The Left Can’t Stop Wondering Where Bill Clinton Went Wrong. The Answer Explains a Lot.

Popular memory has not been kind to Bill Clinton. Even many liberals and progressives now disavow the Clinton legacy. The (very solid) case against him, from the left: His presidency was marked by retrograde domestic policies that authored mass incarceration, workfare, unpopular trade deals, financial deregulation, and austerity through deficit reduction. In practice, Clinton’s “new economy” became a form of hypercapitalism defined by digital infrastructure, bloated executive salaries, advances in worker surveillance, the increasing hegemony of box stores with draconian anti-union policies, and the rise of “McJobs” within the so-called gig economy. (During the Clinton years, job growth was strongest in low-skill, low-pay industries—particularly retail and service.) Executive-approved buzzwords such as team-building, employee involvement, and high-performance productivity gave new gloss to old forms of worker coercion. And as millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs vanished and unions floundered, the evisceration of key New Deal entitlements and social protections for newly vulnerable workers stoked resentment and electoral backlash.

It didn’t have to be this way. In a new book, historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein (1940–2017) contend that the path to Clintonian neoliberalism was not a fait accompli, a top-down conspiracy, or even a set of strategic policy choices. Rather, it was contingent and crooked. Exploring the “how and why” of Clinton’s supposed transmutation from progressive to centrist, the authors argue that Bill Clinton and his team were not so-called New Democrats when they arrived at the White House. Rather, they gradually and fitfully moved toward the center between 1993 and 2001, thereby solidifying a host of short- and long-term structural changes and political shifts: the end of the Cold War, growing Wall Street influence, hyperglobalization, the explosion of the carceral state, the emergence of a more punitive and less generous welfare state, the decline of unions, and eventually the rise of Trumpism.

These disastrous outcomes were never Clinton’s intention, Lichtenstein and Stein insist. But as thorough, insightful, and nuanced as their book is, this argument is not entirely convincing. A Fabulous Failure overlooks the fact that Clinton’s deep-seated hostility toward organized labor closed the door on the possibility of a more populist, interracial working-class electoral coalition—in the mold of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition—and precluded the development of genuinely bold, progressive policies. We are all paying the price today.

Although never a New Leftist, the young Clinton was a “southern progressive” and “cautious radical,” the authors note, when he entered the Arkansas governor’s mansion in 1979. As governor, Clinton made populist gestures and, at times, presented himself as a political insurgent. Yet, A Fabulous Failure’s argument goes, he was constrained by the “hard demands of the Arkansas business class” and the absence of strong unions and civil rights organizations in the state. According to Lichtenstein and Stein, Clinton hoped to build a more equitable economy—but he valued skills attainment over redistribution and private-public “innovation” over government programs. He was also sincere about education reform, even as he eschewed direct material aid in favor of teacher testing, vocational skills training, and meritocratic notions of “educational opportunity.” Clinton may have called himself a New Democrat, the authors admit, but they add that he was never a “creature” of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Even after Clinton was president, his proposed health care reform agenda (pushed by party activists and loyal opposition in the Congressional Budget Office) would have been far more transformational and market-regulating than Obamacare, they argue.

The creation of a permanent and engaged New Deal–style coalition that could win decisive legislative majorities and pass progressive policy in the 1990s would have required a potent and engaged labor movement. Yet Lichtenstein and Stein depict a rising politician undermining progressive allies, selling out unions, and largely acceding to corporate interests. The authors allude to young Clinton’s deeply held “progressive” sensibilities and determination to enact reform “from within.” But how committed was Clinton to the cause of working people when his first date with his future wife, in 1971, involved crossing a picket line at Yale? Lichtenstein and Stein never quite square this circle.

As a young politician, Clinton could have done far more. Arkansas in the 1970s was actually the most unionized state in the former Confederacy, and the AFL-CIO was its most influential political organization. Meanwhile, voters across the border in Missouri—a state comparable to Arkansas in many ways—supported “a far more robust liberal-labor presence.” Under Clinton’s leadership, organized labor disintegrated in Arkansas. As governor, he broke pro-labor campaign promises and opted not to challenge the state’s right-to-work law. Ever the triangulator, Clinton even launched attack ads against progressive challengers, warning that unions were “disastrous for the economy of Arkansas”—all part of an effort to encourage corporations to relocate to the state and grow low-wage jobs there.

Such double dealings stemmed from Clinton’s distorted understanding of other economic systems and a failure of imagination. For example, Clinton dreamed of remaking Arkansas’ economy in the image of the small-scale, high-skill, and flexible production models—“microenterprises”—he encountered when he toured northern Italy in the 1980s. Curiously, though, Clinton did not see that region’s massive trade union movement, syndicalist traditions, or municipal communism as critical to its economic success. The deterioration of organized labor under Clinton’s watch was, the authors write, a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” as he deliberately undermined unions in the state and then cited their shrinking numbers as cause for writing them off entirely.

In the Oval Office, Clinton repeated these “calculated betrayals” on the national stage. Lichtenstein and Stein depict a chief executive who was smart and skilled, but also cynical, opportunistic, and unprincipled. Clinton sought moderate reforms, at least initially, but too often saw that agenda thwarted by an incredulous and tightly coordinated business class—not to mention endless culture war battles and personal foibles. Most importantly, Clinton’s personal “disdain for organized labor” left him ill-equipped to challenge entrenched corporate power, even if he had wanted to. (He didn’t.) Despite a growing chorus of dissenters, which eventually erupted on the streets at the “Battle of Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, Clinton’s domestic agenda soon came under the near-total influence of doctrinal deregulators like Larry Summers, who sought to portray the political and economic program as “pragmatic” and “natural.” (Any alternative was not only “ideological,” but it was also futile.) Of course, their flavor of capitalism—like all forms of capitalism—was not organic. It required massive state mobilization to create and restructure markets and augment private-public partnerships. That mobilization did not, however, provide direct investment in universal programs for working people. The result: Clinton, unlike FDR—or to a far lesser extent, Obama—was never able to pass legislation whose mass benefits would guarantee a broad, faithful, and durable voting base.

Clinton’s role in decoupling the Democratic Party from mainstream labor, first in Arkansas and then nationally, had dire implications for working women and people of color. Lichtenstein and Stein profile a president who could “feel” racism and racial disparities, yet did not recognize that such injustices could be upended only through working-class empowerment. Whether in Hillary’s relationship with Walmart (she sat on its board of directors from 1986 to 1992) or Bill’s “tough on crime” politicking, the Clintons exhibited a lack of understanding—or perhaps concern—that diversity, crime, and trade issues were class issues, and labor issues specifically. This detachment of race and gender from class presumably helped justify both welfare “deform”—as Eileen Boris and others call it—and the 1994 crime bill, which, despite support from the Congressional Black Caucus and scores of middle-class Black voters, proved disastrous for working-class communities of color. In that sense, A Fabulous Failure hints at the extreme limitations—if not the utter futility—of any kind of anti-racism or feminism that does not include robust support for unions and worker power.    

But the book could have gone much further. This impressive survey of a leader’s (somewhat) good intentions led astray by structural forces, personal failings, and a hefty dose of realpolitik might have led Lichtenstein and Stein to address larger questions about the deleterious impact of inequality on civil society and the basic contradictions between democracy and capitalism. Instead, the authors often seem to champion “good” (New Deal) over “bad” (neoliberal) expressions of capitalism. They see the 1970s as a “pivotal decade” (in Judith Stein’s well-known formulation) in which a new Democratic leadership class enabled a shift from the “New Deal order” to the “post-Fordist” order. Accordingly, Lichtenstein and Stein extol the New Deal tripartism that “propelled U.S. economic growth, doubled the standard of living, and sustained Democratic Party hegemony.”

But—as other historians of the era’s continuing impact on American life has recently articulated—there are tremendous continuities between the New Deal and neoliberal stripes of capitalism. As Margot Canaday, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Colin Gordon, and others have shown, the New Deal state was often highly exclusionary (along lines of race, sexual orientation, and beyond), deferential to the business sector, and relatively meager compared to the supports offered in other industrialized nations. And in his new book, Brent Cebul shows how the “supply-side liberalism” of the midcentury period functioned as a bridge between these supposedly discrete historical eras and political traditions.

In that vein, just as the New Deal’s emphasis on individualism and its conscious (anticommunist) rejection of collectivism ultimately sowed the seeds of its own destruction, the Clintonites—through policies that exacerbated economic inequality—helped open the door to “retrograde forces that they had barely imagined.” Indeed, Clinton’s presidency ended with a variety of “hidden fractures” that slowly became evident starting with the bursting dot-com bubble and Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, and later resurfaced during the Great Recession, which laid waste to the fiction that corporate self-interest could serve as sufficient protection for the public. Bank bailouts and the increased concentration of private economic power in the political realm further blurred the lines between the corporate and governmental spheres. Predictably, these trends conferred new legitimacy on anti-statism, as right-wing populist anger spurred class dealignment, accelerated by the long decline of unions. Through scare words such as globalization and multiculturalism, Republicans connected economic grievances to racial resentment, hastening voter defections and laying the groundwork for the white nationalism and empty material promises of Donald Trump.

Ultimately, A Fabulous Failure points to the hopelessness of social justice without a vital place for organized labor. This is a crucial and timely appeal. But the book’s central claim that Clinton became a full-throated neoliberal only as president is unconvincing—and contradicted at times by the authors’ own evidence. Put simply, Lichtenstein and Stein are too soft on Clinton’s record before he took the oath of office in 1993. After all, Clinton had established his anti-labor and racist bona fides before his 1992 electoral victory over George Bush, as illustrated by the execution of Ricky Ray Rector and his appalling public repudiation of Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah in the wake of the Los Angeles rebellion.

Moreover, precisely when or how Clinton became a Clintonite is less important—and less interesting—than how he, like Obama and Trump, both drew from and added to a consensus politics whose features cannot simply be indicted as “neoliberalism.” Rather, its traits are endemic to capitalism itself: extreme wealth inequality, corporate monopoly, symmetry between private and public power, market erraticism, worker displacement, and environmental destruction.

We still inhabit the world that Bill Clinton created. But Clinton was also a product of the world that created him. Lichtenstein and Stein seem to advocate for a return to the New Deal and a softer brand of capitalism through enhanced worker power. Yet the New Deal era—admittedly the greatest period of worker power expression in U.S. history—contained the very seeds of the market-oriented state that Clinton cultivated. With wealth inequality at an all-time high, fascism resurgent, and climate crisis at a tipping point, we are still harvesting that rancid yield. The sweep of democracy under capitalism between FDR and Clinton suggests that liberation cannot be achieved by taming unruly markets (“managing capitalism”) or promoting a more favorable balance between workers and owners. It can be won only by transcending the system altogether.