"A fascinating new book by John Ganz, 'When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s'..."

"... offers a useful way to think about the value system undergirding MAGA’s romance with the mob. Ganz’s book excavates a prehistory of Trumpism in the angry, cynical period between the end of the Cold War and the full flush of the Clinton boom. You can see, in the rise of figures like David Duke, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, Trumpism in embryo.... But the most revelatory section... involves the mystique around the mobster John Gotti and the Buchanan-style paleoconservatives who saw, in the mafia, an admirable patriarchal alternative to the technocratic liberalism they despised.... Societies fetishize Mafiosi to the degree that they lose faith in themselves.... It’s a sign that a culture is in the grip of a deep nihilism and despair when moblike figures become romantic heroes, or worse, presidents."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "Donald Trump’s Mob Rule" (NYT).