This essay is the first part of an exchange with historian Nelson Lichtenstein. Read responses 2, 3, and 4.
Is it really necessary to debate progressives again over Bill Clinton’s legacy? With a vengeful Donald Trump thrashing about our political waters like a blood-frenzied shark, it seems like a distraction.
What’s more, the left’s revisionist history of the Clinton years strikes me as a facile exercise in presentism—reinterpreting the past to score present-day ideological points. Nonetheless, the “neoliberal” legend seems to be gaining currency outside the activist and academic circles from which it sprang.
In a widely noted speech last April, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan took errant potshots at Clinton’s trade policies by way of touting the Biden Administration’s turn to industrial policy as a bold new departure in economic philosophy. Rolling out Bidenomics in July, President Biden confusingly described it as a rejection of the “trickle-down economics” that has supposedly held sway for the last 40 years—a period that includes the eight years of the Obama-Biden Administration.
