More people are imprisoned in the U.S., at over two million, than in “Red” China, a country of over two billion.The prison rate in Russia, where over 500 people are incarcerated for every 100,000, is much lower than our own, which hovers at 724. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the rate of imprisonment among black Americans for drug offenses, a major part of the tremendous rise in our incarcerated population, far exceeds that of white people in this country. This is despite both racial groups sinking their sorrows in illegal substances at similar rates. America spends funds that could go to roads and hospitals on a massive, brutalizing and racist prison system.
The ballooning of the prison population within the U.S. can be traced to the now infamous 1994 crime bill, which funneled more money and resources into building prisons and police patrolling the deindustrialized remnants of blue-collar, low-income Black and Brown neighborhoods.
“I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” said Bill Clinton in 2016. Clinton’s bill was “bipartisan,” combining the efforts of racist and paranoid Republicans with cynical and racist Democrats, like Strom Thurmond’s close friend, then-senator Joseph Biden.
In Nelson Lichtenstein and the late Judith Stein’s A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, the Clinton presidency is taken apart, issue by issue. As historians of labor and political economy in the United States, Lichtenstein and Stein offer an extensive, and detailed, expose of the political machinations of Clinton and the so-called “experts” whispering in his ears about the political benefits of locking millions of people behind bars or gutting remaining pieces of New Deal regulation.
A through line in A Fabulous Failure is the inherent authoritarian nature of U.S. bourgeois politics, saturated with anti-progressive forces and cheerleaders for capitalist “ingenuity,” including experts claiming to care about the average person or marginalized groups. As demonstrated within the text, reforms that were considered relatively progressive, like Clinton’s healthcare proposal, were motivated by the Clinton administration’s alliances with some of the more “reasonable” business interests rather than progressive social forces. This had much to do with the product of decades of political repression against the Left, both within and outside the labor movement.
“Missing were the social forces that could mobilize not just on behalf of their own constituents, but with sufficient strength to transform politics and the political economy as well,” Lichtenstein and Stein write.
Even Clinton’s most progressive advisors never considered attempting to rebuild or enlist these forces. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who has repackaged himself online as a left-wing populist, and others within the administration shared a very patronizing view about labor unions. “The jury is still out on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace,” Reich told press at the time. Labor unions themselves, decimated by a mixture of repression and horrible decision making, refused to meet the moment in terms of recruitment of workers in the white-collar “new economy” and among businesses like Walmart.
Banking on the moral and rational impulses among certain sectors of the business community, Reich, Ira Magaziner, who co-led Clinton’s healthcare reform task force, and a slew of others never grasped the fundamental nature of politics itself: power and who has it. The service-sector industry, followed by Wall Street, leveraged their power, derived from their position within the capitalist economy, imposing themselves over the already limited political horizons of others, including rival industries in old-school manufacturing.
A political animal, drenched in personal hubris and some level of delusion, Clinton was eager to win a second term in the White House. Early in the administration, facing pushback from so-called business allies (Hillary sat on the board of Walmart) and the Republican takeover of Congress, Clinton gave in to his baser, extremely shorter-term interests.This meant shifting his focus from a tepid “progressive” agenda, framed in terms of finding a “compromise” between business leaders and their employees and between Black and white Americans, to become a center-right, neoliberal totem.
“All this changed with the Republican sweep of the 1994 midterm elections. The Clinton White House was not just thrown onto the defensive but would soon accommodate the conservative onslaught,” Lichtenstein and Stein stated. Very early on, Reich and others either were marginalized or forced to change their own positions on serious issues, while center-right sycophants like Larry Summers were prioritized within the administration.
Without a social base to call their own, Reich and others, like Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born, who championed some level of banking regulation over derivatives, were isolated.
“Born’s seemingly modest gambit soon provoked furious opposition, from both Wall Street and the economic heavyweights who occupied the commanding heights within the federal government: Rubin, Greenspan, and Levitt,” Lichtenstein and Stein explain. “Summers placed an angry call to Born, telling her, ‘I have thirteen bankers in my office, and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II’.”
Inevitably, shorter-term financial interests that could immediately “unleash” the economy triumphed over any ideological concern for how society could benefit a majority. The various constituencies that had been convinced to vote for “change” in the early 1990s after a decade of Reaganism were abandoned.
“Bill Clinton often called his presidency a ‘bridge to the twenty-first century’. But that arch would prove fragile and misaligned, with foundation pylons and suspension cables that could not bear the weight of the inevitable storms, political and economic, that swept the nation in the years he left office,” Lichtenstein and Stein conclude. The broader working class were wholly dismissed, as the AFL-CIO wandered between complicity and some measure of “polite” critique of Democratic leadership.
Clinton’s policies laid the groundwork for future global recessions which would gut middle class and working-class communities. Communities of color, which already bore the brunt of Clinton’s crime and welfare reform policies, would be worst-affected when Clinton’s financial deregulation culminated in the 2008 Financial Crisis.
Biden is discussed at the tail-end of the book and mentioned in relation to major pieces of legislation, like the 1994 crime bill, and his support for Clinton initiatives that created a fourth and fifth Reagan term inside the White House. Stein and Lichtenstein also remind the reader that Summers and other authors of Wall Street deregulation were reincorporated into the Obama administration, following in the enduring American tradition of criminality being rewarded as “expertise.”
A Fabulous Failure challenges us to have a more complex and knowledgeable view about the nature of U.S. bourgeois governance and the politics of progress. It is a politically immature view, for instance, to conclude that the Left should not engage with existing political and economic institutions. As depicted in the book, government matters, from business regulation to providing such things as better food safety codes, labor regulations, and protections for tenants. None of this is revolutionary, but these decisions can be life-changing for many people.
Individual elected officials, even those that profess socialism or progressive politics, will not be sufficient to secure sound policies. Every administration, Democratic or Republican, features a revolving door between public officials and private corporate interests, setting the stage for any kind of reform to be countered or co-opted. The sincerity, or lack thereof, of the Clinton administration’s progressive operatives and populist campaign rhetoric was irrelevant in the context of a profoundly hostile ecosystem.
The more far-reaching goals of socialist administrations at any level of government can only be achieved if we succeed in building a more supportive ecosystem. The most important element of this ecosystem is a robust and ambitious labor movement. This movement will, in turn, help to build a broader network of progressive and socialist policy makers able to serve as advisors and functionaries, channeling the demands and interests of the exploited into material gains. Advisors drawn from the ranks of progressive social movements and dependent on them for their positions and influence will be more reliable and effective exponents of their goals than the most committed freelancer.
This, of course, is easier said than done. Over the years, we’ve seen a growth in terms of left-wing media voices and progressive think tanks. These can’t compare, however, with the bevy of options capitalists, liberal or conservative, have at their disposal.
In the face of this discrepancy in power and resources, A Fabulous Failure showcases how critical it is to find ways to cultivate a deep bench of thinkers and policy aficionados accountable to progressive social forces. The best case scenario for the Clinton administration was always going to be disappointing from a socialist perspective. In the absence of a social base and supportive infrastructure for progressive change, what we actually got was much worse than that disappointing result: a skyrocketing incarceration rate, welfare restrictions, and eventually catastrophic financial deregulation. Without these supports, socialist administrations will also be subject to drift and disaster — regardless of the personal convictions they bring into office.