Did the 1990s break America’s faith in democracy?

History is written by the victors, says the cliché. Invariably they pay more attention to themselves than they merit. It is often more enlightening to ask the vanquished what happened. Because history keeps going, the losers could always become future winners. We should thus pay greater heed to the ghosts of battles lost. That is the premise — and brilliant insight — of John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, a revisitation of early 1990s America.

Most people will recall that Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush in the 1992 US presidential election. The more knowledgeable will remember the vote-splitting boost Clinton unwittingly got from the third party candidacy of maverick billionaire, Ross Perot. But you are straying into wonkishness if you know much about the failed Republican primary challenges of Patrick Buchanan and David Duke. The first, a former speechwriter to Ronald Reagan, pointed his proverbial pitchfork at Bush’s Republican establishment. The second, an ex-grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, made an overt appeal for white restoration.

Duke’s showing was barely a footnote, garnering less than one per cent of the primary vote. The weaponised nostalgia of Buchanan, by contrast, gave Bush Sr a genuine scare. Buchanan ran a close-ish second to him in New Hampshire. Then he fizzled. A few months later Clinton ran rings around the seemingly out-of-touch Bush. The world moved on. The internet was on its way and the cold war was over. As were Perot, Buchanan and Duke.

Revisited from today’s vantage point, however, these unsavoury figures look more like signposts. The title of Ganz’s book is drawn from a 1992 speech by self-declared rightwing American populist, Murray Rothbard, in which he vowed to “break the clock of social democracy”. That obscure declaration by a libertarian crank assumes prophetic form three decades later.

Among its virtues, the greatest value of Ganz’s book is that it delivers history in its richest context. When the Clock Broke is not simply a political chronicle enlivened by cultural criticism — though it is both. The book is a genuine social history. It is all the better because the author resists overdoing that time’s warnings to the present. Those blanks are ours to fill in.

Ganz’s implicit argument is that America’s faith in democracy started to crumble in the early 1990s. The system had seen off the external threats of fascism and communism. Now it would start to implode from within. Conditioned by the dog-eat-dog boom years of Reagan’s late 1980s — the age of junk bonds, hostile takeovers, corporate restructuring and C-suite fraud — Americans were already angry before the 1991 recession hit. Reagan had mauled the social safety net. After years of high growth, and booming valuations, the median household was worse off at the end of the 1980s than at the start. Wall Street had been partying. But there was a sharp decline of Main Street’s faith in the American creed. This was also the start of the 1990s culture wars. Universities were attacked for coming up with censorious rules of political correctness. Riots broke out in Los Angeles after the police beating of Black motorist Rodney King was captured on video.

On the intellectual front, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) proclaimed an oddly joyless ideological victory in which liberal technocracy would produce “neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history”. On the big screen, David Mamet’s 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross served in Ganz’s insightful comparison as that moment’s version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s protagonist Willy Loman embodied the always-be-closing spirit of his age; Mamet’s Sheldon Levene personified the gasping-for-air frustrations of his.

“If Death of a Salesman, on the verge of the 1950s, portrayed the American Dream and middle-class life as shallow and materialistic,” writes Ganz, “Glengarry Glen Ross showed them as totally out of reach, an impossible goal for sad and struggling men.”

There was even nostalgia for the Mafia’s heyday. America was riveted by the trial of John Gotti, head of the Gambino syndicate and last of the dons. Instead of dancing on the Cosa Nostra’s grave, New York’s tabloids were seduced by Gotti’s twisted honour code. The suavely tailored killer knew how to play up to the role. As urban America was convulsed in crack wars and the sound of gangsta rap, the waning age of organised crime seemed almost sepia-tinted.

The eventual Gotti conviction nevertheless served as the political launch pad of Rudy Giuliani, New York’s district attorney. He would become the city’s mayor on his second attempt in 1994. Donald Trump, meanwhile, was converting his first wave of bankruptcies into another step up the ladder of celebrity. It is a measure of Clinton’s skill as a political operator that the 1990s are recorded as his. As Ganz sets out, however, Clinton should share “his” decade’s legacy with its losers, notably the men who foreshadowed “the politics of national despair”.

One of despair’s products is vanishing trust. That includes disbelief that any institution would speak the truth. Everyone has a sinister agenda. Conspiracy theories fill the vacuum. The BBC journalist, Gabriel Gatehouse, offers a modern history of American conspiracism that takes us up to almost today.

The title of his book, The Coming Storm, borrows from a popular tagline of the QAnon conspiracy movement. QAnon devotees are constantly on the lookout for a sign — whether from the anonymous, and possibly imaginary, “Q”, or from Trump himself — that the reckoning is nigh. On that day, righteous Americans will retake their nation from the satanic paedophile rings that run its deep state. Much of Gatehouse’s American odyssey, which builds off his eponymous podcast series, is a hunt for Mike Flynn, the former US lieutenant general, who served briefly as Trump’s first national security adviser. Flynn, a former QAnon digital soldier, is a cult figure on America’s far right.

But Gatehouse casts his net wide. Few conspiracist gatherings escape his curiosity, whether it be the New York launch of a minor venture capitalist’s movement to build a new city on the Mediterranean, or one of the burgeoning number of National Conservative (“NatCon”) conferences at which Flynn is a frequent star. Other stars include Curtis Yarvin, the far- right intellectual companion to Peter Thiel, a far bigger Silicon Valley figure, and Thiel himself. Gatehouse’s search for the elixir of American conspiracy takes in an obscure figure from Idaho, who was jailed for opposing federal land evictions, an ex-convict who made copies of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop that he forgot to pick up from a Delaware repair shop, and always Flynn, who has no interest in being interviewed by the corrupt media.

Gatehouse is indefatigable. He avoids taking facile potshots at the swaths of America prone to conspiratorial gibberish. His quest is to find out the source of their credulity. That he never quite gets there is no reflection on his efforts. The paranoid style has waxed and waned throughout US history — from the anti-immigrant Know Nothing party of the 1850s to Joe McCarthy’s red scare a century later. The Coming Storm is a lively and often insightful chronicle of the cast of misfits, armed patriots, digital entrepreneurs and purveyors of outrage that Gatehouse meets along the way.

He finishes on a rare false note. “Was Trump an existential threat to democracy?” Gatehouse asks. “When I started out on this project, I probably would have said that he was. Then, at various points on my journey, I did wonder whether Biden and his allies, in their earnest attempt to save the system, might in fact be the authors of their own demise. But now I’ve come to the end of the rabbit hole. And what I think I’ve learned is this: it’s neither.” He might be right. But his narrative does not support that conclusion.

There is no trace of doubt in Robert Kagan’s Rebellion — a bracing warning about what is at stake in America’s presidential election on November 5. In England that night, people will light bonfires in their annual burning of the effigy of Guy Fawkes, the Catholic reactionary who in 1605 tried to blow up Parliament. Trump’s goal is nothing less than the destruction of US democracy, according to Kagan. His campaign is today’s version of the gunpowder plot. As Kagan set out in his last book, The Jungle Grows Back (2018), the struggle for American democracy is never over.

It is hard not to share Kagan’s alarm over what is at stake in the 2024 election. He marshals his case with compelling force. If I had one quibble with his jeremiad, it’s his monocausal account of what fuels Trump. To Kagan, Trump is the latest in a historic line of attempts to reverse America’s racially egalitarian trajectory. Trump is the vehicle for besieged white Christians who want to reverse the gains of the civil rights era and restore something resembling the confederacy. Economic inequality and cynicism about meritocracy play no role in Kagan’s account of what drives populism.

“The issue that carried Trump was race, not economics,” Kagan writes of his victory in the 2016 election. This was in spite of the fact that millions who voted for Trump in 2016 chose the mixed-race Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012. As the former head of Bain Capital, Romney epitomised plutocratic America.

Nor does Kagan’s framework explain why so many Hispanic and increasingly African-American voters have drifted into Trump’s Maga camp. Though it is a key part of Trump’s appeal, white nationalism is a necessary, not sufficient explanation for what drives Maga. But Kagan is right on his core warning about Trump, which he makes with characteristic verve.

As Ganz shows, bankruptcy can take a while to brew before it suddenly engulfs you. The rich and brazen can wriggle out of it. A week after Clinton won the 1992 election, New York Magazine put Trump on its cover in a prizefighter’s stance. “Fighting back: Trump scrambles off the canvas,” said the headline. Buchanan would run again for the Republican nomination four years later, with less success. Buchanan’s “America first” rallying cry — itself a borrowing from the Nazi-sympathising Charles Lindbergh in the early 1940s — would be there for Trump to pick up. We will be hearing its echoes day and night for the next seven weeks — and possibly for far longer.

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz Farrar, Straus and Giroux, £25.99/$30 432 pages

The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine by Gabriel Gatehouse Ebury Press/BBC Books, £25 384 pages

Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again by Robert Kagan WH Allen/Knopf, £18.99/$26 256 pages 

Edward Luce is the FT’s US national editor