I picked up A Colossal Wreck because the 1990s and early 2000s feel more relevant by the day. There’s a growing sense, reflected in books like John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, Richard Beck’s Homeland, and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards, that something broke during those years. Neoliberalism was triumphant, globalisation reached its highest pitch, and the American empire roamed the earth unchecked. But even at its most confident, the whole thing rattled. Cockburn’s book, a rolling diary of those years, captures the texture of that rattle, political, cultural, economic—before the crash. He doesn’t chart a straight path to Trump, but he shows us the terrain: the crumbling foundations, the hollow centre, the quiet burn of betrayal.
First published by Verso in 2013, A Colossal Wreck is a collection of diary pieces and short columns, sometimes anecdotal, sometimes forensic, always cutting. It spans from 1995 to 2012, but it feels like a travelogue of the long unravel, one that ends not with resolution, but with the reader already halfway into the wreckage of what came next. It’s not about Trump, but Trumpism is everywhere in its margins.
The Betrayal Years
The Clinton administration, in Cockburn’s account, is the moment the rot becomes irreversible. He is relentless on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a decision pushed by “Wall Street’s man Rubin,” which dismantled the last serious firewall between speculative finance and deposit banking. “The Clinton administration,” he writes in early 1995, “is now aiming to give banks and the securities firms everything they have yearned for.” The deregulation was dressed up as modernisation. In practice, it was a handover of the economy to finance capital.
Clinton didn’t just give Wall Street what it wanted, he delivered it with liberal branding. Cockburn skewers this tendency again and again: the hollow uplift, the therapeutic moralising, the conversion of poverty into pathology and social justice into micro-regulation. Of Hillary Clinton, he wrote: “There’s the same imperious gleam, the same lust to improve the human condition until it conforms to the wretchedly constricted vision of freedom which gave us social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic policing.” That phrase—therapeutic policing—could serve as a subtitle for the Clinton-Blair project. It’s the soft authoritarianism of the post-Cold War consensus: well-intentioned, managerial, coercive. A politics without enemies, except the poor.
What makes Cockburn’s anger different from the liberal-left melancholy that usually accompanies critiques of the Clinton years is that he already knew there was no centre to be restored. “The centre,” in this book, is already a zombie: smug, inert, determined to hand over power to the market while issuing grants for youth outreach programmes. Cockburn’s clarity lies in his refusal to treat these people as mistaken. They were not mistaken. They were effective.
Ghosts in Macomb County
It’s easy to be clever about populism in retrospect, but Cockburn was already trying to read its codes in the 1990s. One of the most compelling diary entries recounts his visit to “Gun Stock ’95” in Macomb County, Michigan—Reagan Democrat territory, and two decades later the site of Trump’s breakthrough. The event had been pitched to him as a far-right jamboree, a mini-Nuremberg. What he found was something else: “Most of it could have been delivered by a leftist in the late ’60s without changing a comma.”
There were speeches about the Constitution, the banks, the surveillance state. The line between right and left had dissolved into something harder to categorise, resentment, mistrust, the desire for meaning in a country increasingly run like a shopping mall. “Tell someone he’s a Nazi long enough, and he may just become one,” he writes, “just for the hell of it and as a way of saying F— you to the powers-that-be.” This was twenty years before liberals would ask themselves why working-class voters in places like Michigan weren’t properly grateful for free trade and tech-sector trickle-down. Cockburn already knew the answer: they’d been abandoned.
But more than that, they’d been sneered at. His writing is always alive to class contempt. The way liberalism, when it becomes unmoored from material politics, collapses into snobbery. His great fear wasn’t that the left was losing to the right, but that it had stopped speaking in class terms altogether and retreated into postures, permissions, and taboos.
Therapeutic Empire
The book’s subtitle—A Road Trip through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture, suggests something more anecdotal than what’s inside. The road trip is real enough: Cockburn goes everywhere, often in failing cars with dodgy transmissions, drifting through desert towns and empty diners and gas stations selling Confederate belt buckles. But his real concern is empire—the way it unravels not in a blaze of glory but in the small lies we tell to keep the machine going.
He’s especially good on the post-9/11 turn. The Bush administration’s militarism is met with horror, but not surprise. He understood that a system designed to dominate would always find new enemies. Of Bush’s speech to Congress after 9/11, Cockburn writes: “A declaration of lawlessness, with the concept of ‘justice’ being reduced to that of the freedom to shoot the other guy on whatever terms America may find convenient.” Drone warfare, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act—these are not distortions of American values, in his view. They are the values, expressed without shame.
There are lighter moments, anecdotes about vintage cars, small-town eccentrics, a hilarious encounter with a man who believes NPR uses Beethoven’s Fifth to activate Pentagon sleeper cells, but even the humour is underscored by dread. Everything is coming apart, and everyone seems to know it.
Cockburn’s Compass
By the end, A Colossal Wreck feels less like a chronicle and more like a requiem. Cockburn died in 2012, just before Trump entered politics in earnest, but the book anticipates him in all but name. The distrust, the class rage, the war against the liberal elite, the fetish for authenticity, even the performative vulgarity, it’s all here. The difference is that Cockburn never mistook style for substance. He recognised that grievance, when untethered from class politics, tends to curdle into reaction.
His politics were never about posture. He supported the Fully Informed Jury Association, a libertarian-adjacent group campaigning to preserve jury nullification rights, because he saw in it a populist logic that cut through elite consensus. He dismissed left–right taxonomy as “an active impediment to thought and action.” What mattered to him was power: who had it, who wielded it, and who got crushed beneath it.
Cockburn deserves to be remembered alongside the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer, not just for the calibre of his prose, but for his commitment to writing politics as it was lived and felt. Like Thompson, he understood that outrage could be sharpened into style; like Mailer, he never let good manners get in the way of a serious argument. But unlike either, he never drifted into performance or self-mythology. His writing remained rooted in material analysis and lived consequence. It was a politics of record, of witness, and, always, of refusal.
The Wreck is Still Smouldering
Colossal Wreck doesn’t end with a warning. It doesn’t need to. The collapse has already happened. The Democrats gave up class politics. The press became a carnival of moral melodrama. War became the default posture of liberal modernity. The state became something you experience through bureaucracy, policing, and debt. Into that void came Trump. Not as anomaly, but as product.
Cockburn didn’t live to see the rallies, the tariffs, the MAGA hats. But he saw the hollowness that made it all possible. He walked through it. He wrote it down. And in doing so, he left behind a record, not just of what fell apart, but of who saw it falling.
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