In 1993, Vice President Al Gore took part in an unusual debate about trade: He went on Larry King’s CNN show to spar with Ross Perot—the third-party candidate President Bill Clinton had beaten in the previous year’s election—over the impending North American Free Trade Agreement. During the campaign, Perot had warned that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” as high-paying manufacturing jobs drained out of the country. About a year later, Clinton was trying to push it through, and so Gore was dispatched to debate NAFTA’s most high-profile opponent.
Most observers concluded that Gore won handily. But he didn’t convincingly put away Perot’s arguments; instead, he took his opponent down with a lot of cheap rhetorical tricks—most especially, baiting Perot’s notorious temper by constantly interrupting him. Perot’s peevish “Could I finish?” was turned into a punch line by comedian Dana Carvey, and that was that. It was a tactical success for Clinton, who wanted to build a new base for his party among the executive and financier class and high-income voters. NAFTA was eventually approved by the Senate and signed into law by Clinton on December 8, 1993.
In the end, however, Perot turned out to be more right than wrong about NAFTA—and not only on economic but on political terms. While NAFTA’s overall effects weren’t that large, there were far bigger losses after Clinton signed another trade deal, this time with China, in 2000, and the wreckage left by the outsourcing and deindustrialization that followed would come back to haunt his wife in the 2016 election. The Democrats’ embrace of free-market policies, which reached its apex under Clinton, may have helped rejuvenate the party in the 1990s and early 2000s, but that embrace has now crippled it. Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump—whose signature economic pledge was to reverse the “bad deals” of the past few decades—simply highlights a generation of Democratic Party politics that has now come crashing to an end.
Two new books help fill in the details of the rise and fall of Clintonian economics and politics: Bill Clinton, a short biography by Michael Tomasky, and Shattered, a narrative account of Hillary’s 2016 election loss by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. These demonstrate neatly how Clintonism—a politics of triangulation in a neoliberal age—eventually undermined itself.
As its title suggests, Tomasky’s volume—an entry in the Times Books series on American presidents—is a brief, crisp, and overly sympathetic telling of Bill Clinton’s story. It covers, with aplomb, his early career as Arkansas governor, his long-shot campaign for president, and his later career as a globe-trotting philanthropist. At the center of the book, however, is not only the tale of a president from a town called Hope but also the outlines of how Clintonism, as an expression of post-welfarist liberalism, came into being.
Early in his presidency, Clinton developed what would become the key feature of his politics: Recognizing that the New Deal coalition between Southern Democrats and the Northern working class had fallen apart, he set out to win over those people who voted for the GOP. This required triangulation, especially in a context in which the free-market right had won a near consensus over the perceived failures of the welfare state. As Tomasky argues, Clinton was genuinely concerned with improving the lot of working-class Americans. Yet all of his policies to that end were hemmed in by a neoliberal framework that had been embraced by both sides of the aisle by the 1990s. Sometimes this was against his wishes—when discussing his first budget, Clinton famously complained, “You mean to tell me that the success of my economic program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” But it also became a central feature of Clintonism.
This economic straitjacket was the result of a fight that had started decades before. After the Great Depression and the Second World War, classical laissez-faire economics had been profoundly discredited, and the Democratic Party had come to accept that strict controls on the markets and protections for workers—in the form of pro-union legislation, the regulatory state, antitrust policy, and so on—were needed to moderate the ruthless swings of capitalism.
But many still hated the New Deal—and that included a faction within the Democratic Party. When, in the mid-1970s, the United States suffered the twin problems of high inflation and high unemployment—or “stagflation”—these anti–New Dealers pounced. Blaming the problem on New Deal structures, they insisted that only deregulation, union-busting, and tight money would restore growth and stabilize prices. Under the direction of Al From and his Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), of which Clinton was a charter member, this group of “New Democrats” consolidated in the 1980s and gradually rooted most of the old New Dealers out of leadership roles in the Democratic Party, and eventually out of the party altogether.
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