Abstract
The Anti-oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy
Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. £34.95/$41.00. 640 pp.
What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party
Michael Kazin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. $20.00. 432 pp.
Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century
Brent Cebul. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. $39.95. 432 pp.
A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. £35.00/$39.95. 544 pp.
Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality
Lily Geismer. New York: PublicAffairs, 2022. $30.00. 448 pp.
The Anti-oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. £34.95/$41.00. 640 pp.
Judicial review appears nowhere in the US Constitution; it was invented by the Supreme Court itself. Yet today’s Americans have come to believe that the Supreme Court is the sole interpreter of what the Constitution permits or requires.
In this important and readable book, law professors Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath marshal a historically grounded challenge to that conventional wisdom. Their sweeping reinterpretation of US political and legal history is aimed at demonstrating that the court’s rulings have assumed such a definitive aura only in recent decades. They show that, from the earliest days of the American republic through the 1940s, constitutional interpretation had been shaped and reshaped by back-and-forth dialogues between the political and judicial branches of government. They urge us to understand constitutional interpretation as an ongoing and inherently political process, a battle over competing normative visions of what purposes the American republic is meant to serve.
Their own vision is one they call the ‘Democracy of Opportunity’ tradition – a formulation taken from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech accepting the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination. This tradition sees the Constitution’s over-riding purpose as being expressed in its Article 4 guarantee of a ‘Republican Form of Government’. Fishkin and Forbath argue that making good on that guarantee imposes three affirmative duties on America’s political and judicial branches: 1) erecting and maintaining ‘restraints against oligarchy’; 2) assuring ‘a political economy that sustains a robust middle class’; and 3) applying and expanding ‘a constitutional principle of inclusion’ that transcends race, sex and other potential lines of exclusion (p. 3).
Fishkin and Forbath argue that these three principles, rather than textual literalism or originalism, should guide constitutional interpretation in a process not confined to the court alone, but engaged in by the elected branches as well, and ultimately decided by the sovereign people. In other words, without a numerically dominant middle class operating in an open and competitive economy, sufficiently freed from the fear of want to take part in political life, and inclusive of all Americans, republican government as conceived by the Framers cannot survive. The authors argue that for most of American history, the biggest threats to achieving those conditions have been oligarchy, economic depression and racism.
The chief opposing constitutional tradition they discuss is one that has become known as ‘Lochnerism’ after the landmark 1905 Supreme Court decision in the case of Lochner v. New York. In that case, the court struck down a New York state maximum-hours law for bakers, ruling that it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of private contract. More broadly, the authors see the Lochner decision’s reasoning as embodying a constitutional tradition built around the Madisonian supremacy of property and contracts, not the Jeffersonian ideal of egalitarian citizenship.
Tracing the history of these two competing constitutional traditions through Reconstruction and the New Deal to the present, Fishkin and Forbath conclude that the three guiding principles of the Democracy of Opportunity tradition must stand or fall together – in other words, that an anti-oligarchic, middle-class interpretation prospers when it embraces inclusion and falters when it does not. The evidence from American history is ambiguous. The two periods that saw the strongest efforts to broaden inclusion – the first Reconstruction era of the 1860s and 1870s, and what has been called the ‘second reconstruction’ of the 1960s – both gave way to America’s first and second Gilded Ages, periods in which oligarchy and plutocracy triumphed in the judicial and political arenas.
What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party
Michael Kazin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. $20.00. 432 pp.
It is no small challenge to write a coherent history of the US Democratic Party, from its Jacksonian origins as a white man’s party upholding slavery, states’ rights and the ethnic cleansing of America’s native population to today’s ‘woke’ party of rainbow coalitions, multiculturalism and activist federal government. Michael Kazin, who teaches history at Georgetown University and who formerly edited the democratic-left journal Dissent, successfully takes up this challenge in What It Took to Win. The six previous books Kazin authored or co-authored on various strands of the Democratic Party’s left wing prepared him well for this larger task, broadening his historical perspective and illustrating how a wide range of ideologies and constituencies managed simultaneously to find homes within broader Democratic electoral coalitions. It helps too that Kazin is a clear and graceful writer who artfully draws on his research to enliven his narrative with colourful stories of individual Democrats and their not-always-successful efforts to shape party policies.
Kazin creates a unifying theme by noting the Democrats’ consistent portrayal of themselves as ‘the Democracy’ – the party of the common people against special interests, and of the disempowered many against the powerful few. Using this narrative device allows him to trace continuities between Democrats as different as Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Jesse Jackson. It proves somewhat more of a strain to extend that continuity to such recent Democratic presidents as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
Kazin does not gloss over the uglier parts of Democratic Party history. He calls out the Jim Crow prejudices and practices of Woodrow Wilson, the decisive role played by the Ku Klux Klan at the Democrats’ 1924 convention, the Jim Crow carve-outs Roosevelt made to New Deal programmes to make them more palatable to segregationist southern Democrats, the serial incompetence of Carter, and the social and electoral costs of Clinton’s ‘triangulation’ of Republican ideas and neo-liberal initiatives from the Democratic Leadership Council. Kazin faults Barack Obama for his frustrating political passivity once in office, arguing that he forfeited the best chance in many years to rebuild the Democrats’ demographic base beyond minorities and college-educated professionals, and thereby overcome the Republicans’ structural small-state advantages in the electoral college and US Senate. Writing in 2022, Kazin sees Joe Biden repeating some of these same political mistakes, albeit in the absence of Obama’s stronger electoral mandate and personal charisma. The author looks, hopefully, to the grassroots energies of a revving American labour movement to pick up some slack.
Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century
Brent Cebul. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. $39.95. 432 pp.
The economic-development strategies now labelled neo-liberal date back long before the 1970s, as Brent Cebul shows in this important revisionist history of government-sponsored urban- and rural-development initiatives throughout the twentieth century. ‘Supply-side liberals’ (as Cebul calls them) in the federal government have partnered with ‘supply-side state builders’ in the private sector at least since the days of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, leveraging public and private sources of capital, and shaping local spending of federal dollars.
As Cebul’s case studies of northwest Georgia (for state-aided rural-development schemes) and the city of Cleveland (for Rust Belt urban-redevelopment programmes) illustrate, such public–private partnerships have consistently reinforced the power of local business establishments. One feature common to programmes in both areas was the incremental marginalisation of African-American interests and voices, reinforcing surviving Jim Crow practices in Georgia and amplifying the political influence of Cleveland’s biggest banks, private developers and law firms. By spotlighting Georgia as one of his case studies, Cebul is also able to illustrate the developing political views of Jimmy Carter, first as the state’s governor (1971–75) and then as US president (1977–81). Neo-liberal ideas and methods shaped Carter’s political career in Georgia long before they became nationally fashionable during his presidency.
Structural forms of neo-liberalism, like public–private partnerships, date back to the New Deal era, but it is only since the mid-1970s that development and redevelopment for their own sakes have displaced empowering the poor as explicit goals of ‘New’ and ‘Third Way’ Democrats. Under the Republican administration of Richard Nixon, federally targeted development grants had given way to revenue-sharing block grants that reinforced local power establishments. During the Reagan administration, the federal government sought to withdraw from publicly funded development altogether, over the howls of local power brokers used to federal handouts with few strings attached.
Republicans like Nixon and Ronald Reagan are only one part of this depressing story. Cebul charts supply-side liberal Democrats’ steady loss of interest in bargaining on behalf of the poor and marginalised constituencies their party claimed to represent during the New Deal and Great Society eras. That shift in attitudes translated into less determination among Democratic officeholders to involve communities in planning their own futures and a lessened sense of government responsibility for the poor. Meaningful consultation of poor communities peaked, albeit very briefly, during the Great Society years, before Lyndon Johnson quickly heeded the complaints of local power brokers and reined it in. By the 1980s, differently packaged ‘trickle-down growth’ formulas were all either Democrats or Republicans offered the poor. At least that was the case in Georgia and Cleveland; Cebul doesn’t indicate whether the same trends applied elsewhere, though plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that they did.
Cebul, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, is passionately angry about the story he tells. It’s easy to see why.
A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. £35.00/$39.95. 544 pp.
It takes a frustratingly long time after an American administration leaves office before scholars can do full justice to its record. They must wait until relevant archives are opened, memoirs written and oral histories recorded. Until now, we’ve had to content ourselves with partial sketches of the Clinton administration, some depicting the 42nd US president as an archetypical neo-liberal, others as a tactical wizard with infinitely flexible principles, still others as a reinventor of progressive politics for the post-Reagan era – a potentially transformative leader whose achievements were cut short by the self-inflicted Lewinsky scandal.
The late Judith Stein, who launched the research project that led to this book, and Nelson Lichtenstein, who completed it after Stein’s death in 2017, have now given us the more complete account scholars have been waiting for. A Fabulous Failure is the most coherent and insightful study I have yet read on the policies and politics of the Clinton administration.
Stein’s research and teaching focused on American social movements and political economy. Lichtenstein has written 18 books spanning labour history, social thought and political economy. Their overlapping skill sets proved useful as they worked their way through the now available primary sources, producing an original, balanced and revisionist account of this pivotal period in which the Democratic Party aligned itself with economic globalisation, welfare-state dismantlement, mass-incarceration anti-crime strategies and financial-market deregulation in ways no Republican administration could have politically carried through. The consequences of these ‘New Democrat’ policies continued to be felt long after Bill Clinton left office – most notably in the financial meltdown of 2007–08 and the electoral estrangement of former blue-collar Democrats in the Trump era.
Lichtenstein and Stein show how Clinton came to office not as a neo-liberal market fundamentalist but as a different kind of Democrat. His early appointees, such as Robert Reich as labor secretary, Mickey Kantor as chief trade negotiator and Laura Tyson as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, favoured interventionist economic planning and nationalistic trade diplomacy aimed at making American corporations stronger international competitors.
Within his first two years, however, Clinton yielded ground on these and other fronts under the influence of some of his other economic appointees, including Lloyd Bentsen, his first treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, who chaired Clinton’s newly created National Economic Council before succeeding Bentsen at the Treasury, and Alan Greenspan, the Reagan-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve. Whatever survived of early market-interventionist ideas were swept away after the 1994 midterm congressional elections in which the Republicans gained 54 House seats, enabling them to install Newt Gingrich as speaker.
A Fabulous Failure takes readers through successive phases of Clinton’s political transformation: the 1993 budget fights over deficits and stimulus; the split in the Democratic Party over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); the thwarting of his health-insurance reform proposals by a Democrat-controlled Congress; the fulfilment of Clinton’s campaign promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’; the punitive racial politics of mass incarceration under the Clinton-championed, Joe Biden-drafted 1994 crime bill; Clinton’s sponsorship of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization without human-rights conditionality; and his administration’s calamitous refusal to regulate exotic financial derivatives, and even more calamitous deregulation of banking and finance.
The political fallout from early battles shaped the political outcome of later ones. Most consequentially, Clinton’s alienation of pro-labour Democrats over NAFTA cost him potential votes that might have passed his healthcare reforms. We’ll never know what might have happened if he had chosen to take on healthcare first.
By all accounts, Clinton’s second-term entanglement with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment impaired his personal focus. But Lichtenstein and Stein conclude that these did surprisingly little to deflect his administration’s post-1994 policy directions. Much as the Watergate scandal strengthened Henry Kissinger’s hand in the Nixon administration, Clinton’s impeachment reinforced the already decisive influence of Rubin and his acolytes such as Larry Summers, who served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001.
Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality
Lily Geismer. New York: PublicAffairs, 2022. $30.00. 448 pp.
A large new class of Democrats came to office in the elections of the mid-1970s, benefiting from the political fallout from Watergate and the Nixon pardon. Their victories extended the party’s base into new demographic turf that was more suburban, socially liberal and fiscally conservative than the labour-oriented urban enclaves that had characterised the previous New Deal Democratic coalition. Many of these newly elected Democrats – men like senator Gary Hart, House members (and future senators) Tim Wirth, Paul Tsongas and Al Gore, and governors Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis – soon became outspoken critics of old-line liberal Democratic leaders and their New Deal-style policies.
Many of these new Democrats had worked in George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign (Hart managed it nationally and Clinton helped run its Texas operations). But that year’s blowout Democratic defeat, followed by the failed presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984, pushed these newcomers to sound out fresh electoral strategies and policy directions. These new approaches were more market-friendly and less union-friendly than those the Democrats had been running on since the New Deal, their funding less dependent on federal spending, their benefit structures means-tested rather than universal. These policy changes culminated in the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985, which in turn became the launching pad for Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign.
The story of the DLC, the policy ideas it nurtured, their application during Clinton’s two presidential terms and their real-life consequences for those most directly affected is well told by Lily Geismer, who teaches history at Claremont McKenna College. Drawing from the thinking of the DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, Clinton sought to replace New Deal and Great Society-style universal entitlements with public–private initiatives. Through political exhortations, personal networking and fiscal incentives, Clinton sought to replace government-guaranteed benefit programmes with publicly funded, privately run market-based alternatives.
That larger shift underpinned Clinton’s tireless promotion of microlending, empowerment zones, charter schools and, most consequentially, welfare reform. It was also reflected in his campaign to ‘reinvent government’, largely by shrinking it. Geismer tracks the political and intellectual roots of these policies and the early pilot projects that served as their proving grounds, examining what happened when scaled-up versions of the pilots encountered the real world. Many of the resulting programmes were designed for those most able to take advantage of them – in Clinton’s frequently repeated phrase, those willing to ‘work hard and play by the rules’. Since Clinton was also committed to budget-cutting, many of these were woefully underfunded. And since Clinton was an instinctively silver-tongued politician, many were rhetorically oversold.
As Geismer shows, those unwilling or unable to conform to Clinton’s middle-class norms became the ‘left behind’. The success or failure of Clinton’s programmes often depended on the luck of the economic cycle; even in booms, they shifted a great deal of decision-making from public to private hands. Programmes once intended to buffer the harsh vagaries of the market were replaced by ones that typically reinforced market shocks. Geismer’s overall assessment is reflected in the book’s subtitle, though the many case studies she presents include individual success stories as well.
In an epilogue, Geismer looks at the devastating social consequences of Clinton’s reforms that played out in the years after he left office – from the mass foreclosures of the subprime-mortgage crisis of 2007–08 to the public-sector unpreparedness that worsened the deadly toll of the 2020–22 COVID-19 pandemic. She concludes that ‘it is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector’ (p. 331).