When the Clock Broke

John Ganz is the author and also a Substack writer of the Unpopular Front

I referenced this book back in September 2025 when I was covering “Evil Geniuses.” “When the Clock Broke” takes a close look at the time period from 1989 until 1994 and charts the transformation of the Southern strategy from a regional to a national campaign. This strategy aimed at polarizing voters around race and ethnicity to move southern voters from the Democratic party to the Republican party. So before zeroing in on the early 90s, Ganz takes a look at what has happened in Louisiana. I found this took me full circle because one of the first books I covered when I started this Substack was Arlie Holschild’s book, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” which looked closely at Louisiana.

In the first chapter, he covers the rise of David Duke and zeroes in on Louisiana politics. Before we get to the early 90s, Ganz takes a look at Louisiana history. He says that in the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction, a Bourbon oligarchy took power in1877. There was coup executed by a white militia that shared power with a Tammany style urban machine in New Orleans. Patriarchal domination was inscribed in the state’s Napoleonic Civic Code. When challenged by populists in 1896, they resorted to force and fraud to push it back. Tyranny coexisted with a certain kind of anarchy.

Then there was Huey Long. His populism made no provision for union protection, child labor laws, or unemployment insurance. He instituted martial law twice to ensure the outcome of an election in New Orleans and to put down a revolt of laid off oil company workers. He distrusted what he called the “lying press” and created an apparatus of propaganda. He was already preaching about the disappearance of the middle class, and this was before 1935 when he was assassinated. But at the same time, Long could always reach accommodations with moneyed interests even while publicly attacking their rule. The fate of oil and populism in Louisiana have always been entwined.

David Duke expanded Long’s arguments into a pseudoscientific treatise on Black inferiority which targeted the ideas stemming from the equalitarian cultural anthropology of Franz Boas. The state made David Duke required reading. Duke’s paradox was to be more socially acceptable by being a public Klan leader. Ganz says that it was because of Duke’s narcissistic personality that he couldn’t be satisfied with ruling an invisible empire. So he took the racism back into plain view.

Always marching to its own beat, Louisiana had economic cycles that were different from the rest of the country, never experiencing the malaise of the 1970s due to high oil prices. But when some of America experienced the 1980s boom, Louisiana faced double-digit unemployment. As he ran for public office, Duke had support from the working class but that support also crossed over, perhaps more quietly, to middle-class respectability. By then he had also become publicly antisemitic. He didn’t win but he got a lot of votes.

He said there was a need for a Huey Long in reverse, a populist for less government. He attacked welfare, affirmative action, and advocated for prisons and the death penalty for drug dealers. He then won a seat in the state house. Charges of hypocrisy could not damage Duke. He had a strange power to make voters alter their opinions to fit him.

When there was a hypothetical poll about a theoretical candidate who dodged the draft, avoided taxes, had plastic surgery and had never held a job, voters hated the imaginary candidate but when it was Duke, they made excuses for him. They had found a candidate that was bulletproof. One woman said, “Only dumb people pay taxes.” He started to get national exposure and money trickled in from all across the country. Despite inventing the Evangelical Bible Church that he said he attended, he got 69% of the white evangelical voter and 56% of the Cajuns.

In Duke’s rise, a disintegration of the white middle class becomes evident and with it, new dangers. He craved approval and acceptance by the crowd and also relished his ability to frighten and repulse the society that rejected him. His only identity was that of the “White Man.” There was always an imaginary world of power and prestige and a conspiracy that explained his lack of status. He said if the deterioration of the white middle class continues, then I will be president and Ganz points out, that if not him, then maybe another him. You can see where this is going.

The tolerance of New Orleans takes admirable forms in the cosmopolitan, worldly attitude associated with the diverse, multicultural and sophisticated place that it is. But such tolerance can be more akin to cynicism and indifference leading to an acceptance of open criminality in politics. So, we see a foreshadowing of what is to become common in America. Duke was a model of what we could expect, and the cynicism of New Orleans forms the kind of backdrop that we see expand to other cosmopolitan cities.