The Salvo, vol. 9: Kakistocracy (Part 1)
The Newt and Bill Show.
Welcome to the ninth edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: why 1990s America was so terrible.
Next week, I am planning to interview the writer John Ganz, whose forthcoming book, When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, you can pre-order here. You should also check out John’s excellent Substack, Unpopular Front.
This week, as a prelude to the interview, I wanted to provide a patchy, incomplete, and fundamentally inadequate history of the US in the 1990s, and sketch some of the scenes, personalities, and moods that defined the decade.
The 1990s was not a feel good time for the US. Beneath the jubilation at having prevailed in the Cold War, the country was downcast and uneasy with the prospect of a dreary, unheroic future. “When the tension and rivalry come to an end,” Marvin Lundy, a collector of baseball memorabilia, tells Brian Glassic in Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), “that’s when your worst nightmares begin”. Once the nemesis in the East had gone, what remained except financial deregulation and a few mopping-up campaigns? Writing to the New York Times in 1995, one reader described Americans as living in an “Age of Kakistocracy.”
The scene was actually quite shit from the start. The country entered a recession in 1990. The federal budget deficit was at an unprecedented high, unemployment soared, and the crime rate – fuelled by a crack cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s – was four and a half times what it had been three decades earlier (in 1990 there were 2,245 homicides in New York alone).
The decline in national self-confidence revealed itself in a resurgent anti-Japanese hysteria, as the world’s second largest economy supplanted the USSR as America’s arch competitor. William S. Dietrich’s In the Shadow of the Rising Sun (1991) exemplified US fears of a rising power in Asia, hyperventilating over the success of Japan’s post-war commercial expansion which threatened “our way of life and ultimately our freedoms as much as past dangers from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union”.
To avoid a financial crisis, George H. W. Bush embarked on a prolonged austerity drive. Politically, the effects were terminal. John H. Sununu, the White House Chief of Staff, hoped that a bit of do-good interventionism in the Middle East would improve Bush’s prospects for re-election. Operation Desert Storm temporarily boosted the president’s approval rating and a victory parade in June 1991, complete with a pageant of military hardware, revived a sense of national purpose, as he declared there was “a new and wonderful feeling in America”.
But the Gulf War ecstasy waned, unemployment rose, the recession dragged on, and Bush’s numbers crumbled. For America-Firsters, too much blood and treasure had been spent on foreign wars, and it was time for the country to concentrate on its own affairs. Writing in the National Interest in 1990, Pat Buchanan bluntly demanded “a new nationalism, a new patriotism, a new foreign policy that puts America first and, not only first, but second and third as well”. This was his campaign message during the Republican primaries in 1992, when his fire-eating brand of paleo-conservativism resonated more than expected and embarrassed Bush and the GOP establishment. “When we take America back,” Buchanan bragged from his Manchester headquarters after ending his campaign, “we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first”.
If there’s an underlying lesson to American political history in the 1990s, it’s that a phenomenon like Donald Trump was bound to happen sooner or later. The conditions for his emergence were prepared at that time by the scorched-earth strategies of leading Republicans such as Newt Gingrich, and the cultural confrontation over what Buchanan called “the soul of America”.
For Gingrich, recovering the fortunes of the Republican Party, which hadn’t enjoyed a congressional majority since 1954, was not so much about policy as it was about tone and strategy. Steeped in the writings of Arnold Toynbee and Tom Clancy, Gingrich channelled reactionary visions of national decline through a no-nonsense, tough-guy persona. In contrast to the idealism of late-stage Regan, he didn’t see “sunrise every day” in America, but liberal ascendency and cultural twilight.
Entering Congress in 1979, becoming House Republican Leader in 1989, and then Speaker in 1995, Gingrich nurtured a cadre of Young Turks committed to reversing the social and cultural changes of the 1960s, while nationalising congressional politics through relentless confrontation with the opposition. From the outset, he let rip against the “Democratic Machine” and what he judged to be its moral depravity. He branded the Democrats as unethical, untrustworthy, decadent, criminal, corrupt, and crooked. He spoke of “being vigilant in the defence of liberty”. It was the language of Jacobinism. Some compared him to Robespierre.
As the historian Daniel T. Rodgers shows in Age of Fracture (2011), it was the sudden sense of change, impermanence, choice, and fluidity – feelings long suppressed by the frozen bipolarity of the Cold War – which clashed with residual desires for certitude and tradition, that generated the intense cultural atmospherics of the 1990s. It was a decade when abortion clinics were bombed, hardliners took control of the NRA, Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building, and survivalists such as Randy Weaver and Ted Kaczynski faced-off against the ATF in the woods – violent fallouts from a conflict between those who thought of morality as being progressive, universal, and socially constructed, and those who thought of it as immutable, indigenous, and forever.
Gingrich was one manifestation – albeit a powerful one – of how class war became culture war; one more defender of Civilization who took aim at what he and his hard right crew saw as a villainous alliance of liberal journalists, academics, politicians, social workers, and other professional types. The crimes of this “new class” was their belief in the growth of state power and opposition to the inherent goodness and wisdom of middle America. Gingrich gave a public face to this sort of reactionary politics slowly accreting out of view, in the churches, gun associations, radio shacks, veterans societies, anti-tax parties, and confederate and white nationalist groups.
Gingrich was especially innovative at using the media to relay his attacks on the Democrats. C-SPAN started transmitting live video of the House of Representatives in session in 1979, the year Gingrich entered Congress. Every night, after the conclusion of business, members of the House could speak on any topic for up to an hour. These ‘Special Order’ speeches were usually banal – a shout-out to a local sports team, or honouring a community icon – and were mostly delivered to an empty chamber. But with the cameras trained on the speaker, viewers at home (anywhere up to 20 million by 1984) could easily assume that it was a full house conducting serious affairs of state. Gingrich and his allies used their Special Orders to emit nightly inectives against the Democrats without so much as a moan of dissent from the other side. Gingrich became producer and star of his own TV show, and the airings transformed right-wing Republicans, as the columnist Mary McGrory put it, into “the idols of people who do not have much to do”.
Rolling news and TV panel shows such as The McLaughlin Group and Crossfire had been heating up the national polemics from the early 1980s. So did AM radio, on which red-faced bloviators like Rush Limbaugh excoriated Bill Clinton and his base of “feminzais,” “Marxists,” and “environmental whackos”. During orientation week for the incoming members of Congress in 1994, when Republicans ditched the usual programme at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for an ersatz version at The Heritage Foundation, Limbaugh told the assembled freshmen that, “what happens on talk Radio is real simple: we validate what’s in people’s hearts and minds already”.
Bill Clinton also took advantage of evolving trends in the media. Even though he was born before colour TV, he seemed to be made for how personal and confessional the medium had become by the 1990s. With his therapeutic language of “feeling,” “pain,” and “forgiveness,” Clinton projected just the right amount of empathy to appear genuine. Politics was no longer about mass movements, public mobilisation, and the commitment to ideological principles. It was about developing intimate connections with the viewer-voters.
Clinton took to this with relative ease. But as a living sleaze machine, he was always easy pickings for Gingrich & Co. He would always be dogged by an image problem. The perception was that beneath the folksy charm and concern, this affable jazzman was a calculating self-promoter who lusted for power. On the presidential campaign trail for New York magazine in 1992, Joe Klein reported that, when asked about his values, Clinton hesitated for a while before answering: “Integrity”. After another long pause he then said, “Family … and service”. The studied phrasing, the faux weightiness of the words, the smooth, depthless quality of his persona – Clinton had the oily allure of a huckster. Some called him Slick Willie.
The most illustrative example of Clintonism came in January 1992. Hampered by tabloid allegations about an alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers, Clinton paused his presidential campaign in New Hampshire to fly back to Arkansas, where he was governor, to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector. Rector had been convicted of a double murder ten years earlier, after killing a man in a restaurant and then shooting the police officer who negotiated his surrender. Rector then shot himself in the head in an attempted suicide. The emergency surgery he received amounted to a frontal lobotomy, and left him with the understanding of a child the – surgeon who performed the operation compared him to Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. On the day of his execution by lethal injection, Rector was seen dancing around his cell, growling and barking like a dog. Reporting for The New Yorker, Marshall Frady described the events later that night:
…something was amiss. Eventually, the director of the Department of Corrections, Art Lockhart, opened the door from the hall to tell the assembled spectators that medical technicians were having trouble locating a serviceable vein…the witnesses had to sit waiting for a full hour, hearing from behind the curtain period hand slaps on skin and sudden great grunting groans…as the medical technicians made yet another stab at the vein…. In fact, the medical crew was soon increased from two to five in an urgent scrimmage—if the execution didn’t take place before midnight, it would have to be postponed until another date decreed by Clinton—to find a vein that would not wilt at the needle’s insertion, a difficulty later attributed to Rector’s bulk and his regular dosages of the antipsychotic drug Mellaril. Rector himself, it is reported, once obligingly tried to help them find a suitable vein. At one point, after applying a local anesthetic, the medical crew employed a scalpel to slash into the crook of his arm, in what the attending supervisor, John Byus, a former military medic, afterward described as a “cut down” method…. During that hour, eight outcries from Rector were heard.
Rector was eventually executed in Cummins Prison, a former plantation-turned-prison farm. The Supreme Court would later rule that executions of mentally handicapped criminals constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”. But as Christopher Hitchens put it, like the way he bombed Iraq during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, “Clinton would deliberately opt for death as a means of distraction from sex”.
Clinton could never shoot straight. If, as the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún once wrote, dialectics “is the art and technique of always landing on your feet,” then Bill was the Hegelian-in-Chief, navigating between thesis (“I smoked a joint”) and antithesis (“but I didn’t inhale”); between expressions of compassion and uplift for some and brute incarceration for others; between campaigning as a progressive on the road and securing the Reaganite ascendancy in office; between receiving oral sex, but not to completion.
Clinton’s shapeshifting allowed the right to vilify him as a radical liberal, even if he was doing their own work for them. The 1990s might have witnessed a culture war (the term itself was coined in 1991), but what that left intact and unchallenged were the commanding heights of the neoliberal agenda. The system allowed for marginal differences in position, but the basic feature of political life was an ideological consensus that neither Clinton nor Gingrich did much to disturb.
The “tribalism” of the 1990s wasn’t because Democrats and Republicans disagreed so much, it was because they had so little to disagree on. In 1994, Alexander Cockburn noted that, “on issue after issue – welfare, military spending, crimes – they’re all in sync, which is why Limbaugh and the right have to invent or recycle all the personal gossip about Clinton to show there’s a devil in the White House rather than someone who’s basically doing what they want”.
Since the 1970s, Democrats began to plunder and clone electoral issues from the Republicans, especially on welfare, and even took some of their donors (Enron gave money to both parties). Clinton may have gestured towards an activist state in the 1992 primaries, but once the neoliberal cavalry assumed key positions in his administration – Robert Rubin, Lloyd Bentsen, and Larry Summers – he swerved right. From passing NAFTA and the Crime Bill in 1994, to privatising the airwaves in 1996, to repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, to overseeing the kind of wealth disparities not experienced since the 1920s, Clinton became the executor of the Reaganite counter-revolution. Tribalism was merely the surface noise silencing deeper harmonies within the American system. To quote Hitchens again, the parties resembled “two cosily fused buttocks of the same giant derrière”.
Both the Houses of Clinton and Gingrich were committed to making politics redundant. That project had been underway since at least the 1970s, when the Trilateral Commission Report concluded that there was an “excess of democracy,” and that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups” (the class and colour of those people was left to the imagination).
But the decline of ideologies, master narratives of history, and labels of left and right had reached its nadir by the 1990s. And with the deepening of globalisation, changes in habits of mass consumption, developments in cybernetics, and transformations in labour – what Ulrich Beck called a “system of flexible, pluralised, decentralised underemployment” – politics became less about the distribution of power and resources, or the struggle for inequality and welfare, and more about technical adjustments from centre.
Perhaps the best summation of the age of Clinton and Gingrich is to be found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections on those deflated expectations of post-1830s France: “In this political world thus constituted and conducted, what was most wanting…was political life itself”.
Readings from the NS
“Oyler has spoken of feeling “limited, particularly stylistically” when writing for publications, and relishes “the relative freedom a book” offers. Yet freedom, famously, often doesn’t feel very freeing. Here, it imposes the burden of self-propulsion, and the challenge of imagining and summoning one’s own readership. On a few occasions I wondered if Oyler misjudged hers. In the course of her essay about criticism, she refers to herself as a “snob” for, among other elitist misdemeanours, enjoying movies with subtitles and disliking happy endings. The essay is a defence of difficult art, and of the importance of distinguishing this from “popular forms of entertainment” such as “unimaginably dumb movies”. It’s a worthwhile argument eloquently made, but I suspect Oyler will be for the most part preaching to a choir of snobs. And the word itself, though funny, risks reproducing the cultural populism she is critiquing”. Since everyone has been reading that review, here is Lola Seaton’s essay on Lauren Oyler’s essay collection from March.
“When we first meet Scott’s Ripley he is engaged in a phone scam on behalf of a fake collection agency – something that is all too familiar to contemporary viewers, and unlikely to endear him to them, as other contemporary media disposes audiences to place their allegiance with the rich rather than plucky class insurgents. In 2024, fraud and corruption pervade every institution in American society, on its houses of worship, its sports teams, its schools, hospitals, tech companies, private equity firms, police departments, news outlets, culture industry, and branches of its government. Against this backdrop of widespread social mistrust, it is hard for a man like Tom to distinguish himself. He’s no longer the talented Mr Ripley; just Ripley. A dime a dozen, adjusted for inflation”. Ryan Ruby binge watched the new Netflix miniseries ‘Ripley’.
“the building, which opened in 1866 as the base for the India Office and Colonial Office, and serves as an expression of Britain’s late 19th-century ideas about itself, is nothing short of a celebration of the British empire at its most powerful and racist.” Sathnam Sanghera, the author of Empireland and Empireworld, writes on the elitism at the HQ of the British Foreign Office.
Listening elsewhere
‘The Language, the Media, and Palestine’, On the Nose: A Jewish Currents Podcast, 14 March 2024. Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel talks to guests about the decisions that newsrooms are making regarding the language they use to discuss Israel/Palestine, and what these decisions mean about the state of journalism today.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
— Gavin.