A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism

by Nelson Lichtenstein, Judith Stein

How the Clinton administration betrayed its progressive principles and capitulated to the right

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation’s economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. This book reveals why Clinton’s expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today.

Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration’s progressive reformers―people like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, Laura Tyson, and Joseph Stiglitz―were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement. Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Al Gore proved champions of this financialized world. Meanwhile, Clinton divided his own party when he relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries. Even the economic boom Clinton ushered in―which tamed unemployment and sent the stock market soaring in what Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen termed a ”fabulous decade”―ended with a series of exploding asset bubbles that his neoliberal economic advisors neither foresaw nor prevented.

A Fabulous Failure is a study of ideas in action, some powerfully persuasive, others illusionary and self-defeating. It explains why and how the Clinton presidency’s progressive statecraft floundered in a world where the labor movement was weak, civil rights forces quiescent, and corporate America ever more powerful.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, Audiobook, Economics, United States

504 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 2023

About the author

Nelson Lichtenstein is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.

Reviews

[Neil Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely intelligent and frankly infuriating book about the promise of Clinton's presidency and the actual outcomes. The authors do a great job in providing the context of all the major hallmarks of Clinton's presidency, from the failed health care plan, to the reactionary crime bill, a little detour in trade via NAFTA and China's WTO invite, and through the deregulation of wall street later on.

There is an interesting Royal court dynamic threaded through this book where there are two factions trying to gain Clinton's favor: one more progressive and focused on health care and economic gains for labor, while the other, represented by Rubin and Summers, just want to push their brand of "The Washington consensus" to a globalizing world. The TLDR of this rivalry is that the Neo-liberal camp wins basically all of the arguments and Clinton is dragged to the right, even though he campaigned on progressive ideas.

[Teddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars


Bill Clinton. He is the nastiest skank bitch I have ever met. Do not trust him, he is a fugly slut.

OK but for real, this book does a fantastic job of explaining the economic & labor history of the Clinton administration, and how the administration's decisions completely fucked over American capitalism and created this neoliberal hellscape we're currently living through.

The only qualm I have about it is that it is dense -- tbh even more dense than the history books I go for lol. I do think that impedes the accessibility a little bit. But on the flip side, that density allows the reader to really delve into what happened and WHY it happened.

Definitely recommend!!!!

[P J M]

Had to return to library before finishing. Great political history.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Clinton (the only president I've ever met) is a skank ass ho

I know everyone is hating Biden right now, but Clinton is easily the worst Democratic president since like... Grover Cleveland? Where Biden's project was more or less ineffectual,* Clinton was both completely ineffective on good things like healthcare reform, industrial policy, labor rights but insanely effective at truly heinous shit like gutting welfare, sending jobs to China, deregulating Wall Street, and expanding the prison industrial complex,. POS president.
Insane that if Hillary won the Starbucks CEO would've secretary of Labor good god. And Zuckerberg's no 2 would've been running the Treasury!!! People are always gonna vote for Trump when shit like this is the alternative.
Inshallah Democrats get their shit together or more likely someone gives Bernie Sanders the substance

*TLDR: Biden's econ policy was as dope as his foreign policy was dumb/atrocious. Doesn't super matter though because his main legacy now is Trump 2.0 (and probably Gaza, aint no way the textbooks gonna remember Lina Khan RIP).

[Flora R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a pretty damning overview of Clinton’s legacy, although it’s not unfair to him as far as having had good intentions at the outset.

My biggest takeaway, as with the last nonfiction book I read about the nineties, is just how long term the fuckery of the right wing and neoliberal democrats have been with us, and how systemic the problem is.

It also makes me appreciate how different Biden’s approach to economic policies were from Obama and Clinton, even though he was absolutely on the wrong side of so many policy debates before his presidency, which is pretty wilds

[Kylie Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is DENSE, particularly so because it is so economically focused. But in general an interesting topic and argument, particularly considering I don't have as much background with this period.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

peterberard.substack.com

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent overview of Clinton's presidency, with an emphasis on labor issues. It seeks to answer one question about Clinton - how did a Democratic president end up ratifying the Reagan small government revolution, deregulating finance, and failing to arrest the decline of union power in the United States? Lichtenstein and Stein do a good job of emphasizing that both (a) the structural limitations Clinton faced (labor had already been traumatized by Reagan's destruction of the air traffic controller's union and was trending towards political marginalization and (b) Clinton's tactical/personal mistakes (his scandals, his attempted top-down imposition of his health care reform without sufficiently consulting his allies in Congress) eliminated any chance of implementing his ambitious dream of "managed capitalism" in which management and labor would work together in creating the high-tech jobs of the future.

[Jason Hojnacki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first got interested in politics/current events in the 90s and really liked Bill Clinton when he was in office so I already have a unique perspective on his presidency. This book is well written and backed up with research, but I disagree with the title of the book. I don’t see how Clinton was a ‘failure’ in office when the economy did well and we were at peace during his tenure. Yes, Clinton did not drastically alter the course of the nation or of Capitalism itself, but I don’t consider that a failure, more like a shift or a change in direction. Clinton was never a hard core liberal himself, so it makes sense that he would govern from a centrist position, so the idea that he would drastically change the American economy or capitalism doesn’t make much sense. Given the contents of the books, a better title would’ve Clintonomics or Centrist economics or something to that effect. Good overview of the American and world economy of the 1990s, but the idea that his presidency was a ‘fabulous failure,’ does not make much sense to me.

[Mattschratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is good but also, don't read it! I spent the entire time I read it thinking about Benjamin's Angel of History. You have a better day if you see a chain of events instead of just "a single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage and hurls it in front of [the angel's] feet." You don't need to know about how to calibrate your seething indignation of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and the rest of these cretinous freaks. The angel would like to make whole what has been smashed, but he's blowing away and so instead we get those awful people like Clinton himself still standing around and saying "I guess I should've done something about regulating derivatives." If you read, say, the Jeeves and Wooster books, you will not have to think about the Angel of History at all, so I recommend that (though again this book is very well-written and conceptually enlightening).

[Spencer Cooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a detailed description of the Clinton presidency with a focus on his economic and social policies. A lot of this information is eye opening and self evidently important given knowledge of the 2008 financial crisis, the policies of the democratic party/politicians in the 21st century, and the current state of the US economy.

Where the book falls short is organizing these historical events into narratives that make them easy to follow. At times this book felt like a play by play retelling of particular policy dramas in the Clinton presidency without a clear thesis.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a great book. Whatever you think about the Clinton administrations, you'll find your conception of them challenged here. Nelson Lichtenstein and the late Judith Stein have written a book that takes the Clintonite project on its own terms, but without succumbing to its illusions. The result is an instant classic in the history of social and economic policymaking.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book that tracks both the aspirations and the paradox of Clinton’s ever-changing economic policy starting with his governorship, and leading ultimately to his complete unshackling in the late ‘90s of the malignant form American Neoliberalism that we are still wrestling with today.

[Josh Adamek · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a behemoth and dense at times, however, its economics centered argument is intertwined in a compelling narrative that encourages the reader to look beyond standard interpretations of the Clinton administration.

[David Gateley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best Clinton book for sure - the epilogue is 🔥by itself

[Teresa Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exhaustive in scope and circular in narrative structure, this book is singularly informative. It also broke my heart repeatedly with its tale of bright shining promise disastrously unfulfilled.

[Aidan Kohn-Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really thoughtful and in-depth overview of a truly terrible President and Admin

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

labor historians do it better

[Gabriel Goffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF.

[Kevin Schafer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I get too bummed about the state of the world, I like it I read a nonfiction book to remind myself things have always been bad and actually this current bad thing is been decades in the making.
I guess that brings me to the Clinton administration. This book pairs well with Ganz’s as this picks up the narrative as soon as Clinton becomes president. I felt the authors gave BIll way too much credit for his purported anti racism and progressive agenda while instituting a crushing neoliberal regime that punished the poor most. Guffawed at the part where BC tried to emulate Italian worker collectives in rural Arkansas, neglecting to account for the robust social safety net that actually allowed these to work originally

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here’s my review!

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