Thomas Frank: Bill Clinton's Five Major Achievements Were Longstanding GOP
Objectives
Sunday, 15 May 2016 00:00 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
Bill Clinton, standing between Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, taking
the oath of office of president of the United States on January 20, 1993.
Clinton ran for president as a champion of the working class, but largely
abandoned their economic interests while in office - preferring Wall Street
to Main Street -- beginning with his signing of NAFTA. (Photo: White House)
What is the core philosophy of today's Democratic Party and does it serve
anyone's interests other than a wealthy elite? Thomas Frank lays bare
Democrats' abandonment of their purported values -- and the role this has
played in entrenching economic inequality -- in his sardonic new book,
Listen, Liberal. Order your copy by making a donation to Truthout today!
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, discusses the Hillary Doctrine's
basis in neoliberalism, how the Democratic Party stopped governing on behalf
of the working class and how President Bill Clinton's major achievements
actually enacted conservative goals, and ultimately hurt working people.
Mark Karlin: The innovation class, the creative class, the wealthy class,
the professional class with Ivy League degrees: How did President Obama
become the avatar for believing these groups should be the decision makers
in government?
Thomas Frank: Obama thinks such people should be in charge because they came
up through the same system as him. "Because he himself was a product of the
great American postwar meritocracy," his biographer Jonathan Alter writes,
"he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had
ascended."
Most of our other Democratic leaders (the Clintons, for example) came up the
same way and believe the same thing. Indeed, what Alter describes is
standard-issue stuff for Democrats these days. The Democrats are a class
party in the fullest sense of the phrase, and the class whose perspective
they reflect and whose interests they serve is the highly educated,
white-collar professional class. Theirs is a liberalism of the rich.
Can you describe a little about what you call "The Hillary Doctrine,"
including how microlending is a good example of her belief in opening doors
of entrepreneurship to solve the world's economic problems?
The Hillary Doctrine was Clinton's understanding of American national
interest when she served as Obama's secretary of state. The idea was that
the US would henceforth be the world's defender of women and girls. Hillary
didn't mean this in a general sense, however. The kind of women we were
committing ourselves to specifically were female entrepreneurs.
Thomas Frank. (Photo: Bonkeeyi)The source of this notion of liberation
through female entrepreneurship is the microlending movement, in which
Hillary has been an enthusiastic participant for many decades. It arose as
part of neoliberalism in the 1990s: The IMF [International Monetary Fund]
and World Bank would "structurally reform" a country's economy, and to help
out with the human dislocation that resulted, they would give microloans to
small entrepreneurs, who were encouraged to start tiny businesses like
gardening or handicrafts. Over the years, the microlending movement accreted
all these details: The entrepreneurs had to be women. They had to be hooked
up to a bank. They had to have a Western mentor. They had to have
smartphones. And so on.
You can see the appeal of this movement: It's telling you that the solution
to poverty is not unions or government or anything like that, but for
everyone to work hard and start their own businesses -- and, incidentally,
to extend the reach of Western financial institutions to every village on
the planet. A pure win-win. Everyone feels good. Everyone feels virtuous.
Except for the people who live in those countries, of course, because they
know it doesn't work. You don't build a country's economy by having everyone
buy a goat and sell milk to one another. All these people have to show for
this strategy is debt. Some empowerment.
I was captivated by your description of Hillary Clinton being surrounded by
a "microclimate of virtue." Can you describe what you mean by that and how
it was represented in your section, "No Ceilings," that included Melinda
Gates and a panel to show how much women in power "cared" for poor women? I
love your sardonic description, "the presenters called out to one another in
tones of gracious supportiveness and flattery so sweet it bordered on
idolatry."
Every biography of Hillary Clinton talks about her goodness, her
high-mindedness, her rock-solid dedication to principle. Reading those
books, I couldn't imagine what they meant, since Hillary is as much of a
shape-shifter and a compromiser as any other politician.
When I saw her in person, however, it all made sense. It was at a Clinton
Foundation event, as you mention. Everyone took their turn on the stage,
praising everyone else, in the highest and most gracious forms you can
imagine. There was an almost intoxicating sense in the room of the goodness
and virtue of everyone present, with Hillary herself anchoring the swirl. It
must be hard for someone who wasn't there to believe, but these people
seemed to regard her with an idealism that was almost cult-like.
The exaggeration of it all showed me that this sense of virtue is not only
central to Hillary Clinton's appeal, but to liberalism generally. This is a
movement that has done tremendous harm to minorities and working people over
the last few decades, and yet liberals have such an elevated sense of what
fine people they are. It is a precious self-image.
You trace the modern abandonment of working men and women by the Democrats
to a book by Fred Dutton in 1971. Can you explain the tome and its
implications?
Dutton was a high-ranking Democratic Party official who later became a
prominent Washington lobbyist. Among other things, he served on the McGovern
Commission, which worked to reorient the Democratic Party away from labor
and working people. Dutton's book was called Changing Sources of Power, and
it was sort of an explanation of why the McGovern Commission did what it
did. Basically, Dutton was one of those establishment people who were simply
bowled over by the sheer righteousness of the youth movements of the 1960s
-- something I also found a lot of in the advertising industry in my first
book, The Conquest of Cool. The kids were so wise and so profound, Dutton
thought. They had brought politics to a whole new philosophical level. And,
meanwhile, as everyone could see, working people were so backward and so
ugly, supporting the Vietnam War and all that stuff. Of course you wanted to
ditch one group and embrace the other.
Given what was going on back then, it's easy to understand why Dutton felt
as he did. He wasn't totally wrong about blue-collar workers and the Vietnam
War, for instance. But turning your back on the concerns of working-class
organizations for whatever reason meant turning your back on their issues,
with consequences that are all too clear today.
You argue the abandonment of labor by the Democrats came to full fruition in
the two administrations of Bill Clinton? How did Clinton who came from a
working-class upbringing eventually betray the workers of the United States?
First of all, I'm not so sure about his background. It is true that he came
from a very poor state, and that his family struggled, but Clinton's
biographers always emphasize that he wasn't really of the working class: He
always drove a new Buick, etc.
Clinton never had a really great relationship with workers' organizations,
but the worst thing Clinton he did to them was NAFTA. There were many trade
agreements, of course, but NAFTA was the one that mattered, both because it
was the first one and because labor put everything into stopping it. Indeed
labor had stopped it when George H. W. Bush tried to get it through
Congress. Clinton got it done, however, with a little muscle and a vast fog
of preposterous claims about how NAFTA would increase exports and
manufacturing employment.
His admirers saw NAFTA as his "finest hour," because he had stood up to a
traditional Democratic constituency. What an achievement. NAFTA handed
employers all over America the ultimate weapon against workers: They could
now credibly threaten to pick up and leave at the slightest show of worker
backbone -- and they make such threats all the time now.
How did the Clinton administration become a surrogate of Wall Street,
resulting in the far-reaching repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act?
In 1992, Clinton ran as a populist, deploring income inequality, but that
was just an act. As president he seems immediately to have decided to cast
his fortunes -- and those of his party -- with Wall Street. Bank
deregulation was a persistent policy of his from the very beginning -- he
signed the Riegle-Neal Act in 1994, for example, and the Mexican bailout (a
big favor to Wall Street) came shortly thereafter. Along the way, he helped
bail out a too-big-to-fail hedge fund, he twice appointed Alan Greenspan to
run the Federal Reserve and he ensured that certain derivative securities
would not have any kind of federal supervision at all.
At the time, Clinton's admirers thought this record was something to boast
about. He had brought his party out of the Rooseveltian dark ages and had
embraced modernity, etc.
Why did he do it? My explanation is simple class identification. Clinton's
real class story has to do with his career in college and graduate school,
where he became a star of the rising professional cohort. People with this
kind of background saw (and still see) Wall Street as a part of the
enlightened world, a part of the world inhabited by people just like them.
They're so smart! Plucking wealth from thin air!
This is a little off message regarding the book, but can you speculate why
the Republicans were so obsessed with removing Clinton from office when he
was fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda, including negotiating with Newt
Gingrich about cutting Medicare and Social Security?
"Fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda": That is a point worth reiterating.
Clinton had five major achievements as president: NAFTA, the Crime Bill of
1994, welfare reform, the deregulation of banks and telecoms, and the
balanced budget. All of them -- every single one -- were longstanding
Republican objectives. His smaller achievements were more traditionally
Democratic (he raised the earned-income tax credit and the minimum wage),
but his big accomplishments all enacted conservative wishes, and then all of
them ended in disaster.
So why did the right try so hard to get rid of him? For one thing, because
they always do that. They never suspend the war or stop pushing rightward.
There is no point at which they say, "OK, we've won enough." For another,
because Gingrich couldn't control the rank and file, a problem that persists
to this day.
The final conservative consequence of the impeachment, although this one was
surely not intended: impeaching Clinton made him a martyr and hence a hero
to Democrats. It secured his family's and his faction's grip on the
Democratic Party apparently forever.
You write in your last chapter: "And every two years, they [the Democrats]
simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of
the nation to their standard." That sure sounds to me a bit like Hillary
Clinton's basic pitch (paraphrased): "I'm not going to get a lot done
because that's reality, but I'll be sitting in the Oval Office instead of
that demagogue Trump. So vote for me." Any resonance there?
That is exactly how I meant it, although of course I couldn't see that Trump
was going to be the GOP nominee when I was writing the book.
Is the Acela Express the main transportation route between lawmakers,
regulators, lobbyists and financiers?
The Acela runs between Washington and New York just a little bit faster than
the ordinary Amtrak train. It costs much, much more, however. Because once
you're on that Acela train, you're instantly in the secured precincts of the
tidy and prosperous professional class. All these nicely dressed people
typing away on their keyboards. People looking over spreadsheets. People
reading management books and talking management talk. People flattering each
other. People shushing each other in the quiet car. Shushing each other so
vehemently I once saw a quiet car dispute almost turn into a fistfight. It
is literally the express train of the class war. Every sort of narcissism
and upper-class social pathology is on full display.
A few weeks ago on the Acela train, I sat near a man who seemed to be some
sort of Hillary Clinton adviser. He was talking very loudly on his cellphone
about her latest TV commercial, about how she was finding her own voice,
which sounds banal but which I guess is a good thing to do if you want to be
president of the United States.
When you end with a rather pessimistic notion that the betrayal of the
Democrats in power will not easily change, you state "that the problem is
us." Who are you referring to as "us"? Liberals? How does the Bernie Sanders
movement that came near to toppling Clinton Inc. fit into your answer?
"The problem is us" in the sense that liberalism is dominated by a certain
class outlook and that I am part of that class. I am calling on other
members of that class to look in the mirror and understand who they are --
that they are just as much products of their economic position as are the
blue-collar workers they so hate. In particular, I am calling on them to
understand that they aren't the fine and virtuous people they believe they
are. That it is because of them that inequality is out of control, that Wall
Street is wrecking the world, that middle-class America is falling apart.
And that they have an obligation to do something about it.
I like to think that Bernie is saying the same thing, in his own way.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
MARK KARLIN
Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and
publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010.
BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary
five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed
"war on drugs" to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also
interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout's
Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin
conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and
innovative advocates on a weekly basis for 10 years. He authored many
columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.
RELATED STORIES
Thomas Frank Talks With Truthout on How Wall Street Doubled Down on Trashing
America's Economy
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
Thomas Frank on Money in Politics
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co. | Report
None of the Bankers Think Hillary Clinton Believes Her Populism, a Financial
Journalist Wrote
By Thomas Frank, Metropolitan Books | Book Excerpt
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Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Thomas Frank: Bill Clinton's Five Major Achievements Were Longstanding GOP
Objectives
Sunday, 15 May 2016 00:00 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
. Bill Clinton, standing between Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton,
taking the oath of office of president of the United States on January 20,
1993. Clinton ran for president as a champion of the working class, but
largely abandoned their economic interests while in office - preferring Wall
Street to Main Street -- beginning with his signing of NAFTA. (Photo: White
House)
. What is the core philosophy of today's Democratic Party and does it
serve anyone's interests other than a wealthy elite? Thomas Frank lays bare
Democrats' abandonment of their purported values -- and the role this has
played in entrenching economic inequality -- in his sardonic new book,
Listen, Liberal. Order your copy by making a donation to Truthout today!
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, discusses the Hillary Doctrine's
basis in neoliberalism, how the Democratic Party stopped governing on behalf
of the working class and how President Bill Clinton's major achievements
actually enacted conservative goals, and ultimately hurt working people.
Mark Karlin: The innovation class, the creative class, the wealthy class,
the professional class with Ivy League degrees: How did President Obama
become the avatar for believing these groups should be the decision makers
in government?
Thomas Frank: Obama thinks such people should be in charge because they came
up through the same system as him. "Because he himself was a product of the
great American postwar meritocracy," his biographer Jonathan Alter writes,
"he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had
ascended."
Most of our other Democratic leaders (the Clintons, for example) came up the
same way and believe the same thing. Indeed, what Alter describes is
standard-issue stuff for Democrats these days. The Democrats are a class
party in the fullest sense of the phrase, and the class whose perspective
they reflect and whose interests they serve is the highly educated,
white-collar professional class. Theirs is a liberalism of the rich.
Can you describe a little about what you call "The Hillary Doctrine,"
including how microlending is a good example of her belief in opening doors
of entrepreneurship to solve the world's economic problems?
The Hillary Doctrine was Clinton's understanding of American national
interest when she served as Obama's secretary of state. The idea was that
the US would henceforth be the world's defender of women and girls. Hillary
didn't mean this in a general sense, however. The kind of women we were
committing ourselves to specifically were female entrepreneurs.
Thomas Frank. (Photo: Bonkeeyi)The source of this notion of liberation
through female entrepreneurship is the microlending movement, in which
Hillary has been an enthusiastic participant for many decades. It arose as
part of neoliberalism in the 1990s: The IMF [International Monetary Fund]
and World Bank would "structurally reform" a country's economy, and to help
out with the human dislocation that resulted, they would give microloans to
small entrepreneurs, who were encouraged to start tiny businesses like
gardening or handicrafts. Over the years, the microlending movement accreted
all these details: The entrepreneurs had to be women. They had to be hooked
up to a bank. They had to have a Western mentor. They had to have
smartphones. And so on.
You can see the appeal of this movement: It's telling you that the solution
to poverty is not unions or government or anything like that, but for
everyone to work hard and start their own businesses -- and, incidentally,
to extend the reach of Western financial institutions to every village on
the planet. A pure win-win. Everyone feels good. Everyone feels virtuous.
Except for the people who live in those countries, of course, because they
know it doesn't work. You don't build a country's economy by having everyone
buy a goat and sell milk to one another. All these people have to show for
this strategy is debt. Some empowerment.
I was captivated by your description of Hillary Clinton being surrounded by
a "microclimate of virtue." Can you describe what you mean by that and how
it was represented in your section, "No Ceilings," that included Melinda
Gates and a panel to show how much women in power "cared" for poor women? I
love your sardonic description, "the presenters called out to one another in
tones of gracious supportiveness and flattery so sweet it bordered on
idolatry."
Every biography of Hillary Clinton talks about her goodness, her
high-mindedness, her rock-solid dedication to principle. Reading those
books, I couldn't imagine what they meant, since Hillary is as much of a
shape-shifter and a compromiser as any other politician.
When I saw her in person, however, it all made sense. It was at a Clinton
Foundation event, as you mention. Everyone took their turn on the stage,
praising everyone else, in the highest and most gracious forms you can
imagine. There was an almost intoxicating sense in the room of the goodness
and virtue of everyone present, with Hillary herself anchoring the swirl. It
must be hard for someone who wasn't there to believe, but these people
seemed to regard her with an idealism that was almost cult-like.
The exaggeration of it all showed me that this sense of virtue is not only
central to Hillary Clinton's appeal, but to liberalism generally. This is a
movement that has done tremendous harm to minorities and working people over
the last few decades, and yet liberals have such an elevated sense of what
fine people they are. It is a precious self-image.
You trace the modern abandonment of working men and women by the Democrats
to a book by Fred Dutton in 1971. Can you explain the tome and its
implications?
Dutton was a high-ranking Democratic Party official who later became a
prominent Washington lobbyist. Among other things, he served on the McGovern
Commission, which worked to reorient the Democratic Party away from labor
and working people. Dutton's book was called Changing Sources of Power, and
it was sort of an explanation of why the McGovern Commission did what it
did. Basically, Dutton was one of those establishment people who were simply
bowled over by the sheer righteousness of the youth movements of the 1960s
-- something I also found a lot of in the advertising industry in my first
book, The Conquest of Cool. The kids were so wise and so profound, Dutton
thought. They had brought politics to a whole new philosophical level. And,
meanwhile, as everyone could see, working people were so backward and so
ugly, supporting the Vietnam War and all that stuff. Of course you wanted to
ditch one group and embrace the other.
Given what was going on back then, it's easy to understand why Dutton felt
as he did. He wasn't totally wrong about blue-collar workers and the Vietnam
War, for instance. But turning your back on the concerns of working-class
organizations for whatever reason meant turning your back on their issues,
with consequences that are all too clear today.
You argue the abandonment of labor by the Democrats came to full fruition in
the two administrations of Bill Clinton? How did Clinton who came from a
working-class upbringing eventually betray the workers of the United States?
First of all, I'm not so sure about his background. It is true that he came
from a very poor state, and that his family struggled, but Clinton's
biographers always emphasize that he wasn't really of the working class: He
always drove a new Buick, etc.
Clinton never had a really great relationship with workers' organizations,
but the worst thing Clinton he did to them was NAFTA. There were many trade
agreements, of course, but NAFTA was the one that mattered, both because it
was the first one and because labor put everything into stopping it. Indeed
labor had stopped it when George H. W. Bush tried to get it through
Congress. Clinton got it done, however, with a little muscle and a vast fog
of preposterous claims about how NAFTA would increase exports and
manufacturing employment.
His admirers saw NAFTA as his "finest hour," because he had stood up to a
traditional Democratic constituency. What an achievement. NAFTA handed
employers all over America the ultimate weapon against workers: They could
now credibly threaten to pick up and leave at the slightest show of worker
backbone -- and they make such threats all the time now.
How did the Clinton administration become a surrogate of Wall Street,
resulting in the far-reaching repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act?
In 1992, Clinton ran as a populist, deploring income inequality, but that
was just an act. As president he seems immediately to have decided to cast
his fortunes -- and those of his party -- with Wall Street. Bank
deregulation was a persistent policy of his from the very beginning -- he
signed the Riegle-Neal Act in 1994, for example, and the Mexican bailout (a
big favor to Wall Street) came shortly thereafter. Along the way, he helped
bail out a too-big-to-fail hedge fund, he twice appointed Alan Greenspan to
run the Federal Reserve and he ensured that certain derivative securities
would not have any kind of federal supervision at all.
At the time, Clinton's admirers thought this record was something to boast
about. He had brought his party out of the Rooseveltian dark ages and had
embraced modernity, etc.
Why did he do it? My explanation is simple class identification. Clinton's
real class story has to do with his career in college and graduate school,
where he became a star of the rising professional cohort. People with this
kind of background saw (and still see) Wall Street as a part of the
enlightened world, a part of the world inhabited by people just like them.
They're so smart! Plucking wealth from thin air!
This is a little off message regarding the book, but can you speculate why
the Republicans were so obsessed with removing Clinton from office when he
was fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda, including negotiating with Newt
Gingrich about cutting Medicare and Social Security?
"Fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda": That is a point worth reiterating.
Clinton had five major achievements as president: NAFTA, the Crime Bill of
1994, welfare reform, the deregulation of banks and telecoms, and the
balanced budget. All of them -- every single one -- were longstanding
Republican objectives. His smaller achievements were more traditionally
Democratic (he raised the earned-income tax credit and the minimum wage),
but his big accomplishments all enacted conservative wishes, and then all of
them ended in disaster.
So why did the right try so hard to get rid of him? For one thing, because
they always do that. They never suspend the war or stop pushing rightward.
There is no point at which they say, "OK, we've won enough." For another,
because Gingrich couldn't control the rank and file, a problem that persists
to this day.
The final conservative consequence of the impeachment, although this one was
surely not intended: impeaching Clinton made him a martyr and hence a hero
to Democrats. It secured his family's and his faction's grip on the
Democratic Party apparently forever.
You write in your last chapter: "And every two years, they [the Democrats]
simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of
the nation to their standard." That sure sounds to me a bit like Hillary
Clinton's basic pitch (paraphrased): "I'm not going to get a lot done
because that's reality, but I'll be sitting in the Oval Office instead of
that demagogue Trump. So vote for me." Any resonance there?
That is exactly how I meant it, although of course I couldn't see that Trump
was going to be the GOP nominee when I was writing the book.
Is the Acela Express the main transportation route between lawmakers,
regulators, lobbyists and financiers?
The Acela runs between Washington and New York just a little bit faster than
the ordinary Amtrak train. It costs much, much more, however. Because once
you're on that Acela train, you're instantly in the secured precincts of the
tidy and prosperous professional class. All these nicely dressed people
typing away on their keyboards. People looking over spreadsheets. People
reading management books and talking management talk. People flattering each
other. People shushing each other in the quiet car. Shushing each other so
vehemently I once saw a quiet car dispute almost turn into a fistfight. It
is literally the express train of the class war. Every sort of narcissism
and upper-class social pathology is on full display.
A few weeks ago on the Acela train, I sat near a man who seemed to be some
sort of Hillary Clinton adviser. He was talking very loudly on his cellphone
about her latest TV commercial, about how she was finding her own voice,
which sounds banal but which I guess is a good thing to do if you want to be
president of the United States.
When you end with a rather pessimistic notion that the betrayal of the
Democrats in power will not easily change, you state "that the problem is
us." Who are you referring to as "us"? Liberals? How does the Bernie Sanders
movement that came near to toppling Clinton Inc. fit into your answer?
"The problem is us" in the sense that liberalism is dominated by a certain
class outlook and that I am part of that class. I am calling on other
members of that class to look in the mirror and understand who they are --
that they are just as much products of their economic position as are the
blue-collar workers they so hate. In particular, I am calling on them to
understand that they aren't the fine and virtuous people they believe they
are. That it is because of them that inequality is out of control, that Wall
Street is wrecking the world, that middle-class America is falling apart.
And that they have an obligation to do something about it.
I like to think that Bernie is saying the same thing, in his own way.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Mark Karlin
Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and
publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010.
BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary
five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed
"war on drugs" to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also
interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout's
Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin
conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and
innovative advocates on a weekly basis for 10 years. He authored many
columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.
Related Stories
Thomas Frank Talks With Truthout on How Wall Street Doubled Down on Trashing
America's Economy
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | InterviewThomas Frank on Money in Politics
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co. | ReportNone of the Bankers Think Hillary
Clinton Believes Her Populism, a Financial Journalist Wrote
By Thomas Frank, Metropolitan Books | Book Excerpt
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