MAR 2025.6.17 - A Fabulous Failure

and other nicknames for the author

Nelson Lichtenstein with Judith Stern, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism (2023)

I stopped and started writing this review a few times. It shouldn’t be too hard- A Fabulous Failure is a very good, but by no means strange or mind-blowing, work of history. But, I found myself floundering on a feeling- inevitability. Capitalism does what it does; the Democrats, and especially the Clinton type of Democrats, do what they do. From the perspective of 2025, Clinton’s embrace of neoliberalism seems entirely inevitable- if he was elected in 1992, it was going to happen. If any viable Democrat was elected in 1992, something similar would likely have happened- we’re talking about the second most enthusiastic capitalist party in history, fresh off the end of the Cold War. Why spend roughly 450 pages going over it, other than for the pleasure of seeing a record well kept?

I get this isn’t an especially rational way of looking at things, but it was hard to get past. But I’ll try to get at what this book was and why it’s worth reading, even if it all seems overdetermined, like lore railroading the players into the game’s ludicrous premise… Nelson Lichtenstein poses the question like this: almost everyone in American politics seemed to agree, circa 1992, that American, and global, capitalism required some degree of management. By the end of Clinton’s presidency, the consensus – embraced by a President who had, at one point, expressed some interest in this capitalism-managing project – among American elites was that the markets were something like literal magic, and should be left to do their own thing (with the Fed and the Treasury its votaries, doing the rituals necessary to appease said magical force).

It’s worth noting here that the “everyone” in American politics who thought both domestic and international capitalism needed more and/or smarter regulation included some pretty big business players. Manufacturers in particular wanted to see some kind of universal health insurance provision, believing that cutting the soaring costs of providing their employees insurance could make the difference between competing with Japan and Germany and going under. Firms of all kinds, and especially in Silicon Valley, wanted the US to undertake diplomacy to open up Japan’s markets to American competition. Schemes involving industrial policy, restructuring corporate reward structures, and retraining workers to be more competitive in various ways were in the air, especially in Democratic Party policy wonk circles, and Bill Clinton was always an omnivorous reader of reports and proposals… especially ones that say he could have his cake and eat it too.

The bulk of the book is made up of detailed descriptions of policy struggles, ranging from the healthcare debate to efforts to open up Japan’s markets to American manufacturing to NAFTA and the GTO negotiations with China. There’s a common pattern evident especially in the early chapters- the Clinton administration has a comparatively progressive policy goal. Facing resistance from Republicans, industry, conservative Democrats, or all of the above, the Clinton people water it down- there were indeed efforts at labor and environmental protections in early versions of NAFTA, but they went out the window. Sometimes they pass something, sometimes they don’t, but the administration, and especially the big rubicund sex harasser on top, keeps getting what they/he wants most- to stay in power and, eventually, become broadly popular.

Common pattern or no, these chapters are all well-written and I found them very interesting and illuminating. Lichtenstein, good historian, won’t call things inevitable… but even he grants that from 30,000 feet, the pattern of the Clinton administration is quite simple and clear. So is that of both American and global capitalism, freed to pursue its basic imperative. A whole new world opened for business by the end of the Cold War, kneecapped unions and popular movements, advances in communications and information technology, all worked towards a system that rewards efficient exploitation much more than innovation or any other supposed capitalist, let alone human, value. I think Lichtenstein would say that different policy decisions by the Clinton administration could have changed this, or anyway modified it. That said, most of the alternatives they had in mind – the left-liberal “capitalism with a human face” the Democrats still trot out sometime, Robert Reich’s gnomish dream of retrained blue collar workers in new high-wage jobs – did not have the juice to get much of anywhere. Lichtenstein doesn’t pretend that they did… especially without a strong labor movement behind them, which wasn’t there wasn’t, not enough of one, anyway.

Numerous actors, including those supposed to act as Clinton’s left-leaning conscience, fell victim to “seductive illusions,” as Lichtenstein calls them. These illusions ranged from the vision of a non-adverserial, non-confrontational relationship between labor and management (like was supposed to prevail, happily, in Germany and Japan, according to a popular meme at the time) to the “New Economy” vision of the second half of the decade, where the early web made all prior concepts of business irrelevant because we’d all grow rich off of pets dot com stock options. By the time the latter stuff started up, especially given the seemingly miraculous economic growth of the period, nobody was prioritizing managing capitalism. This included the early stages of the derivatives trading that would eventually lead to the 2008 collapse.

Well, somebody got rich, and some keep on getting rich off of a new, or at any rate recent, proximate-in-time, economy. Somebody likely sees the many-generations-Xeroxed version of “high quality team” -style management that prevails in a lot of workplaces as labor-capital peace. Those people likely still see the Clinton years as “fabulous” and not in the sense of “fabulous failure” (or maybe they don’t- I’ve studied how these people think for a long time and still can’t predict them as well as I’d like). But, as Lichtenstein reminds us, even if we can’t imagine getting anyone who doesn’t already feel the failures of the period to see them, that doesn’t mean they’re not biting people even someone like Bill Clinton likely cares about- including his wife, during her run for President. It turned out, if your whole thing is “we’ll try to reign in the worst excess of capital, war, and racism from shredding the social fabric, at least a little bit more than the other guys!” that letting capital run rampant and shred the social fabric does not make for a loyal and expansive voter base. As it turns out, even this, even the failure of their own political fortunes, doesn’t seem to be enough for the Democratic Party as a whole to get the message and change. I’d say that’s strange, but increasingly, it just seems… inevitable.

Mithra knows a thing or two about being fabulous