Kazin, like most progressives, argues that the collapse of the New Deal coalition was fatal to the project of making the economy work for working people, and he follows many commentators in characterizing the shrinking and reshaping of the party’s ambitions as a tragic and confused reaction to the rise of the right—a consequence of its failure to develop a coherent and politically galvanizing update to moral capitalism in response to the social and economic crises of the late 1960s and 1970s. “The party as a whole never seriously tried,” Kazin writes. “Instead, most of its leaders, elected and otherwise, either acquiesced to or promoted austere budgeting and market-based solutions, elements of the policy agenda later known as ‘neoliberalism.’” In doing so, he argues, they lost the opportunity “to forge a new coalition of working- and lower-middle-class people of all races who shared, despite their mutual suspicions, a desire for a more egalitarian economic order.”
The trouble with this account is that Democrats did build a winning multiracial, largely working-class political coalition with appeals to a novel vision for a more egalitarian economic order. It was this coalition that brought southerner Bill Clinton presidential victories in 1992 and 1996. Kazin mostly attributes those victories to George H.W. Bush’s “stumbles and misfortunes” and the spoiler candidacies of Ross Perot. But even if one believes that Perot’s candidacies handed Clinton the White House—and it’s not obvious they did—it seems relevant to any evaluation of Clinton’s political record that he remains the last president from either party to have spent most of his time in office with majority approval.
Behind the presidential politics that dominate Kazin’s story, Democratic politicians across the country, from rural communities in the South to the North’s urban centers, spent the last decades of the twentieth century building public support for a policy revolution that rivals the New Deal in scope and enduring impact. A commitment to tax incentives, deregulation, and privatization; paeans to entrepreneurship and technological innovation; an abiding faith in personal responsibility, skill development, and education, preferably through schools engaged in a simulacrum of market competition, as solutions to long-standing structural inequities: understood properly, the Democratic Party’s turn toward neoliberalism wasn’t a rejection of moral capitalism at all. It was another, popular instantiation of it—the fourth.
As the Claremont McKenna historian Lily Geismer argues in Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, the party’s neoliberalism was much more than a strategic response to the electoral successes of Ronald Reagan and others on the right. Clinton and other Democratic leaders built a serious, sincere, and expansive policy program, one “based on a genuine belief in the power of the market and private sector to achieve traditional liberal ideals of creating equality, individual choice, and help for people in need.” Out of that belief, the party’s leading figures came to “focus on economic growth and the tools of the private sector rather than on direct government assistance and economic redistribution as the main means to address persistent poverty and structural racism.”