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Today, the word “neoliberal” is used to describe an epochal
shift toward market-oriented governance begun in the 1970s. Yet the
roots of many of neoliberalism’s policy tools can be traced to
the ideas and practices of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. In
Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul chronicles the rise of what he
terms “supply-side liberalism,” a powerful and enduring
orientation toward politics and the economy, race and poverty, that
united local chambers of commerce, liberal policymakers and
economists, and urban and rural economic planners. Beginning in the
late 1930s, New Dealers tied expansive aspirations for social and,
later, racial progress to a variety of economic development
initiatives. In communities across the country, otherwise
conservative business elites administered liberal public works,
urban redevelopment, and housing programs. But by binding national
visions of progress to the local interests of capital, liberals
often entrenched the very inequalities of power and opportunity
they imagined their programs solving. When President Lyndon Johnson
launched the War on Poverty—which prioritized direct partnerships
with poor and racially marginalized citizens—businesspeople,
Republicans, and soon, a rising generation of New Democrats sought
to rein in its seeming excesses by reinventing and redeploying many
of the policy tools and commitments pioneered on liberalism’s
supply side: public-private partnerships, market-oriented
solutions, fiscal “realism,” and, above all, subsidies for
business-led growth now promised to blunt, and perhaps ultimately
replace, programs for poor and marginalized Americans. In this
wide-ranging book, Brent Cebul illuminates the often-overlooked
structures of governance, markets, and public debt through which
America’s warring political ideologies have been expressed and
transformed. From Washington, D.C. to the declining Rustbelt and
emerging Sunbelt and back again, Illusions of Progress reveals the
centrality of public and private forms of profit that have defined
the enduring boundaries of American politics, opportunity, and
inequality— in an era of liberal ascendance and an age of
neoliberal retrenchment.
American political history has been built around narratives of
crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly
stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes.
No doubt the history of American politics is filled with such
moments—the Great Depression and the New Deal; the rise of modern
conservatism in the 1960s and ’70s; and, most recently, the 2016
election of Donald Trump. But while crisis-centered frameworks can
make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan
change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the
production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status
that transcend the usual breakpoints in American history. Brent
Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together
first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making
structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan
realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors
see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by
tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state
and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as
disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates analyses of the
crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward
the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an
evolving understanding of American political development that cuts
across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal
ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political
history is today.
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