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Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality
The 40-year history of how Democrats chose political opportunity over addressing inequality—and how the poor have paid the price
For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent.
The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it.
Historian Lily Geismer recounts how the Clinton-era Democratic Party sought to curb poverty through economic growth and individual responsibility rather than asking the rich to make any sacrifices. Fueled by an ethos of “doing well by doing good,” microfinance, charter schools, and privately funded housing developments grew trendy. Though politically expedient and sometimes profitable in the short term, these programs fundamentally weakened the safety net for the poor.
This piercingly intelligent book shows how bygone policy decisions have left us with skyrocketing income inequality and poverty in America and widened fractures within the Democratic Party that persist to this day.
For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent.
The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it.
Historian Lily Geismer recounts how the Clinton-era Democratic Party sought to curb poverty through economic growth and individual responsibility rather than asking the rich to make any sacrifices. Fueled by an ethos of “doing well by doing good,” microfinance, charter schools, and privately funded housing developments grew trendy. Though politically expedient and sometimes profitable in the short term, these programs fundamentally weakened the safety net for the poor.
This piercingly intelligent book shows how bygone policy decisions have left us with skyrocketing income inequality and poverty in America and widened fractures within the Democratic Party that persist to this day.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2022
27 people are currently reading
1671 people want to read
About the author
Lily Geismer
5 books12 followersLily Geismer is associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. She earned her bachelor's degree from Brown University and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 28, 2022
Originally published on my book blog, TheBibliophage.com.
Lily Geismer covers tremendous political, social, and historical ground in Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. Starting with mindset changes in the post-Carter, Reagan-era Democratic Party, Geismer works through fifty years of policies. Left Behind is a policy wonk’s kind of heaven. Still, she also makes it accessible for the rest of us.
Geismer divides the book into several main policy areas: microenterprise, community development banking, charter schools, Empowerment Zones, and free trade. Woven throughout is whether or not these policies benefit the people in communities “left behind” by the economic and technical advances of the late 20th century.
If Left Behind sounds intense, that’s because it is. However, Geismer makes this detailed and scholarly work into something readable. Packed with information, I highlighted many passages. Skimming was impossible. Instead, I read many paragraphs twice to absorb the full meaning of the text.
Much of Left Behind covers the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, since his administration embraced the connection between public policy and private funding that Geismer questions throughout the book. But she’s careful to point out that Clinton built on the framework of his fellow “New Democrats.” And also that the Obama administration took the same playbook and ran with it as well.
My conclusions
This is a cautionary tale. It’s not a victory lap, by any means. Geismer repeatedly points out that these policies were a lot of sizzle and not much steak. They talk a good game about empowering people and communities of color. At the same time, the new policies expect no accountability from the private and philanthropic organizations purportedly investing. And ultimately, that combination helped the corporations and foundations considerably more than it helped the actual folks “left behind.”
To me, this is a vital read for everyone with strongly progressive left-leaning political perspectives. Sure, Geismer lays out policy. But reading between the lines, she’s also discussing why Democrats struggle to succeed politically. The actions in Left Behind explain why communities of color don’t trust politicians. The policies discussed are only the most recent failures to deliver on campaign promises. Still, today’s voters remember these are the decisions. I believe that Geismer disproves the free market, campaign trail cliche, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
Left Behind probably isn’t for the casual political or recent historical reader. On the other hand, if you’re open to the time investment, then Geismer rewards you with meaningful insights. I’m incredibly glad I persisted and absorbed this book. Its analysis and ideas will stay with me for a long time.
Pair with The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. I thought of this book often while reading Left Behind.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to NetGalley, Perseus Books / PublicAffairs, and the author for a digital advanced reader’s copy in exchange for this honest review. Left Behind debuts on 1 March 2022.
Lily Geismer covers tremendous political, social, and historical ground in Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. Starting with mindset changes in the post-Carter, Reagan-era Democratic Party, Geismer works through fifty years of policies. Left Behind is a policy wonk’s kind of heaven. Still, she also makes it accessible for the rest of us.
Geismer divides the book into several main policy areas: microenterprise, community development banking, charter schools, Empowerment Zones, and free trade. Woven throughout is whether or not these policies benefit the people in communities “left behind” by the economic and technical advances of the late 20th century.
If Left Behind sounds intense, that’s because it is. However, Geismer makes this detailed and scholarly work into something readable. Packed with information, I highlighted many passages. Skimming was impossible. Instead, I read many paragraphs twice to absorb the full meaning of the text.
Much of Left Behind covers the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, since his administration embraced the connection between public policy and private funding that Geismer questions throughout the book. But she’s careful to point out that Clinton built on the framework of his fellow “New Democrats.” And also that the Obama administration took the same playbook and ran with it as well.
My conclusions
This is a cautionary tale. It’s not a victory lap, by any means. Geismer repeatedly points out that these policies were a lot of sizzle and not much steak. They talk a good game about empowering people and communities of color. At the same time, the new policies expect no accountability from the private and philanthropic organizations purportedly investing. And ultimately, that combination helped the corporations and foundations considerably more than it helped the actual folks “left behind.”
To me, this is a vital read for everyone with strongly progressive left-leaning political perspectives. Sure, Geismer lays out policy. But reading between the lines, she’s also discussing why Democrats struggle to succeed politically. The actions in Left Behind explain why communities of color don’t trust politicians. The policies discussed are only the most recent failures to deliver on campaign promises. Still, today’s voters remember these are the decisions. I believe that Geismer disproves the free market, campaign trail cliche, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
Left Behind probably isn’t for the casual political or recent historical reader. On the other hand, if you’re open to the time investment, then Geismer rewards you with meaningful insights. I’m incredibly glad I persisted and absorbed this book. Its analysis and ideas will stay with me for a long time.
Pair with The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. I thought of this book often while reading Left Behind.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to NetGalley, Perseus Books / PublicAffairs, and the author for a digital advanced reader’s copy in exchange for this honest review. Left Behind debuts on 1 March 2022.
August 6, 2022
Lily Geismer’s “Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality” traces the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council and the corresponding evolution in the mainstream Democratic Party’s approach to solving social and economic problem toward one that relied on market solutions. As Geismer makes clear, this was not a “defensive reaction” to the Republican Party, but “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.” This framing is important because it highlights how ideological and ultimately hegemonic the change was. These new Democrats (manifest most purely in the Clintons) actually believed in their solutions like microfinance, charter schools, empowerment zones, and privately funded housing developments, but that belief was also coupled with an unwillingness to accept actual data, to listen to voices on the ground, or to course-correct. Markets can achieve various goals, but stability is not one of them, and treating the government as an enabler of markets, rather than a guarantor of stability, put poor communities especially at risk during the economic downturn and foreclosure crisis that came in the late 2000s.
In recent years, there’s been a tendency to describe the shift in the Democratic Party toward being socially liberal but fiscally conservative, but what’s important to recognize is that the DLC and New Democrats were not hat socially liberal either. Their political project was in opposition to the 1960s and 1970s social movements, a rejection of the Rainbow Coalition vision of the party – one of a coalition of people of color (especially Black voters), feminists, the LGBTQ community, and environmentalists. (This is especially clear in the way that Clinton’s advisers were happy with the Democratic losses in 1994—a “disciplining” of a party base they never wanted to have.) The new striving (white) upper-middle-class that economic forces and policies had created identified more as Democrats than as Republicans (a party of old money and old industries ), but they were hostile to the idea of a coalition-based party, deriding it as “beholden to special interests” (these groups plus labor, most notably—business never counting as a “special interest”). The DLC/New Democratic project was to root this out and to also strike a contrast with the “New Deal” project of public programs and public investment, which was always framed as more expansive than it ever was (a rhetorical tactic that facilitated a slide to the right). It is easy to see the attractiveness of such a shift to the Silicon Valley world, as Lily Geismer points out most notably in her chapter on charter schools: wealthy individuals to believe that their talents can be the cure-all for a problem, especially if that quick fix means systemic change is not needed. But their talents were good for creating wealth for them—those talents were never fit for reducing poverty or inequality, or expanding economic opportunity.
There are two ways of defining neoliberalism I’ve used that this book helps illustrate. One is that it is about protecting the “economy” from the forces of democracy (technocracy and privatization help constrain public input into governance, for example). The other is that the shift from a classical liberalism to a neoliberalism marked a shift from coercive exclusion to coercive inclusion: rather than forcing certain disenfranchised populations out of the market economy (sometimes in neo-feudal fashion), neoliberalism sought to use market discipline to force all into participation: turning over public housing and public schools to the market, trying to force individuals receiving public benefits back to work, designing systems for entrepreneurship not security, etc. Geismer’s book shows what those words tell.
Ultimately, capitalism exists to create profits. One can try to structure markets with social goals in mind, and they might be able to deliver them to an extent. But delivering on social goals can never and will never be their purpose, and no amount of wishing, hoping, or even legislating will change that. If we want a more equal society, we need a robust public sector a structure of decision-making and policy design that can incorporate feedback from the most marginalized—those who have to live with the impacts of the policies.
In recent years, there’s been a tendency to describe the shift in the Democratic Party toward being socially liberal but fiscally conservative, but what’s important to recognize is that the DLC and New Democrats were not hat socially liberal either. Their political project was in opposition to the 1960s and 1970s social movements, a rejection of the Rainbow Coalition vision of the party – one of a coalition of people of color (especially Black voters), feminists, the LGBTQ community, and environmentalists. (This is especially clear in the way that Clinton’s advisers were happy with the Democratic losses in 1994—a “disciplining” of a party base they never wanted to have.) The new striving (white) upper-middle-class that economic forces and policies had created identified more as Democrats than as Republicans (a party of old money and old industries ), but they were hostile to the idea of a coalition-based party, deriding it as “beholden to special interests” (these groups plus labor, most notably—business never counting as a “special interest”). The DLC/New Democratic project was to root this out and to also strike a contrast with the “New Deal” project of public programs and public investment, which was always framed as more expansive than it ever was (a rhetorical tactic that facilitated a slide to the right). It is easy to see the attractiveness of such a shift to the Silicon Valley world, as Lily Geismer points out most notably in her chapter on charter schools: wealthy individuals to believe that their talents can be the cure-all for a problem, especially if that quick fix means systemic change is not needed. But their talents were good for creating wealth for them—those talents were never fit for reducing poverty or inequality, or expanding economic opportunity.
There are two ways of defining neoliberalism I’ve used that this book helps illustrate. One is that it is about protecting the “economy” from the forces of democracy (technocracy and privatization help constrain public input into governance, for example). The other is that the shift from a classical liberalism to a neoliberalism marked a shift from coercive exclusion to coercive inclusion: rather than forcing certain disenfranchised populations out of the market economy (sometimes in neo-feudal fashion), neoliberalism sought to use market discipline to force all into participation: turning over public housing and public schools to the market, trying to force individuals receiving public benefits back to work, designing systems for entrepreneurship not security, etc. Geismer’s book shows what those words tell.
Ultimately, capitalism exists to create profits. One can try to structure markets with social goals in mind, and they might be able to deliver them to an extent. But delivering on social goals can never and will never be their purpose, and no amount of wishing, hoping, or even legislating will change that. If we want a more equal society, we need a robust public sector a structure of decision-making and policy design that can incorporate feedback from the most marginalized—those who have to live with the impacts of the policies.
April 15, 2024
Maybe the real threats to democracy were the Democrats who betrayed us along the way 🥰
November 1, 2022
I was eager for this after reading Geismer’s Massachusetts work. This is a strange book, for a few different reasons.
First is the contrast between the indictment-style tone set by the title and the introductory editorializing versus the actual content of the book, which is best thought of as a series of thoroughly reported U.S. public policy vignettes from the nineties. The relationship between the sober and reasonably neutral historical summaries and the author’s searing policy critique is not obvious. There’s certainly a thesis here and a ton of interesting evidence but the reader is left wanting a bit more connective tissue between the two. Often it seems like the problem the author is dancing around is scale—so should we actually encourage more of these kinds of projects? Not what the author has in mind, clearly.
Still, four stars for a thoughtful if critical perspective on the limitations of market-oriented incrementalist reforms to solve intractable social problems that appear alongside a market economy. It’s not a “policy” book per se so you don’t get that last chapter with the “ideas to fix this” all nicely laid out, which is fine. But I do wonder what alternative solutions the author had in mind, at least to serve as a contrast.
First is the contrast between the indictment-style tone set by the title and the introductory editorializing versus the actual content of the book, which is best thought of as a series of thoroughly reported U.S. public policy vignettes from the nineties. The relationship between the sober and reasonably neutral historical summaries and the author’s searing policy critique is not obvious. There’s certainly a thesis here and a ton of interesting evidence but the reader is left wanting a bit more connective tissue between the two. Often it seems like the problem the author is dancing around is scale—so should we actually encourage more of these kinds of projects? Not what the author has in mind, clearly.
Still, four stars for a thoughtful if critical perspective on the limitations of market-oriented incrementalist reforms to solve intractable social problems that appear alongside a market economy. It’s not a “policy” book per se so you don’t get that last chapter with the “ideas to fix this” all nicely laid out, which is fine. But I do wonder what alternative solutions the author had in mind, at least to serve as a contrast.
October 2, 2022
More like the DEMOCRAPS, am I right? Shocktober 2022 begins with Lily Geismer's "Left Behind," a book about the 90s that's at least as scary and apocalyptic as Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' novel of the same name. Geismer's tome fills a curious void in contemporary political writing-- while a new book about the conservative movement seems to come out every day, there's weirdly little that's been published about the Democratic party. By focusing almost exclusively on the left wing (or the center left, or the center that was bizarrely called the left for a generation, anyway) "Left Behind" shows definitively that the (shitty, bad) world we live in today is unquestionably a bipartisan legacy.
The main characters of the book are the Democratic Leadership Council and its principal avatars, the Clinton family. In crystal clear, admirably objective prose, Geismer shows how this centrist, capitalist, technocratic, "market-based" wing of the party seized control of its operations and helped set the terms of American governance for decades. The book's distopian chapter titles ("The Power of Credit"; "Be Your Own Boss"; "From a Right to a Reward"; "Public Schools Are Our Most Important Business"(fucking YUCK, dude)) give you a hint of what's to come, as a group of folks ostensibly committed to ending poverty via private sector solutions (Geismer, to her credit, almost always gives her subjects the benefit of the doubt, and assumes they're operating in good faith-- which of course makes her critique even more stinging) demonstrate in word and deed how the ending poverty thing sorta falls by the wayside once the private sector is at the helm. Geismer argues not that microcredit lending, housing vouchers, workfare, and charter schools didn't help SOME people (because they did, at least in some ways), but that they were a horrible, disastrous, woefully insufficient substitute for the good old welfare state, which Clinton and his allies played a major role in hollowing out. The book's final chapters persuasively show how even the "gains" made with these tweaks to America's unequal system were quickly undone by the financial crisis, which of course hurt most those families and communities deliberately preyed upon by a newly empowered cadre of lenders looking for exciting "untapped markets."
This shit is just sad and infuriating, man. All the stuff you can't stand about our stupid little party-- the one I've voted for in every election where I was permitted ( :^) )-- begins here: the incredible condescension toward Black people and poor people (the word "responsibility" and all of its racially-charged connotations gets uttered every other page); the shameless boot-licking of CEOs and profit ghouls, especially of the Silicon Valley ilk (didn't think Reed "Please Borrow Your Netflix From Someone Else and Punish this Monster" Hastings would appear here); the reckless scrapping of the New Deal and Great Society (neither of which ever really achieved the sort of comprehensive social change they aspired to-- not that the DLC would ever tell you); the endless speculating about what white moderate suburban swing voters really believe and how their cop dick-sucking fantasies should be catered to at every turn (fucking arghhhhhhhhh); the rejection of Black people and labor unions and feminist movements and the LGBTQ community as "special interests" (as opposed to celebrating them as the LIFEBLOOD and SOUL of the party); the promotion of specific stories of "winners" ("Rebecca started her own Gingerbread House building business from her backyard) that inevitably makes everyone who gets punished by our merciless world seem like a loser.
Geismer basically hits the same notes in every chapter here, even as she is meticulously describing the ins and outs of specific policies. The repetition is profound and good, I say. This book is about how reciting capitalist mantras can rot your mind and totally blind you to what's actually going on. We're still living in this "Left Behind" world, of course (especially apparent to folks like me, in good old central Ohio!), so if you're feeling like having a good "real life" fright this Shocktober, I highly recommend Geismer's enjoyable but maddening, readable-but-also-highly-chuckable-across-the-room book.
The main characters of the book are the Democratic Leadership Council and its principal avatars, the Clinton family. In crystal clear, admirably objective prose, Geismer shows how this centrist, capitalist, technocratic, "market-based" wing of the party seized control of its operations and helped set the terms of American governance for decades. The book's distopian chapter titles ("The Power of Credit"; "Be Your Own Boss"; "From a Right to a Reward"; "Public Schools Are Our Most Important Business"(fucking YUCK, dude)) give you a hint of what's to come, as a group of folks ostensibly committed to ending poverty via private sector solutions (Geismer, to her credit, almost always gives her subjects the benefit of the doubt, and assumes they're operating in good faith-- which of course makes her critique even more stinging) demonstrate in word and deed how the ending poverty thing sorta falls by the wayside once the private sector is at the helm. Geismer argues not that microcredit lending, housing vouchers, workfare, and charter schools didn't help SOME people (because they did, at least in some ways), but that they were a horrible, disastrous, woefully insufficient substitute for the good old welfare state, which Clinton and his allies played a major role in hollowing out. The book's final chapters persuasively show how even the "gains" made with these tweaks to America's unequal system were quickly undone by the financial crisis, which of course hurt most those families and communities deliberately preyed upon by a newly empowered cadre of lenders looking for exciting "untapped markets."
This shit is just sad and infuriating, man. All the stuff you can't stand about our stupid little party-- the one I've voted for in every election where I was permitted ( :^) )-- begins here: the incredible condescension toward Black people and poor people (the word "responsibility" and all of its racially-charged connotations gets uttered every other page); the shameless boot-licking of CEOs and profit ghouls, especially of the Silicon Valley ilk (didn't think Reed "Please Borrow Your Netflix From Someone Else and Punish this Monster" Hastings would appear here); the reckless scrapping of the New Deal and Great Society (neither of which ever really achieved the sort of comprehensive social change they aspired to-- not that the DLC would ever tell you); the endless speculating about what white moderate suburban swing voters really believe and how their cop dick-sucking fantasies should be catered to at every turn (fucking arghhhhhhhhh); the rejection of Black people and labor unions and feminist movements and the LGBTQ community as "special interests" (as opposed to celebrating them as the LIFEBLOOD and SOUL of the party); the promotion of specific stories of "winners" ("Rebecca started her own Gingerbread House building business from her backyard) that inevitably makes everyone who gets punished by our merciless world seem like a loser.
Geismer basically hits the same notes in every chapter here, even as she is meticulously describing the ins and outs of specific policies. The repetition is profound and good, I say. This book is about how reciting capitalist mantras can rot your mind and totally blind you to what's actually going on. We're still living in this "Left Behind" world, of course (especially apparent to folks like me, in good old central Ohio!), so if you're feeling like having a good "real life" fright this Shocktober, I highly recommend Geismer's enjoyable but maddening, readable-but-also-highly-chuckable-across-the-room book.
April 15, 2022
Thorough exploration of the policies, decisions, and actions of the Democratic party over the last 40 plus years and how these actions have shaped our current climate. Whether you agree with the main point of the author or now, this books contains meticulous research that will be valuable to decipher in order to gain a greater level of historical context for the time period.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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June 16, 2022i think it was one of my favorite bloggers tanner greer/the scholar's stage who wrote that as a 20-something interested in history and politics, you'll start finding that you have a big knowledge gap in the years that immediately precede and follow your birth. when you start paying attention to the world, events that happened a generation ago before you existed have started to fall into history and scholarly work has already been done on that. and the events which are happening right now, well, of course you're paying attention to them! so for me at 24 years old, there exists a major blind spot for the clinton and bush years and reading left behind was one of my ways of rectifying that.
geishmer tracks the democrats' turn to neoliberalism and the clinton administration's subsequent implementation of market liberal policies along with their corresponding shortfalls. it's an interesting history, and i think i come out of it partially agreeing with her arguments? she's convincing in that '90s democrats way overstated the power of the market-based anti-poverty pushes compared to the expansions of the state in the great society/new deal along with the long-term harms of putting vulnerable people to the whims of the market. on the other hand, i didn't entirely get the implicit poo-pooing of growth as a major part of an antipoverty strategy. in fact, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America by robert collins makes it clear that traditionally this is a major part of american liberalism's antipoverty policy kit and while geismer's book doesn't make this clear, poverty did decrease a lot during the clinton administration compared to pre-recession reagan/bush. i'm also kind of skeptical about her arguments about democrats '90s electoral strategy - i wasn't around then, but after three blowouts, i feel like she underrates that structurally, maybe america back then was more of a right-wing nation and some democratic adjustment to the right was probably inevitable. (this argument is also obviously meant to have a contemporary echo with today's twitter fights over turnout vs persuasion. i don't care about these debates, and my only comment on them is that both sides should recognize that 2020s america is very different from post-reagan america.)
my only straight-up critique of the book is that the focus on microcredit is a bit much. i get the appeal of it as symbolism for the democrats' turn from state-based solutions to market-based ones, but i just find it hard to believe that it was that important in the grand scheme of things. the chapters on other bad clinton marketization policies like housing, trade, and welfare are a lot more interesting and, tbqh, seem to have considerably more relevance in explaining how we got to the world we have today wrt to issues like mass homelessness and manufacturing job loss. i picked up the book because i enjoyed geismer's previous book, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, this was a time period i had interest in, and it seemed to fit a lot of my pre-existing ideological biases, but ngl, if i knew this was so focused on microcredit, it would've been lower on my to-read list. i'd recommend picking up michael kazin's great What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party first and then reading this if you're particularly interested in the clinton-era verison of the democratic party (or if you're just super into '90s history).
geishmer tracks the democrats' turn to neoliberalism and the clinton administration's subsequent implementation of market liberal policies along with their corresponding shortfalls. it's an interesting history, and i think i come out of it partially agreeing with her arguments? she's convincing in that '90s democrats way overstated the power of the market-based anti-poverty pushes compared to the expansions of the state in the great society/new deal along with the long-term harms of putting vulnerable people to the whims of the market. on the other hand, i didn't entirely get the implicit poo-pooing of growth as a major part of an antipoverty strategy. in fact, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America by robert collins makes it clear that traditionally this is a major part of american liberalism's antipoverty policy kit and while geismer's book doesn't make this clear, poverty did decrease a lot during the clinton administration compared to pre-recession reagan/bush. i'm also kind of skeptical about her arguments about democrats '90s electoral strategy - i wasn't around then, but after three blowouts, i feel like she underrates that structurally, maybe america back then was more of a right-wing nation and some democratic adjustment to the right was probably inevitable. (this argument is also obviously meant to have a contemporary echo with today's twitter fights over turnout vs persuasion. i don't care about these debates, and my only comment on them is that both sides should recognize that 2020s america is very different from post-reagan america.)
my only straight-up critique of the book is that the focus on microcredit is a bit much. i get the appeal of it as symbolism for the democrats' turn from state-based solutions to market-based ones, but i just find it hard to believe that it was that important in the grand scheme of things. the chapters on other bad clinton marketization policies like housing, trade, and welfare are a lot more interesting and, tbqh, seem to have considerably more relevance in explaining how we got to the world we have today wrt to issues like mass homelessness and manufacturing job loss. i picked up the book because i enjoyed geismer's previous book, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, this was a time period i had interest in, and it seemed to fit a lot of my pre-existing ideological biases, but ngl, if i knew this was so focused on microcredit, it would've been lower on my to-read list. i'd recommend picking up michael kazin's great What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party first and then reading this if you're particularly interested in the clinton-era verison of the democratic party (or if you're just super into '90s history).
March 1, 2025
Didn't realize this would be JUST Clinton, would've like some Obama in the mix too
TBH I think Frank's Listen Liberal and Lichtenstein & Stein's Pivotal Decade are more interesting, but this is a good addition for the advanced Clinton haters
Bill, you will always and forever be a filthy skank ass ho
TBH I think Frank's Listen Liberal and Lichtenstein & Stein's Pivotal Decade are more interesting, but this is a good addition for the advanced Clinton haters
Bill, you will always and forever be a filthy skank ass ho
March 22, 2023
There’s the old saw about judging books by covers, but it’s also something of a sucker move to judge them too much by their titles. Among other things, authors don’t choose them- publishers do. Still and all, the title does typically present an argument, one way or another. Lily Geismer is one of the better historians pushing American history’s temporality towards the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first… the “fin de siecle,” if you will. Her book on Massachusetts liberalism and the Democratic Party in the eighties and nineties was especially good. This one is a little less sharp, still well worth reading. But a certain vagueness of judgment creeps in with that interesting verb, “solve.”
The Democrats, neither in the nineties, which is where Geismer focuses her efforts here, nor really in any other time, wanted to “solve” inequality as in “eliminate” it. To be fair, Geismer doesn’t quite claim that they did, certainly not the DLC and the central figure of this book, Bill Clinton. Many of the issues with critical judgment in this book come down to what the Democrats actually wanted to do during the neoliberal turn that the ascendancy of the Clintons and the DLC represent. If you choose to interpret “solve” as “render a problem no longer a problem as far as a given actor is concerned,” you can squint, and think that the Clinton Democrats did want to solve that issue- by rendering inequality moral and right, in a backwards kind of way.
Most of us are, by now, familiar with the basic elements of the story, though the question of how much explanatory weight to give various elements of it still provokes debate. The Great Society programs of the late sixties seemed to be stalling, right-wing reaction driven by racism and opposition to social change was surging, and a new kind of Democrat took the scene in the wake of such epochal defeats as George McGovern’s loss in 1972 and Walter Mondale’s in 1984. In their own mind, they generally didn’t see themselves as representing a swing to the right. Geismer puts a lot of explanatory weight on the concept of “special interests,” and how Democrats ranging from Gary Hart to Al Gore to Joe Biden to Bill Clinton all advertised themselves as being opposed to said interests. This had a double meaning, especially effective at the time: “special interests” could mean big greedy corporations, crooked labor bureaucrats, and the security state, all targets of increased scrutiny in the post-Watergate era. But it also quite clearly meant black civil rights groups, feminists, LGBTQ people, and labor organizing more generally. Three guesses to figure out whose goat got gored first, and the first two don’t count.
In any event, the “new Democrats” could advertise themselves as “taking on the special interests” and recouping white voters who had swung towards the Republicans. In some cases, this did involve naked revanchism and disdain for the poor and people of color, as when Bill Clinton took special care to publicly insult a moderately edgy black lady writer and execute a mentally disabled black man. But, Geismer points out, we can’t say that the neoliberal Democrats completely ignored the social and economic inequality that began to spiral in this era. How we approach what they did gets into some thorny areas of judgment, and the problem with “solve” as a verb.
Geismer gets into the weeds of things like microfinance, special economic zones, and other neoliberal nostrums that acquired popularity among neoliberal democrats in the last quarter of the twentieth century. She traces how Chicago activists during the doldrum times of the seventies started a bank to try to fund community development, how they hooked up with the Grameen bank then starting to do its thing in rural Bangladesh (before just how many ghastly suicides Grameen’s insistence on social shame as a repayment insurance vehicle came out), and how influences from both found their way to rural Arkansas and caught the attention of a certain ambitious young governor.
Did Clinton and the rest actually believe that these programs they touted could meaningfully reduce poverty and inequality, in the face of economic recession and the withdrawal of the welfare state? Did they care? Geismer thinks they cared, somewhat, and sees them as true believers in the promises of neoliberalism: its emphasis on small-scale solutions, its disdain for bureaucracy, its promotion of personal values. Among other things, these promises had elective affinity with many of the “movement values” of the sixties, or anyway, the ones that middle-class climbers didn’t jettison immediately when they became inconvenient (for better and for worse).
Bill Clinton was a complicated guy (ultimately, a moral wretch, but plenty of his predecessors also fit the bill of “complicated guy/moral cretin” - Nixon and LBJ both come to mind). He did not come up rich, even if he scrambled desperately to reach the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in some vague emotional way, he did want the poor to suffer less than they do. I tend to imagine a mix of things – political commitments against “big government,” let alone socialism, and the tendency for the ambitious poor to be profoundly judgmental of other poor people – helped spur Clinton to believing in such bromides as “a hand up, not a hand out” and all the stuff about the moral desirability of small entrepreneurship and/or slaving away at minimum wage to make Tyson or McDonalds more money.
I think the phrase I want here is “stand-in.” Neoliberal poverty programs were always a stand-in for some more serious approach to poverty and social inequality. As time went on, the failures of these stand-ins, always readily apparent, became glaringly obvious. Microfinance, after the initial infusion of cash filters its way into a given poor community, invariably winds up creating a class of micro-rentiers and their extra-exploited serfs (see those suicides), even when prize creeps like that Yunnus guy don’t add cult-y elements to the mix. The one part of it that worked was giving money to poor people- the rest of it was pointless or harmful means testing and surveillance. The rest of the neoliberal arsenal similarly substitutes all manner of usually needlessly complicated jiggery-pokery to what actually improves people’s lives materially: more money, more resources, and more collective control over their labor. Big-state welfarism of the kind associated with LBJ, Humphrey, and Mondale – and, roughly, the sort of thing the ghost at the DLC’s feast, Jesse Jackson, was calling for the whole time – was also a stand-in, a way to improve/mollify the poor and working people and prevent them from getting ideas about upsetting applecarts. But these ideas were considerably more ambitious, formulated at the height of the power of the Western capitalist democracies. It was more of a possibility they could have made their weird dumb socialism stand-in work out of sheer ambition and surfeit of resources, economic and ideological. But by the time the nineties rolled around… well, the armies of the age were weak.
The idea that any of these people, Clinton included, thought that what they were doing meaningfully addressed inequality or poverty… well, it certainly strains credulity they think that now, at this late date. Maybe they did think it in the nineties, when the economy was cruising along and doing most of the work for them? It’s also equally clear, if you actually talk to any of these neoliberals or listen to them answer questions, that they toss off things like microcredit, workfare, and job training programs around as chaff to avoid the larger questions involved… but does that mean they don’t believe in them? I think they probably get that those things don’t “work.” But they also likely genuinely believe that an approach to these issues that combines technocratic expertise with moral exhortation, both of them taking the structures of capitalism as they exist as a given, is the best approach, maybe the only approach. That it also covers their ass, fills a void where answers — arguably, where their souls — should be, that it routinely fails on its own terms, letting the reactionary right take the wheel which, in turn, justifies their existence as the “realistic” alternative… well, bourgeois belief often goes hand in hand with bourgeois interest. Do we think the Protestants Weber wrote about didn’t believe?
I don’t think Geismer interrogates these problems as much as she could have, or as deeply as she interrogated the thought-world of Massachusetts liberalism in her previous book. She mostly compares neoliberalism negatively to Keynesianism, or the approaches of a Jackson or a Sanders, and then goes on to the next example of a Clintonian approach eating shit. That kind of seems to be the way of it, increasingly, maybe a delayed backlash to how dense and theoretical other works of history supposedly get? But American history writing was never really that way… anyway, it’s still a respectable addition to the growing literature on the end of the twentieth century. ****’
The Democrats, neither in the nineties, which is where Geismer focuses her efforts here, nor really in any other time, wanted to “solve” inequality as in “eliminate” it. To be fair, Geismer doesn’t quite claim that they did, certainly not the DLC and the central figure of this book, Bill Clinton. Many of the issues with critical judgment in this book come down to what the Democrats actually wanted to do during the neoliberal turn that the ascendancy of the Clintons and the DLC represent. If you choose to interpret “solve” as “render a problem no longer a problem as far as a given actor is concerned,” you can squint, and think that the Clinton Democrats did want to solve that issue- by rendering inequality moral and right, in a backwards kind of way.
Most of us are, by now, familiar with the basic elements of the story, though the question of how much explanatory weight to give various elements of it still provokes debate. The Great Society programs of the late sixties seemed to be stalling, right-wing reaction driven by racism and opposition to social change was surging, and a new kind of Democrat took the scene in the wake of such epochal defeats as George McGovern’s loss in 1972 and Walter Mondale’s in 1984. In their own mind, they generally didn’t see themselves as representing a swing to the right. Geismer puts a lot of explanatory weight on the concept of “special interests,” and how Democrats ranging from Gary Hart to Al Gore to Joe Biden to Bill Clinton all advertised themselves as being opposed to said interests. This had a double meaning, especially effective at the time: “special interests” could mean big greedy corporations, crooked labor bureaucrats, and the security state, all targets of increased scrutiny in the post-Watergate era. But it also quite clearly meant black civil rights groups, feminists, LGBTQ people, and labor organizing more generally. Three guesses to figure out whose goat got gored first, and the first two don’t count.
In any event, the “new Democrats” could advertise themselves as “taking on the special interests” and recouping white voters who had swung towards the Republicans. In some cases, this did involve naked revanchism and disdain for the poor and people of color, as when Bill Clinton took special care to publicly insult a moderately edgy black lady writer and execute a mentally disabled black man. But, Geismer points out, we can’t say that the neoliberal Democrats completely ignored the social and economic inequality that began to spiral in this era. How we approach what they did gets into some thorny areas of judgment, and the problem with “solve” as a verb.
Geismer gets into the weeds of things like microfinance, special economic zones, and other neoliberal nostrums that acquired popularity among neoliberal democrats in the last quarter of the twentieth century. She traces how Chicago activists during the doldrum times of the seventies started a bank to try to fund community development, how they hooked up with the Grameen bank then starting to do its thing in rural Bangladesh (before just how many ghastly suicides Grameen’s insistence on social shame as a repayment insurance vehicle came out), and how influences from both found their way to rural Arkansas and caught the attention of a certain ambitious young governor.
Did Clinton and the rest actually believe that these programs they touted could meaningfully reduce poverty and inequality, in the face of economic recession and the withdrawal of the welfare state? Did they care? Geismer thinks they cared, somewhat, and sees them as true believers in the promises of neoliberalism: its emphasis on small-scale solutions, its disdain for bureaucracy, its promotion of personal values. Among other things, these promises had elective affinity with many of the “movement values” of the sixties, or anyway, the ones that middle-class climbers didn’t jettison immediately when they became inconvenient (for better and for worse).
Bill Clinton was a complicated guy (ultimately, a moral wretch, but plenty of his predecessors also fit the bill of “complicated guy/moral cretin” - Nixon and LBJ both come to mind). He did not come up rich, even if he scrambled desperately to reach the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in some vague emotional way, he did want the poor to suffer less than they do. I tend to imagine a mix of things – political commitments against “big government,” let alone socialism, and the tendency for the ambitious poor to be profoundly judgmental of other poor people – helped spur Clinton to believing in such bromides as “a hand up, not a hand out” and all the stuff about the moral desirability of small entrepreneurship and/or slaving away at minimum wage to make Tyson or McDonalds more money.
I think the phrase I want here is “stand-in.” Neoliberal poverty programs were always a stand-in for some more serious approach to poverty and social inequality. As time went on, the failures of these stand-ins, always readily apparent, became glaringly obvious. Microfinance, after the initial infusion of cash filters its way into a given poor community, invariably winds up creating a class of micro-rentiers and their extra-exploited serfs (see those suicides), even when prize creeps like that Yunnus guy don’t add cult-y elements to the mix. The one part of it that worked was giving money to poor people- the rest of it was pointless or harmful means testing and surveillance. The rest of the neoliberal arsenal similarly substitutes all manner of usually needlessly complicated jiggery-pokery to what actually improves people’s lives materially: more money, more resources, and more collective control over their labor. Big-state welfarism of the kind associated with LBJ, Humphrey, and Mondale – and, roughly, the sort of thing the ghost at the DLC’s feast, Jesse Jackson, was calling for the whole time – was also a stand-in, a way to improve/mollify the poor and working people and prevent them from getting ideas about upsetting applecarts. But these ideas were considerably more ambitious, formulated at the height of the power of the Western capitalist democracies. It was more of a possibility they could have made their weird dumb socialism stand-in work out of sheer ambition and surfeit of resources, economic and ideological. But by the time the nineties rolled around… well, the armies of the age were weak.
The idea that any of these people, Clinton included, thought that what they were doing meaningfully addressed inequality or poverty… well, it certainly strains credulity they think that now, at this late date. Maybe they did think it in the nineties, when the economy was cruising along and doing most of the work for them? It’s also equally clear, if you actually talk to any of these neoliberals or listen to them answer questions, that they toss off things like microcredit, workfare, and job training programs around as chaff to avoid the larger questions involved… but does that mean they don’t believe in them? I think they probably get that those things don’t “work.” But they also likely genuinely believe that an approach to these issues that combines technocratic expertise with moral exhortation, both of them taking the structures of capitalism as they exist as a given, is the best approach, maybe the only approach. That it also covers their ass, fills a void where answers — arguably, where their souls — should be, that it routinely fails on its own terms, letting the reactionary right take the wheel which, in turn, justifies their existence as the “realistic” alternative… well, bourgeois belief often goes hand in hand with bourgeois interest. Do we think the Protestants Weber wrote about didn’t believe?
I don’t think Geismer interrogates these problems as much as she could have, or as deeply as she interrogated the thought-world of Massachusetts liberalism in her previous book. She mostly compares neoliberalism negatively to Keynesianism, or the approaches of a Jackson or a Sanders, and then goes on to the next example of a Clintonian approach eating shit. That kind of seems to be the way of it, increasingly, maybe a delayed backlash to how dense and theoretical other works of history supposedly get? But American history writing was never really that way… anyway, it’s still a respectable addition to the growing literature on the end of the twentieth century. ****’
February 16, 2022
Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality by Lily Geismer presents in clear and precise terms what many have known, that the Democratic party failed as a response to the Republican party and thus as an advocate for those the GOP cared little about.
The writing here is clear and accessible with any jargon explained very well. As a history of the period and of the Democratic party in particular, it offers insight into some of the reasons we are in the predicament we're in. So as a book that educates the reader and puts detail to what may have already been vaguely understood it succeeds quite well.
I think where it might excel is in generating ideas and opinions in the readers themselves. While Geismer briefly outlines, in broad terms, what mindset we need to adopt moving forward. This reader took an opinion of the past that, while in agreement with the broad ideas mentioned is perhaps a bit more leftist than liberal. It isn't just that the Democrats attempted to use the market concept, which inherently leads to inequality if not held in check. It isn't just that they favored far more privatization than is healthy for any government or society. In even broader terms they made what to me was a major ideological mistake. While the GOP kept pulling the center ever further right, the Democrats didn't pull the other way to maintain some semblance of balance, they kept chasing that center. They have chased it so far that they are as far right now as the Reagan administration was in its time and they are to the right of Eisenhower's conservativism. This was done to win elections, not to improve people's lives. So that now we have two parties, in a horrid two-party system, both ignoring the people and both pursuing electoral victory. By the way, don't hold my opinion against the book, I am not trying to paraphrase Geismer here. The point is that the book made me think. You may well come to different opinions but, like any good book should, this will make you think about what has happened, why, and what we might be able to do about it (if anything).
I would recommend this to anyone who still thinks that the two parties are opposites. While I stop well short of making the cliche that there are no differences, there are, but they are of much smaller degree than they once were. I would also recommend this to those who simply enjoy reading about recent political history.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
The writing here is clear and accessible with any jargon explained very well. As a history of the period and of the Democratic party in particular, it offers insight into some of the reasons we are in the predicament we're in. So as a book that educates the reader and puts detail to what may have already been vaguely understood it succeeds quite well.
I think where it might excel is in generating ideas and opinions in the readers themselves. While Geismer briefly outlines, in broad terms, what mindset we need to adopt moving forward. This reader took an opinion of the past that, while in agreement with the broad ideas mentioned is perhaps a bit more leftist than liberal. It isn't just that the Democrats attempted to use the market concept, which inherently leads to inequality if not held in check. It isn't just that they favored far more privatization than is healthy for any government or society. In even broader terms they made what to me was a major ideological mistake. While the GOP kept pulling the center ever further right, the Democrats didn't pull the other way to maintain some semblance of balance, they kept chasing that center. They have chased it so far that they are as far right now as the Reagan administration was in its time and they are to the right of Eisenhower's conservativism. This was done to win elections, not to improve people's lives. So that now we have two parties, in a horrid two-party system, both ignoring the people and both pursuing electoral victory. By the way, don't hold my opinion against the book, I am not trying to paraphrase Geismer here. The point is that the book made me think. You may well come to different opinions but, like any good book should, this will make you think about what has happened, why, and what we might be able to do about it (if anything).
I would recommend this to anyone who still thinks that the two parties are opposites. While I stop well short of making the cliche that there are no differences, there are, but they are of much smaller degree than they once were. I would also recommend this to those who simply enjoy reading about recent political history.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
January 26, 2025
Lily Geismer presents an interesting if policy heavy analysis of the evolution of the US democrats from the 1970s through to the early 2020s and argues that they bear as much responsibility as the republicans for the current dire state of US society.
Through their embrace of market based solutions to social problems, the democrats turned their back on the new deal ethos of harnessing the power of government to address issues in society and present a “third way” which as Geismer notes, its proponents argue creates a “win win” dynamic wherein business does well by doing good.
What’s interesting is the earnestness with which the figures hailing from the DLC, most notably Bill Clinton, an intelligent man whatever else people may think of him, seem to sincerely believe in the power of their post “left right” outlook to fix societal issues. They don’t come across as cynics who don’t believe what they are espousing but zealous converts to their worldview.
In the end however, with the passage of time and in light of recent political events,
It is clear that there are no such thing as “win wins” under unregulated capitalism, something which the Clinton administration helped to foster through the repealing of new deal era legislation such as glass Steigal, and the consequences of their ideology is the rise of oligarchy and fascism.
There is a heavy focus on policy over personalities in the book which is substantively interesting but makes for a slightly dryer read if your are looking for a political polemic, but it is undeniable that Geismer knows her stuff and ultimately, what matters is policy rather than personalities, something the us electorate has arguably forgotten in light of recent political events.
An important read to understand
The current travails of the democrats and us society.
Through their embrace of market based solutions to social problems, the democrats turned their back on the new deal ethos of harnessing the power of government to address issues in society and present a “third way” which as Geismer notes, its proponents argue creates a “win win” dynamic wherein business does well by doing good.
What’s interesting is the earnestness with which the figures hailing from the DLC, most notably Bill Clinton, an intelligent man whatever else people may think of him, seem to sincerely believe in the power of their post “left right” outlook to fix societal issues. They don’t come across as cynics who don’t believe what they are espousing but zealous converts to their worldview.
In the end however, with the passage of time and in light of recent political events,
It is clear that there are no such thing as “win wins” under unregulated capitalism, something which the Clinton administration helped to foster through the repealing of new deal era legislation such as glass Steigal, and the consequences of their ideology is the rise of oligarchy and fascism.
There is a heavy focus on policy over personalities in the book which is substantively interesting but makes for a slightly dryer read if your are looking for a political polemic, but it is undeniable that Geismer knows her stuff and ultimately, what matters is policy rather than personalities, something the us electorate has arguably forgotten in light of recent political events.
An important read to understand
The current travails of the democrats and us society.
April 11, 2022
Ms. Geismer takes us through the significant changes that the democratic party went through in the 1980's and 1990's to gain the presidency back for the Democrats. With the embrace of a market driven approach the democrats lose their soul and in the process lose their "base". While she alludes to the cause of the rise of the right, she does not fully explore this question. This story is one of the democrats being lost in the wilderness after a Reagan and Bush win in the 1980's and Clinton with his famous triangulation regains the power of the presidency for Democrats but at what cost? Left behind is a good survey of how the democratic party transformed in the 1980's to gain power in the 1990's but it does not go deep enough to answer the question what does this mean for the current state of the party. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions, while the book takes the reader back to that period of time, it doesn't do enough to explore the hollowing out of the party because of those decisions.
January 6, 2025
4.5 - learned a lot in this book about how well-intentioned policies focused on market-based solutions have not eradicated poverty and inequality; they have perpetuated both. Market-based programs "do not have the capabilities to eradicate the root causes of poverty or comprehensively combat problems of capital disinvestment and structural inequality. Instead, they have all too often provided a means for politicians, philanthropists, and corporations to avoid taking accountability for such problems and find more comprehensive and redistributive solutions."
Appreciate the call at the end to "reimagine the relationship between the government and low-income and poor people in ways that restore democratic accountability and decision-making [and] reconstruct America’s social safety net through government. It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement."
Appreciate the call at the end to "reimagine the relationship between the government and low-income and poor people in ways that restore democratic accountability and decision-making [and] reconstruct America’s social safety net through government. It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement."
September 13, 2022
Really good. There's a lot of material out there critiquing/dunking on the DLC/Clinton-era democrats, but this really stands out. The best thing Lily Geismer does here, in my opinion, is to treat the New Dems interest in solving inequality seriously, but skeptically. From that point of view, she's able to demonstrate exactly how their efforts failed and why they should not be repeated. I don't think that would have been possible if she'd treated them as cynics who self-consciously understood their programs as nothing but upward transfers of wealth and outright lied about it.
June 30, 2022
A clear headed if not extremely dry take down of the type of liberalism that focuses on individualism and entrepreneurship as the solve for poverty and inequality in America. Makes clear that the only way forward is to break down the public private partnership, create stronger social programs through the government.
November 3, 2022
This book did a good job at being balanced, giving data, and proving logical outcome to concepts. This was not a indictment toward a party, it is just factual data that proves out poor concepts from the Democratic Party in the 80’s and 90’s.
November 5, 2025
3.5 probably if I could. It's a thorough and readable history largely of the Clinton era policies on the economy and poverty. Very illuminating but not necessarily a fun or riveting read. So if like me you are interested in this part of history it's very good. But not a book for everyone.
July 23, 2022
the hell didn't these assholes just be republicans.
Read
September 11, 2022Every other page of this book introduces a new demon who is still haunting our politics three decades later.
October 20, 2022
More focused on the Clinton administration specifically than I had hoped, but this was a great history and exploration of it's subject.
November 14, 2022
Besides being a slog to get through, it barely covers the topic and never explains how all the chapters that cover random topics contribute to the theme of being left behind.
February 6, 2025
Very good explanation of how the Democrats went wrong under Clinton and the Democrat right.
July 4, 2025
A thorough explanation for much of the reason why income inequality exists to the degree it does today.
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