Do the 1990s hold the key to understanding today’s authoritarian populism? That’s intellectual historian John Ganz’s contention in his new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Con-spiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

In a post-2016 election daze, liberals often projected onto the past a frictionless world of open borders and progress blown to smithereens by Donald Trump. But Ganz reminds us that the last decade of the last century was no multicultural paradise. That decade offered previews of contemporary right-wing politics, from Pat Buchanan’s insurgency to the ex-Klansman David Duke’s dash into the mainstream. Hence the book’s title: When the Clock Broke.

The book is one of many that look to the history of conservatism — especially its less decorous aspects — to find harbingers for Trumpism. Ganz turns to the 1990s to find a crisis of authority that allowed for the rise of fringe alternatives on the Right.