony and virtuality was almost inevitable, a sad entourage trailing the procession of political handshakes. Perhaps we felt as though our actions in society could not really be in service to what Rawls called a “comprehensive doctrine,” or a set of deeply held commitments, since such doctrines were subsumed under the broad liberal compromise. Work and play seemed increasingly meaningless, perhaps even unreal. “You’ve been living in a dream world,” Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus told us in The Matrix as the decade ended.
On the other hand, the compromises didn’t make much sense, and their erosion was likely due in large part to their ad hoc and politically motivated nature. If you accept that abortions should be rare, why keep them legal? If you accept that they should be legal, why urge that they be rare? Such centers did not hold, and it’s little surprise that we end up with one side shouting their abortions and the other overturning Roe v. Wade. One way to think about this tendency for compromise, and perhaps one way to think about liberalism itself, is as a temporary or stopgap measure, a pretense of peace while generational and cultural changes produce the necessary support for more radical politics. In young Democratic Party circles in 2008, we said this explicitly about gay marriage, for instance. Compromise gives the working clocks time to catch up to the progress we already know will be made.
The Recycle Bin of History
Confused thinking and confused writing tend to go together. Anderson talks of “the formally solid Democratic South” (formerly) or “the role of genetics on disease” (?), calls Ken Starr a “former . . . US solicitor” (solicitor general), quotes Ward Connerly as saying that affirmative action unfairly “rel[ied] on race and ethnicity . . . as the dominate factor” (dominant), calls Ann Coulter a “conservate pundit” (conservative), misuses “begs the question” to mean “raises the question,” and uses forms of “ravish” instead of “ravage” three times (e.g. “hiv/aids was ravishing the nation”). In 2000, he writes, “Gore won a half million more popular votes than Bush.” I wonder if Gore won more unpopular votes as well.
For his part, Ganz, who is surprisingly adept at letting the facts speak for themselves, falters occasionally when he pushes them a bit too far, either stylistically or conceptually; in these moments he picks his targets a bit more purposefully than his words. Early on, he says that Reaganomics “would come to be increasingly labeled ‘neoliberalism.’” But American trucking was deregulated under Jimmy Carter, and the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed by Bill Clinton; while Reaganite tax cuts were partisan, core neoliberal ideas were bipartisan. The prose is sometimes less than fully literate: the economic failure of Reaganism “left the country battered productively”; he writes in the section on David Duke, “Always marching to its own beat, Louisiana’s economic cycles were contrapuntal to those of the rest of the country,” a sentence nobody who has studied counterpoint will find euphonious. He calls Bob Casey Sr. “Pennsylvania’s pro-choice governor” (Casey was probably the most prominent pro-life Democrat of the era, and the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act was challenged in Planned Parenthood v. Casey).
In his introduction, Ganz writes that Donald Trump “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate in the period of this book,” that is, in the 1990s. But the opposite seems true. The figures who concern Ganz articulated political visions, took stances, connected their views to broader ideas about society and culture, and were helped along by prominent conservative writers and thinkers. Trump, by contrast, is a sloganeer with little interest in crystallizing anything, and to the extent that there is such a thing as Trumpism, it is usually either a post hoc interpretation of Trump’s appeal or a return to the very sorts of figures, like Christopher Lasch or James Burnham, covered by Ganz. Certainly, Trump is more popular—he won, and (as of this writing) he might win again!—than the “con men and conspiracists” of When the Clock Broke, but even if Ganz is right about the connection here, that popularity comes not from crystallization but from its opposite, obfuscation.
Neither Why the Nineties Matter nor When the Clock Broke take political disputes seriously as an intellectual matter. Discussion of opposition to affirmative action among minority groups, or of black families’ concerns about crime in their communities, for example, are mentioned briefly and waved off, or explained as the result of some right‑wing rhetorical move. But another reason issues might continue to crop up in public discourse is because they were never addressed. Opinions might survive the span of decades through the machinations of dishonest actors, or because some of these opinions are prima facie plausible (and the two are not mutually exclusive).
If the fall of communism saw the American right and center-right looking for enemies inside rather than outside the country, the rise of Trump saw the American left and center-left doing the same, and Anderson and Ganz certainly have found theirs. This puts them in the awkward position of fighting the same culture war they criticize, and resembling the opponents they find ugly. Their self-enlistment in that struggle seems to obscure the central ’90s pattern of temporary liberal compromise in anticipation of progressive cultural change. It also obscures changes in America’s geopolitical position since our heyday of power in that decade. Anderson and Ganz are characteristic of contemporary writers in their national-introspective focus, which has endured despite such changes.
Hideous characters have one consistent advantage over the good, which is their understanding of the inevitability of conflict. Metaphors about turning back clocks, telling history to stop, going back in time, and so on tend to obscure the reality behind political ideology, which is that people tend to have reasons for their beliefs and actions, and avoiding genuine disagreement cannot make those reasons go away. The mere passage of time does not resolve political problems or coordinate divergent interests. Time, as the Smashing Pumpkins said, is never time at all, and though generational trends and frequent “vibe shifts” can make it seem as though the worldviews we hate have been consigned to so-called dustbins of history, what looks like trash today might be recycled tomorrow, when our clocks’ hands prepare to outrace us again.