Peter Beinart of The New Republic has written up a useful history lesson in a defense of Bill Clinton, who in recent years has been criticized by some liberals for having emptied the Democratic party of its principles. Beinart responds by asking us to look at the legacy that Clinton inherited when he took office:
By draining the party of its core convictions, the critics allege, he left Democrats in the intellectual wasteland in which they find themselves today.The charge ignores two small things: the 1970s and the 1980s. In reality, the Democratic Party didn't lose the confidence of its convictions when Clinton became president; it lost them when he was in graduate school. From Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stood for three basic things: enlightened anti-communism, an expanding welfare state, and racial integration. Between 1968 and 1972, under pressure from Vietnam and racial conflict, two of those three collapsed. By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism and advocating racial quotas. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson's Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three.
From 1976 to 1992, each Democratic presidential nominee tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together, and each failed, until Clinton. Carter ran on character--as a decent, capable man who embodied the small-town virtues forsaken by Richard Nixon. And it worked--until economic recession and the hostage crisis stripped him of his reputation for competence and left him ideologically naked.
In 1984, the Democrats nominated Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, who looked like a prisoner of the party's fractious, multicultural factions. While serving numerous parochial interests, his campaign never defined any broader national one. As one Mondale speechwriter admitted, "We had a hell of a time putting down on paper what this campaign was going to be all about."
In 1988, Michael Dukakis barely even tried. "This election is not about ideology," he declared. "It's about competence." And, when Lee Atwater shrewdly invoked cultural issues like crime and the Pledge of Allegiance, which required not merely technocratic solutions, but statements of belief, he crumbled.
This, like it or not, is the history that preceded Clinton. He did not create liberalism's crisis of faith; he inherited it. And, in 1992, he became the first candidate in two decades to offer a coherent response. His adviser Bill Galston called it the "politics of reciprocal responsibility." Government would provide opportunity, but it would demand responsibility in return; it would not give something for nothing. This idea--manifested in Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it"--angered some liberals. But it told blue-collar whites that Democrats would distinguish between people who "played by the rules" and those who didn't. (Clinton's tough stance on crime sent the same message.) By the time Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996, the public's image of government was changing. When people thought of the beneficiaries of government help, they were more likely to think of people like themselves.
If Clinton convinced Americans that government action could be moral, he also convinced them that it could be responsible. By reducing the budget deficit, he helped restore the Democratic Party's reputation for economic stewardship, which had been gravely damaged under Carter. And, by using market mechanisms to achieve traditional liberal goals, he found ways to fight poverty in an environment where large new programs were politically impossible.
To be sure, Clinton sometimes bobbed and weaved. But these two principles--the willingness to make moral judgments (think of school uniforms or the V-Chip) and the recognition that social justice does not always require new programs (think of Al Gore's reinventing government)--were the most important intellectual innovations in the Democratic Party in two decades.
And the results of all of this? They're impressive:
Clinton's 1993 decision to cut the budget deficit rather than propose substantial new spending helped lay the groundwork for an extraordinary economic boom. And, unlike the boom of the '80s, Clinton's genuinely benefited the poorest Americans. Under Ronald Reagan, 50,000 children escaped poverty; under Clinton, more than 4 million did. During Clinton's tenure, income rose faster for blacks and Latinos than for whites, and faster for single mothers than for two-parent families. By 2000, black and Latino poverty were at their lowest levels ever recorded.And it wasn't only the economic boom. Clinton raised the minimum wage, he created SCHIP, which offered health insurance to children of the working poor, and he dramatically expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). These initiatives rewarded work, and none required large new government bureaucracies. But, on the ground, they changed lives. When Clinton left office, the poverty rate was 11 percent. But, as Ronald Brownstein has noted, when you factor in government policies, especially the larger EITC, it dropped to 9 percent. During Clinton's presidency, the percentage of Americans living in poverty fell by one-quarter. And, without particular policies based on a particular vision of government, that would not have happened. Morally and intellectually, Clintonism wasn't a miserable failure; it was a success.
We certainly haven't seen similar results in the past six years.
The printer-friendly version of Beinart's article is available here.
