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.

The history of modern liberalism has been hotly debated in contemporary politics and the academy. Here, Judith Stein uses the steel industry--long considered fundamental to the U.S. economy--to examine liberal policies and priorities after World War II. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, she argues that it was the primacy of foreign commitments and the outdated economic policies of the state, more than the nation's racial conflicts, that transformed American liberalism from the powerful progressivism of the New Deal to the feeble policies of the 1990s. Stein skillfully integrates a number of narratives usually treated in isolation--labor, civil rights, politics, business, and foreign policy--while underscoring the state's focus on the steel industry and its workers. By showing how those who intervened in the industry treated such economic issues as free trade and the globalization of steel production in isolation from the social issues of the day--most notably civil rights and the implementation of affirmative action--Stein advances a larger argument about postwar liberalism. Liberal attempts to address social inequalities without reference to the fundamental and changing workings of the economy, she says, have led to the foundering of the New Deal state. |Using the steel industry to examine liberal policies and priorities after World War II, Stein shows that economic policy--not racial conflict--led to the feeble liberalism of the 1990s.

In the years during and after World War I the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey led what has been called the largest international mass movement of black people in the twentieth century. He and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), built a steamship line, sponsored expeditions to Liberia, staged annual international conventions, inspired many black business enterprises, endorsed black political candidates, and fostered the study of black history and culture.

Judith Stein has not written a conventional biography, though Garvey is the central character. The book is more a study of Garvey's ideology and appeal and of the UNIA and the social basis of its support. Stein examines Garvey's movement in light of the dialectic of race and class that shaped it. Whereas other historians have depicted Garveyism variously as a back-to-Africa, civil rights, or Black Power movement, Stein places Garvey and the UNIA carefully in the context of the international black politics and economics of the period. She analyzes the ways in which the UNIA was a response to the social and political upheaval of world War I and its aftermath. Garvey and other UNIA leaders were part of an international elite of blacks who applauded the triumph of capitalism, though they excoriated the new order's racial discrimination, which denied people like themselves places of prestige in it. Their response to exclusion from the mainstream Western economic world was to construct black institutions modeled on those of white elites. The Black Star Line, the UNIA's steamship company, was just such a venture, and though Garvey's goal of incorporating the black working class into his movement seemed promising briefly after World War I, it ultimately failed. The promise of Garveyism, supported by ideologies generated by the new social movements of the 1920s, was undercut by UNIA leaders' doomed effort to adapt a bourgeois mode of operation to a mass movement. Garveyism was fatally flawed by the ultimate disjunction of its elite methods and mass base.

In addition to her reevaluation of standard views of Garvey and Garveyism, Stein sheds new light on her subject with her use of new sources. Among the most interesting of these are her interviews with surviving Garveyites and reports on Garvey by agent of the federal government's intelligence organizations.

Judith Stein is the first historian both to take Garveyism seriously and to treat it in its own right as a product of its own time. The resulting study should be of great interest to anyone interested in Garvey, his historical period, or the ways in which his work and ideology still influence us today.