The early 1990s were supposed to be a period of calm and quiescence. After a half century of cold war, and a previous half century of hot wars, the decade was supposed to mark a respite from the political and ideological conflicts that had ravaged the 20th century. But history did not stop at the turn of the century. While many Americans in 1989 “believed they were witnessing the ultimate victory of liberal democracy,” as John Ganz writes in his new history of the era, When the Clock Broke, “others thought they were observing its death throes.” A whirlwind tour of the myriad right-wing figures that punctuated the George H.W. Bush years, the book shows us how the post–Cold War period was defined by, if anything, too much history: deindustrialization, racist militias, millenarian sects, extremist demagoguery, urban unrest, conspiracy theories, and generalized despair. “If that sounds a lot like the Trump era,” David Klion writes in the August issue, “well, that’s precisely Ganz’s point”: Trump’s reign was the crystallization of all these emergent forces. “The supposedly ascendant United States at the end of history, in other words, already demonstrated all the symptoms of its present maladies.” Read “Did the Early 1990s Break American Politics?”