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.