Clintonism

You know, all of a sudden, newspapers are all about it.

And I remember, I mean, I think this is a Clintonism situation.

It's the economy, stupid.

Somewhere in there, we have, as you suggested, pushed our attention to this is what matters.

Putnam is often invoked as someone who is seen as a prophet of the sort of problem of social disconnection or social disorganization as we know it today.

And my ambition in the book is really to, I think, validate part of Putnam's hypothesis and also diagnosis to say that despite the very, I don't want to say positivist, but at least sort of pluralist political language in which it counts, the very dubious political affiliations Putnam himself had with Clintonism in the 1990s, there is a rational core to his analysis, which I think transcends the specific audience he was writing for, and that is actually also of strategic import to the left.

And so far as if you read it seriously, because there is obviously also just a data side to the story that's important in that he gathers all the data, thereby clarifies just how severe and how dangerous some of these developments are, no matter what side of the ideological spectrum you're coming from.

And my ambition was really to retell or reframe that story as driven by more firmly materialist factors.

It's not just Secr- former Secretary Hillary Clinton.

If you hear Obama speak, if you hear any of the, any of the Clintonian or Obamaian aides speak, i- there's a level of competence there that is simply absent from competencies and skillsets in our current government.

It makes me feel nostalgic, but we shouldn't feel nostalgic.

That is sh- would be the baseline.

That sentiment starts to take off, and I think, you know, that continues to be quite predominant all the way through debates about Libya and Syria in the early 2010s and the Obama administration.

And that gets a little bit to the adjective that you used to describe particularly this Clintonian foreign policy and later the, a lot of the grand strategies that would come, transformative.

The boundaries of American strategy were ideological In nature rather than necessarily purely its national interest, its security.

Primacy is, is a goal in and of itself because it's what makes the liberal international order go.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's, there's been some great stuff written about this, um, Jacob Heilbrunn on the rise of the neoconservatives, for example, or James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, which, which kind of get into those factional dynamics because there were, there were multiple camps inside that sort of emerging Bush administration, folks who were more, let's say, you know, like, Brent Scowcroft-style Bush Senior, you know, realist Republicans.

And again, that doesn't mean that they were dovish necessarily, but they were not as transformative, I think, as some of these others, sort of Cheney and then the neoconservative wing, much more comfortable with these ideas that the US could, could change the world.

And I've always found the commonalities between sort of the Clintonian liberal internationalists and the, the, the Cheney-style neoconservatives or Bill Kristol at the time.

They're actually-- They have a lot in common, right? They don't necessarily agree on the ends.

Like whether you're talking about the democratisation of the family that really arguably starts... with the movement for women's suffrage in the 1920s, like go through a radical phase in the 70s with women's liberation, or whether you're talking about the democratisation of the state or the democratisation of society through greater social equality, they're all kind of reactions against that.

And then one of the things that is quite confusing to people analytically, like when New Labour and Clintonism start to emerge, is the fact that certainly there are aspects of Clinton's project and New Labour's which are still very authoritarian and in Clinton's case even explicitly racist.

But there are other aspects which seem to be offering a kind of break with the social conservatism of that new right project.

They're less jingoistic.

As I argued in part one, the Third Awokening faded partly because the Clinton era absorbed liberal left professionals into the expanding world of education, NGOs, policy work, media, and professional administration.

Clintonism treated education and credentialing as the solution to the social wreckage left by Reagan era restructuring, but that solution also planted the seeds of the next crisis by overproducing graduates whose expectations could not survive the jobless recovery after 2008.

The system solved one elite overproduction problem by manufacturing the next one.

This also helps explain why anti-woke politics became less electorally potent around 2022 and 2023.

you know, the Clinton, the 90s, man, I mean, you know, you know, politics didn't matter in a certain way.

It seemed to cease to matter because, oh, everybody agrees that Republicans and Democrats are the same when it comes to, you know, economics and, you know, Clintonism and neoliberalism and, Oh, George W. Bush, yeah, I didn't vote for him, but whatever.

I mean, the intense politicization that perhaps came too late, certainly did for the Democrats, was not a thing.

And of course, that's one of those big changes in the last quarter century and between those books.

In the overall political scene, it's Trump's and his captive GOP's neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats, both corporate and progressive, who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.

The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn't work.

We're sick of partial corporate and billionaire aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handled by our government as part of the commons.

Trying to get affordable health care to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us regardless of how many of us die.