When most people think about the 1970s, they’re likely to conjure up images of Watergate, oil shortages, disco, and outrageous hairstyles. When academic political historians have thought about the 1970s, they have tended to see the era largely as one in which the forces of conservatism gained strength, setting the stage for Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 and the subsequent decades of “neoliberalism,” in which both parties tended to agree that market forces needed to be liberated from the heavy hand of government.
But a new generation of historians argues that this reading shortchanges many of the Democratic politicians active in the 1970s and the years that followed, particularly the New Liberals. These were the people who wanted the Democratic Party to regain its political momentum by reforming liberalism as well as the party. The New Liberals included intellectuals like Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner, business figures like Felix Rohatyn and Robert Rubin, and politicians including Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and of course Bill Clinton, who arguably brought the New Liberal project to fruition by winning the presidency in 1992.
Henry Tonks, a historian at Kenyon College, has written a dissertation reevaluating the New Liberals. He argues that while they did pave the way toward the modern Democratic Party, they didn’t capitulate to Reaganism or repudiate their New Deal heritage. Rather, they tried to reinvent liberalism by adapting it to an economy that was becoming more globalized as well as less industrial and more reliant upon financial services and advanced technology. They embraced industrial policy and worried about whether America was falling behind its commercial rivals, particularly Japan. Tonks argues that while New Liberals didn’t correctly diagnose the changes to the economy in all of its particulars, their policy vision retains considerable relevance to today’s politics — and particularly the discussion around the Abundance movement.
Transcript
Henry Tonks: So I would say we need a Sister Souljah moment in 2025. We need a Sister Souljah moment directed against wealthy suburbanites, because at this point a lot of them are pretty loyal Democrats and will probably take a little bit of the heat.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Henry M. J. Tonks. He is a historian at Kenyon College, where he is a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department and the Center for the Study of American Democracy. And he is the recent recipient of a Ph.D. degree in history from Boston University, where he wrote his dissertation, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: Remaking American Liberalism in an Age of Crisis, 1972 to 1992.” Welcome, Henry!
Henry Tonks: Thank you so much, Geoff. It’s a pleasure to be here. Having read both of your books when I was in college a long time ago, it’s a real honor to speak with you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, you get extra merit badges for that, Henry. As you know, most of the people that I have on this podcast are the authors of recent books, generally not people who’ve recently written dissertations. I did have Josh Tait on a few years ago when he was not long out of grad school, but he was something of an exception that proves the rule. But I really wanted to talk to you because of the intrinsic interest of the subject of your dissertation, which I very much hope becomes a book in the fullness of time. I also think it’s extremely relevant inasmuch as there’s been a lot of talk lately, both in the scholarly discourse but also just in terms of the public dialogue, about liberalism, and the crisis of liberalism, and the end of the Clinton-Obama era, or perhaps even the end of the neoliberal order.
And your dissertation is just a superb analysis of the New Liberals. These are the people whom you call “a diffuse group of historical actors spanning formal party politics, academia and think tanks, journalism, and business, who collectively sought to reform liberalism and the Democratic Party,” starting in the 1970s and reaching some kind of culmination with the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992. I don’t think your dissertation is available online, but interested readers can find a condensed version of your argument in the article you wrote for American Affairs in February 2025 under the title “The Rise and Fall of the New Liberals: How the Democrats Lost Their Majority.”
Monty Python had a famous sketch depicting the All-England Summarize Proust Competition, in which contestants were required to give a summary of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in fifteen seconds or less, once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress. How might you summarize your dissertation, Henry, in somewhat more time than that and without the costume change?
Henry Tonks: Thank you. Well, I’ll see if I can do one summary in about fifteen seconds and then a longer one. I would say the super-short version is that in this period I look at, the ’70s to the mid-’90s, the Democratic Party’s center of gravity shifted from the union hall to the Whole Foods food court, but at the same time they didn’t leave behind the ambitions of New Deal-era and post-war liberalism. And I can go into the longer version than that if you would like, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: How about the two-minute version?
Henry Tonks: The two-minute-version sally… Well, you’ll see if I can stick to two minutes. But what I’d say is that an important bit of background for listeners is that there is a lot of interest in liberalism now, but among historians and I think other disciplines as well, it’s still the case that the right — the conservative movement, the Republicans — are far more studied than the Democratic Party and American liberalism. This has started to change in really only the last ten years or so, I would say, with a young generation of historians doing work on the Democratic Party.
But I think the overwhelming thrust of most of this historical scholarship is what I’d describe as the “liberal betrayal” narrative. And it’s essentially that in the exact period I’m writing about, the Democratic Party — for reasons we can get into in more detail later — engineers this kind of ideological transformation away from what you might think of as New Deal liberalism, might think of as post-war liberalism — “big government,” to use a caricature-type phrase, is often how we think of it… They engineer an ideological transformation away from that type of liberalism and into what people often call neoliberalism. And Bill Clinton is the big central figure of that narrative.
Now, I would describe that, as I said, as the “liberal betrayal” narrative. I think there is some truth in it. It has certainly filtered into popular writing and popular political commentary. And I’m really trying to push back against that dominant interpretation to an extent. And essentially, I would argue that these figures I call New Liberals sought to technologically upgrade the New Deal and postwar liberal state rather than move away from it in this sort of ideological transformation. I would say that what I tell is ultimately a story of, if not failure, then mixed results. By the mid-1990s, there is a kind of retrenchment of these New Liberals’ ambitions. But I’m fundamentally pushing against this idea that there is a betrayal or ideological rejection of New Deal liberalism.
Geoff Kabaservice: And when you talk about the New Liberals, who are some of the main characters you have in mind?
Henry Tonks: It’s useful to put names and faces to the term. The most famous one would be Bill Clinton. The other prominent elected politicians in the group would be Gary Hart, who hopefully some listeners are familiar with. The original title of my dissertation was “Monkey Business,” referring to the Gary Hart sex scandal; I was persuaded against this by my advisor at Boston University. Jerry Brown would be another very important elected politician; indeed, he came back in the 2010s as governor of California. Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas… And then the kind of outside-elected-office figures… The most famous today — and he’s done a turn away from his heritage — would be Robert Reich, who probably a lot of listeners are familiar with as a kind of diet Thomas Piketty-type figure, but he was the real in-house intellectual of the New Liberals at the time. Other intellectuals associated with them would be Lester Thurow, an economist; Ira Magaziner, a sort of management consultant/policy entrepreneur. And then there were business figures as well: Robert Rubin might be the most famous, Goldman Sachs chairman; Felix Rohatyn was another Wall Street figure associated with them. And then actually quite a few tech executives were associated with them, if not as closely bound into the political movement.
Geoff Kabaservice: We’ll get into some of those characters in a minute. But you ventured into typically British self-deprecation a minute ago when you denigrated your writing, but in fact you actually have emerged as a prolific commentator for a wide array of publications, including for the Niskanen Center’s online journal Hypertext, in the most recent issue of which you have a terrific essay on what might be thought of as the New Liberal backstory to the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government reform effort of the 1990s. You also had what I thought was a great piece in Compact magazine on Reagan’s being forced away from his free-market, free-trade ideology and into tariff protection measures during his presidency.
But I also wanted to ask you something about yourself. You have an interesting perspective on American politics by virtue of having spent at least most of your pre-graduate school career outside of the United States. So let me start by asking you to tell me something about your own backstory: your education, your family, and how you came to your interest in the subjects that you write about?
Henry Tonks: As listeners will presumably tell from my accent, I’m originally from the UK. I’ve lived permanently in the US since 2017, so I’m sounding more and more like William F. Buckley, I think. But I am originally from the UK. But the family story, really, and my personal story is actually how I got interested in this topic.
My mother is from southern Illinois originally, from a city on the Missouri-Illinois border called Granite City. And in a way, this is sort of how I got interested in the topic of liberalism’s transformation, because I grew up hearing at least a little bit from my mom about growing up in this industrial city in the Midwest, where she went to school with the children of steelworkers. My grandfather was this small-time insurance salesman; he would sell insurance to the steelworkers. And my mom said all of the people she went to high school with — at least all of the white people she went to high school with — had these middle-class lives on the basis of their parents’ blue-collar jobs. And she was puzzled about how this situation changed so markedly. Because if you went to Granite City today, the steel mill is operational again, I believe, after being idled for some time, but clearly the economy has been hollowed out by comparison to the early ‘70s when my mom was growing up there. And it used to be a pretty solidly Democratic congressional district, solidly Democratic county, and now it’s certainly, at the congressional level, very solidly Republican.
And my mom would tell me she was sort of confused or intrigued about how this situation arose. And in a way, my dissertation was partly an attempt to answer that question of what happened to post-war order that had sustained the economy but also had sustained the Democratic Party on the basis of the regionally dispersed industrial economy. And that’s how I found my way to my topic.
Before I went to BU to do my Ph.D., I did a master’s degree at the University of Missouri in Columbia at a center called the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. And initially, I thought I would study the Republican side of that political transition that I just described: the collapse of the postwar order, the decline of liberalism. I thought I would study something about the Republican side of that story. But I had a professor at Mizzou who had been Al Gore’s speechwriter in his misbegotten 1988 presidential campaign — even more misbegotten than his 2000 presidential campaign, I think you could say. And this professor said, “A lot of people are working on the right,” as in fact I said to you a few moments ago. “Not enough people are working on the liberal side of the story from the Democrats’ perspective.” So that’s how I found my way to the topic — really an attempt, I think, to sort of understand this family history on my own side.
And then I focused a lot more on what my protagonists, what the New Liberals said about industrial policy. I focused more on that, partly in the context of the Biden administration’s Bidenomics agenda: the Chips and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act. These parallels are things I’ve written about a little bit in the past year or so for Niskanen and other places.
So I really focused my dissertation on the question of industrial policy because to me there was a clear resonance or parallel between what the Biden administration was trying to do — and to a certain extent what the Trump administration claims that it’s trying to do, or certain members of it claim they’re trying to do — and the debates over industrial policy in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Geoff Kabaservice: So tell me about growing up in the UK.
Henry Tonks: Where to start? I mean, one of my students at Kenyon recently said, “When you grew up, were there people going door-to-door in your neighborhood selling scrap metal?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t grow up in a Charles Dickens novel.” I mean, it was a little bit better off than that. I grew up quite close to Cadbury World, where the best chocolate in the world is made, in a city called Birmingham — which is also the birthplace of modern municipal government, or so we claim. There’s something about an Abundance history, I think, with Joseph Chamberlain in late Victorian Birmingham in the late nineteenth century.
But anyway, growing up there… I mean, who knows where to start, really? I got interested in politics in the UK originally. I went to college in the UK, and I came at that from this intellectual interest in political thought more than a specific policy area. And then I lived in the UK for another three years after college before I moved to the US for graduate school. I worked in Westminster for about eighteen months at the British Parliament, and then I worked in local government for a little over a year back in Birmingham before I moved to the US. I normally go back once a year. But I think in terms of growing up in the UK, I’m not sure how distinct an experience I had. I didn’t go to Eton. Although I’ve been in an elevator with Boris Johnson, I didn’t know Boris Johnson personally. I’m not sure how much distinct about my UK experience that there is in the social sense.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, yes, I’m sure your students at Kenyon will be shocked to find out you didn’t fight with Churchill in the Blitz.
Henry Tonks: Yes, exactly. Although I would say that actually the part of the UK grew up in — Birmingham in the West Midlands — is not entirely dissimilar to the Midwest. I think there’s a kind of commonality with a frustrated or partial post-industrial transition. If you compare Birmingham to Chicago, where my American family lives now, Chicago is a more prosperous city, a much more prominent global city, but I think there’s some similarity with a not fully realized post-industrial transition, or some sort of growing pains about the search for an identity after the industrial economy has declined or been superseded. So there are some commonalities with where I came from in Britain and the topics that I study in the US, I would say.
Geoff Kabaservice: You and I saw each other in person about three weeks ago in Detroit at the conference of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. And Detroit strikes me as a kind of American Black Country, if you will: a place that hasn’t made the turn away from its past, rooted in the auto manufacturing industry, towards something distinctive and different. I mean, it looks better than it did a few years ago. There have been a lot of the old ruins pulled down in the center of Detroit in places like Brush Park. I must say I enjoyed my trip there. I enjoyed seeing you, I enjoyed attending the conference. I went to the Detroit Athletic Club and had a Last Word cocktail, which is one of the classic American cocktails that happened to have been invented right there. I went to the Michigan Grand Central Terminal, which used to be this kind of image of urban decay, which has now actually been beautifully restored. It was an interesting trip. But again, I would think that there would be some of that commonality in the post-industrial Birmingham to the post-industrial Midwest that you’re talking about.
Henry Tonks: Absolutely. I think, Geoff, I’d better clarify, in case people are perplexed or even disturbed by the phrase: When you said “Black Country,” that’s this term for an area of what is now the West Midlands — the West Midlands is a county where Birmingham is — it’s sort of outside Birmingham. My father was from a city in the Black Country called Dudley. So it refers to, I believe, the sort of pollution, essentially from coal production originally. That’s what that term refers to.
I think there is a lot of commonality. Detroit is the far less successful, actually. It’s probably good that you raised Detroit, because it’s far less successful in the post-industrial transition than Chicago. I think there’s absolutely commonality. I also think there’s commonality in the political contestation in parts of the former industrial Midwest — granted, not right in the urban cores themselves, which are as we know quite solidly Democratic. But I think this notion of parts of Michigan, parts of Wisconsin, parts of Illinois — it’s just that it’s overwhelmed population-wise by Chicago, so it’s a solidly blue state — but I think parts of these industrial Midwestern states are shifting to the right, and especially shifting markedly during the Donald Trump campaigns. I think there’s a clear parallel there with the part of the UK I grew up in. And indeed, a lot of the West Midlands where I grew up voted very heavily for Brexit in 2016, shortly before President Trump’s first election. I know that a lot of American and British commentators are keen to make the sort of Brexit-Donald Trump comparison. So I think there are a lot of commonalities.
I also think, if you’ll permit me to branch out a little bit, that what the political protagonists of my academic research, what the New Liberals thought they could do — and this is a point I would say where I diverge from some other historians — what I believe they thought they could do was actually engineer a kind of new version of a mass-employment, regionally dispersed, and productive economy based in more advanced higher-tech manufacturing, but very much manufacturing, not the sort of high-tech services we might associate with tech today.
And actually, I think you see in a lot of different Rust Belt cities the way in which the — “smooth” might be exaggerating, but the way in which the somewhat smooth transition that the New Liberals envisioned from the smokestack industrial economy to the so-called “sunrise” productive high-tech economy — you can see how that transition was really far more complicated and ultimately less secure than they envisioned.
So in the case of Detroit, at least from my knowledge, you have the long-term struggle to find a replacement for the auto industry. In the case of Chicago, I think you have, at the top-line level, a very prosperous transition to a sort of tourism and services-based economy under Richard Daley Jr. in the 1990s. And then if you take the example of Pittsburgh… Pittsburgh is, I think, often hailed as a kind of post-industrial success story, and I think in many ways it is. But you have this very dramatic employment transition from steel to lower-paid healthcare work. And it’s also, interestingly, a sort of gendered transition in the workforce from primarily male-dominated steel employment to often female-dominated healthcare services employment. There’s a great book about this called The Next Shift by a historian called Gabriel Winant that is very critical — more critical than some — of that transition, but he sort of traces it.
And I think if you take Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh — so-called Rust Belt cities — in the case of Detroit and Pittsburgh in now-totemic “swing states” that went, what…? Pennsylvania and Michigan with Trump-Biden-Trump. They are seen as the battlegrounds of the midterms and of the 2028 election. I think if you take those three cities, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, you see the way in which there was this variegated post-industrial transition and not the kind of clear step towards a high-tech version of the old industrial economy that I would say the New Liberals wanted to engineer and ultimately were not able to engineer.
Geoff Kabaservice: You had mentioned earlier that most people in the previous decade, and for a while before that, had been studying conservatism rather than liberalism. And this is especially true of the 1970s as a period. At Boston University, you studied with Bruce Schulman; I first encountered him when he co-edited a book of essays with Julian Zelizer called Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. And I saw that in your acknowledgements you also thanked Catherine Rymph at Missouri, and I came across her book on Republican Women at about that time too. And there was sort of an academical historical consensus a few years ago that what was most significant about the 1970s was the way in which it was the launching pad for the emerging conservative era. So what, besides a market opportunity for these understudied characters, made you want to study the New Liberals instead? What’s their significance now?
Henry Tonks: I would say just quickly that I think there’s no doubt that the conservative movement of the ’70s and ’80s was extremely politically powerful. I would not deny that Ronald Reagan, for example, was a transformational political figure, somewhat analogous to Franklin Roosevelt. But I think the position I’m starting from is that a lot of those earlier narratives would see conservative ascendancy, and then they would say there’s liberal or Democratic decline at the same time. And fundamentally what I’m getting at is rather than liberal decline per se, it’s liberal transformation. And this is indeed a point to name-check the doyenne of my subfield, the historian Lily Geismer. I think she was the first historian to make this point about “Let’s look at liberal transformation, not liberal decline.”
But in terms of the significance… I think first and foremost, I did not adopt this sort of presentist-type position in my dissertation, but I would say if you’re understanding the present, this is a good perspective to have. I would say you can’t really understand the political upheavals of the last ten years, or indeed, the last twenty years since the financial crisis — you can’t understand those political upheavals without understanding the way in which liberalism changed and the way in which its center of electoral gravity shifted away from what had been a more heavily unionized, lower-middle-class and working-class electorate.
You get — in the last ten years, especially pronounced — you get a kind of barbell-shaped Democratic electorate, with the lowest-income voters (although there was a degree to which that started to fracture in 2024) and then increasingly higher-income voters voting Democratic, so it’s this sort of barbell-shaped electorate. And I think you can’t understand the politics of today and the politics of the Trump era merely by looking at so-called conservative success. You have to look at what the Democrats, what American liberals did in this period.
And I would argue that in the mid-1990s, you have about one-and-a-half decades in which the New Liberal figures who I’ve been talking about — Clinton, Dukakis, et cetera — you have about one-and-a-half decades in which they are looking for a New Liberal agenda centered around this sort of industrial policy: quite interventionist state “marketcrafting” of the economy, to use a term that’s popular now. They think they can have a New Liberal agenda that will restore the Democrats to majority status based around industrial policy, based around government marketcrafting of the economy.
And in the mid-’90s, in the first two or three years of the Clinton administration, this agenda ultimately collapses. And what that produces — and this is critical to understanding the Democratic Party of today and therefore why the Democrats are struggling to respond to the populist moment — what that produces, I would say, is a combination of political transformation and policy stasis. So the New Liberals succeed — how intentionally they wanted to do this is up for debate — but they succeed in re-engineering the core base of the party. Now the Democrats’ real core constituency, and the people who supply it with its personnel, are professional-class liberals: more affluent, often cosmopolitan, definitely metropolitan voters and political leaders.
But at the same time as there’s this transformation of the Democrats’ base, this political transformation of liberalism, as they fail to embed their industrial policy agenda once they’re in office, you get a sort of system of policy stasis. Democrats essentially become content to more kindly and gently manage this new you could call it neoliberal economic settlement, where the US economy does tilt more towards services. There’s widening inequality or stratification between different regions of the US. And Democrats really focus heavily on redistribution rather than what is sometimes called predistribution. The less polite way to describe this… There’s a National Bureau of Economic Research paper with this title: “Compensate the Losers?” This is the approach the Democrats take to: “We can’t really market-craft the economy, so what we’re going to do is take the fruits of economic growth and redistribute them more fairly than the Republicans have any interest in doing.”
Now, I would say that there are a lot of economic analysts out there — some of whom like Gary Winslett or Matthew Yglesias are identified with the Abundance movement — who would say, “Well, actually that system worked quite well.” There was quite a bit of economic growth. Famously, Janet Yellen described the 1990s as The Fabulous Decade, with the longest uninterrupted period of economic growth since World War II, if not even longer than that. And I think it may well be. I’m not an econ person, I admit that. I say that I study political economy, which is what historians say they study when they can’t do math. It may well be that in terms of economic figures, this was a period of great prosperity.
But I would just say that if that worked so well politically, then why is it Democrats have not been able to muster a durable and resilient congressional or presidential majority really in the entire period that I study? Yes, they win the popular vote most of the time. When President Trump won in 2024, it was the first Republican popular vote victory since 2004, et cetera. But the Democrats haven’t crafted a durable, resilient majority. And clearly they aren’t succeeding in selling the benefits of “compensating the losers” to the voters who they need to win over. I think if you want to get a sense of how to craft an alternative political agenda that can start to rebuild a more durable series of political majorities, then I would argue you would want to look at why the New Liberals set out to develop a marketcrafting agenda, and then the long-term political issues that arose when they failed to develop that sort of political agenda.
And the final thing I’ll say before we come to another question is I do think it’s critically important to recognize that the New Liberals’ agenda around industrial policy was always about growth. Whether you debate the role of the government in the economy, whether you debate the benefits of bigger or smaller government, really what the New Liberals recognized was that the Democratic Party and liberalism had been successful when it was able to sustain a real growth agenda.
We think of the New Deal today often in terms of redistributionist programs: Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children or so-called welfare that’s overturned by Bill Clinton. But really the reason the New Deal instantiated this political majority that the Democrats were able to enjoy until the 1970s — even when there were Republican presidents, the Democrats controlled Congress, controlled a majority of governorships, often were able to push Republican presidents into a more liberal (so to speak) agenda — really the reason they had this majority was a regionally dispersed growth model. And so I think for liberalism to succeed again, and to answer the sort of political disaffection that you see among a lot of American voters in the populist era, they really need to work out how to implement a serious growth agenda that regionally disperses growth and jobs to more Americans.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s very well put, Henry. In historiographical terms, I see your dissertation as something of a shot across the bow of one of the more famous academic accounts published in recent years, which is Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. If I were to give a Pythonian summary of that work, it would be that if you were to take an Olympian view of American politics in the twentieth century and into the first decade of this century, you would see two basic political orders, which he defines as constellations of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shaped American politics in ways that endured beyond the flux of individual elections or two-, four-, six-year election cycles. And the first of these was the New Deal order, which of course arose in the 1930s and ’40s, reached its zenith in the ’50s and ’60s, and then fell in the 1970s. And then the neoliberal order, which rose in the ’70s and ’80s, crested in the ’90s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s.
And a key attribute of each political order was the ability of the ideologically dominant party to bend the opposing party into accepting its core principles. So the pivotal figure of the first order was Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican president who accepted the central principles of the New Deal order in the 1950s. And the pivotal figure of the second order was Bill Clinton, who accepted the central principles of the neoliberal order, the Republican Party’s preferences, in the 1990s, which is why Gerstle refers to Clinton as “the Democratic Eisenhower.” If this seems to you an accurate summary of Gerstle’s thesis, then how does your analysis dissent from it?
Henry Tonks: I think that is a very accurate summary of Gary Gerstle’s work, which it’s worth saying is extremely impressive. And I’m assigning his book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, as a kind of textbook for a seminar I’m teaching next semester at Kenyon. And that is an accurate summary of his work. Some historians have taken issue with his depiction of President Eisenhower; I think I won’t get into that now. I would say, as the owner of a pair of “I Like Ike” socks, my allegiance is with the liberal Republicans of yesteryear; I do feel quite fondly about them.
But I think that in terms of the period from the ’70s to the ’90s — when in broad terms Republicans have a growing amount of political power, when Reagan’s in the White House, Reagan has a Senate majority, et cetera — I think the premise of Gary Gerstle’s book, of saying that Clinton is the Democratic Eisenhower, would be saying that the impetus for New Liberals’ ideas are reactive to the conservative movement, that it’s a defensive response to the rise of Ronald Reagan. I disagree with that to a considerable extent. And I think the disagreement I have with it, which I’ll spell out now, also helps explain why the New Liberal agenda is retrenched in the way that I said it was, yielding this policy stasis.
So the short answer would be… I would say that the New Liberals were more afraid of Japan than they were of Ronald Reagan. There’s no doubt that they were alarmed by President Reagan’s election victory. A lot of Democratic figures realized that they had to maybe moderate on, for example, cultural appeals to try and win back the so-called Reagan Democrats. But the real impetus for New Liberals’ ideas around industrial policy, around a new growth strategy, was fundamentally fear of rising economic competition from the US’s Cold War allies, and in particular Japan.
Today, our memories of the 1980s often think of it as this optimistic time, this glitzy time. Even if there was social rot and growing inequality, there’s this sort of top-line growth and the optimism of the business class and that sort of thing: Gordon Gekko, greed is good, and everything. But in fact, not just in the early part of the 1980s — when there’s a recession from 1980 to 1982 — but really right through to the end of the Cold War, there’s a profound sense of anxiety among Democrats, among many Republicans, and among large sections of the business community around declining US industrial competitiveness: declining industrial competitiveness partly in so-called “sunset” sectors like automaking, steel, but also declining competitiveness in high-tech manufacturing; semiconductor chip-making is one example.
And the New Liberals who I look at, they understand that there’s a growing electoral threat from Republicans, but they really think the reason that Democrats are in trouble in the long term is that the industrial economy or the productive economy is losing ground to Japan, and that that will imperil the ability of Democrats to have a sustained growth agenda.
And so to get a little bit granular (Ezra Klein’s favorite word) for a moment, the key moment when New Liberals turn their ideas and their fears into a coherent agenda is 1981 to 1983, and they publish a series of policy papers in Congress drawing on expertise and input from Democrats in states as well, as well as academics and business figures. They publish a series of policy papers laying out their vision for a new Democratic agenda.
Now, I think if you took the view that the New Liberals are responding to Reagan, it’s an accommodation with the new Reaganite consensus, then you’d expect it to be a form of Reagan-lite or some kind of acquiescence to the supply side agenda. In fact, it’s all about a blueprint for serious industrial policy, and it’s explicitly modeled on the example of Japan and its Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI. All of these New Liberals really elevate that as the desired outcome, the desired sort of instantiation of their industrial policy.
And I would say that they’re being motivated by this competition with Japan, and the sense that they’re losing ground in terms of both sunset and sunrise industrial production to Japan, motivates them far more in terms of a long-term agenda than anything the Republicans are doing. And this fear isn’t only a phenomenon of the early ’80s. It fluctuates a little bit, but it really continues right through 1991.
So in, for example, 1983, the first part of the period I was talking about, you have a meeting of Democratic bigwigs in Washington to form a new industrial policy agenda. And the chairman of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca, who is a registered Republican, comes to this meeting and he says, “I believe in the free market, but I see what the Japanese are doing to me. We really need an industrial policy.” And you get a lot of high-tech manufacturing companies — Intel, Advanced Micro Devices — their leadership backs these ideas. They bankroll a series of California-based industrial policy groups chaired by Jerry Brown. And they, the business community, are pushing for this industrial policy agenda. And organized labor, as you can imagine, supports aspects of it as well.
By 1991, the New Liberals have still not retreated from competitiveness being their fundamental motivating concern. I think if you read some popular accounts of this period, and you read some popular accounts of the Clinton campaign, you would get the impression that Bill Clinton wins because he does shift towards Reagan. You often hear about this group called the Democratic Leadership Council, and a lot of commentators, whether hostile or positive about the DLC, say that’s where the action is. They move the party towards the middle, they move it in some way to become more centrist or center-right. Thomas Frank criticizes this and Matthew Yglesias sort of praises this, to take two examples.
In fact, yes, Bill Clinton, who wins the presidency, is the chair of the DLC. And yes, he makes some culturally more moderate or conservative rhetorical appeals. But the core of his real substantive agenda is still this industrial policy program. And in 1991, when the primaries are getting going in December 1991, Clinton and his big rival, Paul Tsongas, who is another New Liberal, they’re vying for the Democratic nomination. They’re on the campaign trail, and in Iowa, a journalist says to Tsongas, “We’ve got news that the Soviet Union has dissolved. The Cold War is now over. What do you think?” And of course, the Republican line would be, “The Cold War’s over and America won” — a unipolar moment of triumph. And Paul Tsongas says, “The Cold War is over and Japan has won.” So this anxiety about Japan, and this sense that the thing Democrats need to push back against is declining US productive competitiveness, is still really at the forefront of their minds.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me break in here and give you an example from my own history as well as my studies. I was for a number of years a kind of assistant to Amo Houghton, who was a nine-term moderate Republican member of Congress from upstate New York. He was first elected in 1986. He actually succeeded Democrat Stan Lundine, who you mentioned in your dissertation.
But before Amo became a US Representative, he had run his family business, which was then called the Corning Glass Works; it’s now Corning Inc. It makes the glass in your smartphone, among other things. Amo was the fifth generation of his family to helm the company. By the 1960s, when he was CEO, Corning’s major product was making the glass envelopes around television picture tubes. It was an enormously profitable business, and Corning had 125% of the US market; it had the extra 25% because of breakage. But it was essentially reduced to zero in the ’70s and into the ’80s by what Amo regarded as dumping and other unfair trade practices by the Japanese.
And I think that was part of it. But it was also the fact that once upon a time after World War II, America’s industries bestrode the world like a colossus because so many other countries’ productive capacity had been wiped out during the war. And there were major what you’re calling “sunset” industries — these major heavy industries like auto, steel, and chemicals — that were operating in highly concentrated conditions where they had little competition. And so they didn’t modernize, they didn’t innovate, they allowed their internal management to ossify. And then when competitors arose from overseas, principally from Japan and Germany, these corporations were exposed because their foreign rivals in many cases offered better products and lower prices, and that was a deadly combination.
And the response across the ’70s, ’80s, into the ’90s that you’re talking about, on the one hand, is a domestic story, which is about the trend toward maximizing shareholder value; the wave of corporate restructuring (including mergers, hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts); the disappearance of long-established companies like Gulf Oil, or Bendix, or RCA. But there’s actually another Japanese angle to this, which is that many American corporations adopted a Japanese frame of management, which usually went under the name of Total Quality Management. And this is really part of what allowed them to dig out from under a hole.
And it’s interesting, because there’s a way to bracket this period. In 1980, there’s this NBC program called “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” — where the American business analyst W. Edwards Deming is talking about the Japanese quality control and their methods of total control management. But then even by the early ’90s… You’re a film buff, so I think you might know the 1993 film Rising Sun, which is about how Japan is nefariously taking over America. And the funny thing is that by that point, Japan has entered what will be a decades-long period of stagnation, and yet it is still seen as this major threat — in a sense, as you say, kind of inheriting the Soviet threat.
Henry Tonks: Well, there’s an awful lot to pick up on there, Geoff. One interesting note is that Amo Houghton was elected in 1986, but actually there are Republicans who are supportive of the industrial policy agenda earlier in the 1980s; Amo Houghton himself is not in office, but they’re very similar people to him. John Heinz, for example, another sort of inheritor of a family company in a Rust Belt part of the US…
Geoff Kabaservice:
A Republican Senator from Pennsylvania…
Henry Tonks: Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, yes, heir to the Heinz Ketchup fortune. He is a big supporter of industrial policy. John Danforth from Missouri — also an inheritor, of a pet food company in his case — a supporter of industrial policy in this period. So they’re very similar to the sort of moderate, more patrician-type Republicans like Amo Houghton who support it.
But your point about Japan’s “lost decades,” to pick up on that, is the crucial point about how this industrial policy agenda goes into eclipse. And again, I think reinforcing the way in which I disagree with the Clinton-as-Democratic-Eisenhower thesis, a number of factors happen in the early ’90s, between ’91 to ’95, to send this industrial policy agenda into eclipse and to produce the policy stasis I mentioned before. I think we could get onto more of them in a moment, because they’re all useful and resonant with today. But one of the key factors is Japan’s economic stagnation, “the lost decades.”
I think the exact time when one dates this can vary, but to try and boil down quite a complicated story, there’s something in 1985 called the Plaza Accord that basically depreciates the US dollar. The overvalued US dollar is seen as driving the US balance of payments crisis — I wrote about this in this Compact piece that you mentioned before — and Plaza depreciates the dollar. Japanese direct investment in US assets, especially real estate assets, then explodes in the later part of the ’80s.
Geoff Kabaservice: And there was that panic: “Oh my God, the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center! They’re buying these Hollywood studios!”
Henry Tonks: They bought Rockefeller Center to borrow a film, Die Hard. I quote in my dissertation, this idea of this Japanese company owning this sort of skyscraper in Los Angeles while also manufacturing all these high-quality electronics goods, provokes panic. And then basically, Japan’s real estate bubble, if I understand it correctly, bursts around the turn of the ’80s into the ’90s, and that’s when Japan’s economic stagnation — the lost decades, as they’re called — begins.
But the consciousness of this really doesn’t seem to penetrate into the US fully for a couple of years. And when President Clinton comes into office, he has some of his Department of Commerce team, led by a guy called Derek Shearer, lead the efforts to manage strategic trade with Japan, to try and open up more of the Japanese market to US manufactured exports. And I think it’s really ’94, ’95 when widespread awareness that Japan is economically stagnating really percolates and grips the US political establishment. It takes several years.
And it’s around that time, I think, that the effect of this is: Why should we create a new industrial policy modeled after Japan when Japan is stagnating? It’s interesting, of course, that you note the ways in which US business executives maybe had already borrowed certain ideas from Japan. To take another example of public-private government-business collaboration, you get the creation of something called SEMATECH in 1987, which is a partly publicly funded research and development consortium within the semiconductor chip industry. This is signed into law by Reagan, but a lot of pressure for it comes from New Liberal types like Tim Wirth and Dick Gephardt in the US Congress, and also from companies like Intel and its chairman, Robert Noyce, who is then the chairman of SEMATECH.
So you’ve already had some business-led efforts to emulate or learn from these Japanese examples that I would argue certainly are not unsuccessful. And SEMATECH, I think a lot of analysts say, does help power US innovation in the design if not the manufacture of semiconductor chips. So I would say that the argument that Japan’s lost decades should have discredited industrial policy — I don’t buy that argument. But certainly the effect of it is to discredit elite political interest in industrial policy.
And I hate to put one of your esteemed Niskanen colleagues on blast, but there’s a really interesting article from 1998 in the Cato Institute’s journal co-written by Brink Lindsey, he of the state capacity movement, called something like “Revisiting the ‘Revisionists.’” And it basically looks at Japan’s lost pecades, implies that the stagnation was due to Japanese industrial policy — which it was not, as far as I know — and basically says, “This should put to bed the dreams of people like Lester Thurow and Robert Reich and James Fallows that we should emulate Japan.”
So I think you really see in the mid-to-late ’90s that because of Japan’s stagnation, the New Liberals’ industrial policy agenda is profoundly discredited. And I think that that goes to show that even more than competition or advance from Republicans, the New Liberals had really pinned a lot of their vision to this idea of keeping up with Japan, competing with Japan. And once that so-called threat goes away, I think you see the rapid discrediting of the New Liberals’ interest in industrial policy.
Geoff Kabaservice: I will be sure to ask Brink about that the next time we talk. Just parenthetically, as you know, I spend way too much time thinking about the composition of the American elite. If I’m remembering correctly, Derek Shearer was part of the Yale class of 1968. His best friend was Strobe Talbott, who married Derek’s sister, and then Strobe Talbott went on as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford where he roomed with Bill Clinton, which is why they all ended up in that administration.
But there’s actually something on this question of industrial policy where I want to call attention to a quote you had which I think is worth mentioning. It’s from your dissertation. You said, “New Liberals understood the Reagan Revolution to be a significant proximate threat to their party. But they believed that global competition” — in other words, this Japanese threat we’re talking about — “was a long-term, genuinely existential threat to liberalism. This was because they considered liberalism’s political and electoral prospects to rely on the health of the US productive (i.e., industrial) economy.” That’s an interesting quote. Are you suggesting that these New Liberals still, in the back of their heads, had this model that “We have to be the party of the workingman in the factory, or else liberalism is done for”?
Henry Tonks: Yes, that’s interesting. And incidentally, I would like in a moment to return to the point about Shearer and the Rhodes Scholars, because I think this is something we should get back to before the end. But it’s interesting, Geoff. You’re tempting me to disagree with myself, I suppose. I think it’s a complicated question because I don’t think the New Liberals… I mean, they were themselves overwhelmingly from this so-called professional class that’s on the rise. And whether they’re born into this professional class background, or plucked from the ragged edges of the lower middle class by the intercession of elite institutions of higher education like Bill Clinton, they are creatures of this new sort of professional, highly educated, meritocratic class.
It’s hard to say whether they thought the Democratic Party would continue to be the party of the blue-collar worker in the factory. My interpretation would be that it’s almost more that they think that there will be maybe a higher-educated workforce that becomes an electorate, but that a lot of the workers and voters of tomorrow would still be employed in productive industries. That would be how I would envision it.
I do think that the concerns that President Trump harnessed around working-class resentment of elite Democrats is, I think, a genuine thing, and that there is a kind of New Liberal posture of condescension to a lot of ancestral Democratic voters. I won’t deny that that is a genuine phenomenon. I think it’s more that they really earnestly believed that the future of the US economy was still in productive industries, and that these industries could have mass employment. It would look different to the Democratic-voting blue-collar workers of before. But I do think they believed that these new forms of productive sectors would have something like mass employment.
And I’m glad you gave me the opportunity to mention this, because I think it’s a critical point. I think one crucial miscalculation or misunderstanding maybe that the New Liberals make in the 1980s is that they don’t understand the changing nature of the American workforce. In the 1980s, the US adds something like 90 million new jobs. 75% of those new jobs are in retail and services — and I don’t mean financial services; I mean healthcare services and other types of service-sector work. And I think the New Liberals are asleep at the wheel about these changes in the American workforce. I would say they believe that employment gains will continue to be concentrated in blue-chip productive industries, it’s just that the industries will be higher-tech. They’ll be more research-intensive. They won’t be the smokestacks of previous years.
I think they really seriously miscalculate and they don’t perceive the employment shifts that are actually happening. And this is why the Pittsburgh example that I mentioned before is instructive: it’s a shift from steel to care work. It isn’t a shift from steel to mass-employment, high-tech production. Even though clearly a lot of Pittsburgh’s top-line prosperity today is driven by high-level scientific and medical research and development, that isn’t where the job growth is.
One illustration of how New Liberals make this miscalculation is in 1993, 1994, when you get Bill Clinton’s efforts to enact healthcare reform, so-called “Hillarycare.” And the architect of this is Ira Magaziner, who is one of the big industrial policy gurus and a major admirer of Japan from the previous decade. And one thing that the Clinton administration seems to believe is that they’ll get mass business buy-in to healthcare reform, and the reason they think that is that they have signed up to support it, companies like Chrysler and companies like IBM — which is in trouble in the early ’90s, but is obviously still a major tech manufacturing player.
And in fact, a key vector of opposition to healthcare reform comes from, well, ironically Clinton’s previous benefactors — Walmart, Tyson Foods — and then a lot of fast-food franchises, Hilton Hotels. They oppose it because they have non-unionized, lower-paid service and retail workers, and they don’t want to shell out for their healthcare.
And the Democrats, I think, fundamentally misunderstand that the fact they have buy-in from these blue-chip manufacturers, both high-tech and sunset — that isn’t where the center of gravity in the American workforce is anymore. And so the healthcare reform is stymied by business opposition, because they fail to get the new companies that dominate employment, they fail to get them on board for healthcare reform.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me ask a question here which is a little bit general. I know that you’re interested in the Abundance movement. I’m sorry that you couldn’t get to the Abundance 2025 conference in DC a few months ago. It’s a paradox of this period that in the 1970s especially there are crosscurrents going in both directions that you’re describing here. Jimmy Carter, for example, is seen as the last president of the New Deal era, and yet in some ways he actually is very sympathetic with what will become described as neoliberalism. Of course he famously deregulates the trucking and the airline industries and is moving in that direction.
Jerry Brown is somebody who, as governor of California, identified with the New Liberals and was in sync generally with this deregulatory idea. And yet it’s actually in this period that California starts to accrue all of the regulations and zoning and things of that kind that will make it ultimately impossible to build in California. And for this reason, California is actually very much at the center of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance analysis, because as Derek has put it, “Democrats should be able to say, Vote for us, and we’ll make America like California. And instead, Republicans can say, Vote for Democrats, and they’ll turn America into California.”
So how do you reconcile what really seems like the fading of the Hamiltonian impulse (to use Mark Dunkelman’s term) and the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian impulse in the person of these New Liberals with the fact that they actually want to build factories or revive factories and put Americans back into more jobs that could come about as a result of building things?
Henry Tonks: Incidentally, if I may say something about Jerry Brown, he does have a sort of deregulatory mien or demeanor, But when he’s governor, he creates something called the Office of Appropriate Technology that is designed to get government funding to technological innovations and then deploy them within government. And I would point your listeners to the work of a brilliant historian at UC Davis called Daniel Castaneda. He’s written about this before, and he’s currently writing about California politics in this period that you’re talking about more broadly.
It is a paradox, how you place the figures I’m talking about in conversation with the sort of procedural kludge that the Abundance movement critiques. I think, frankly, it is a juxtaposition that I haven’t fully teased out in my own head about how those things coexist. I would say that there is a profound fear among the New Liberals I look at about being identified with older forms of big government. So a recurring thing you see them do, that I trace in my dissertation and other things I’ve written, is they’ll say things like, “Don’t worry, we’re not doing big government.” But then they’ll have these proposals that resemble, to quote Paul Tsongas, “Leaner but more activist government,” which I think is a very Abundance-friendly phrase that Paul Tsongas uses.
I think the first way that I’d square that circle is to say that sociologically, almost all of these New Liberals come from this highly college-educated, often New Left-inflected background. And so I think a lot of the figures driving the rise of procedural kludge — figures like Ralph Nader — they aren’t New Liberals, but they’re from the same background, and so there is an element of New Liberal sympathy to some of their critiques of the excesses of the New Deal state.
It’s a tricky question to answer, but I think another way that these things combine is that on the one hand, New Liberals had this industrial policy vision. On the other hand, they were often very invested in issues like consumer choice, environmental quality, and that sort of thing. And I think basically, it may almost be because that part of the movement succeeds legislatively and is congruent with Republicans’ desire to delegitimize government. I think that sort of catches on, and the other part of their agenda fails to catch on.
It’s an imperfect answer, but I think the fundamental problem comes back to the failure of the industrial policy vision and the success of the Naderite critique of government. I don’t think that the figures I look at would want to produce the kind of procedural kludge — to borrow a phrase from your interviewee Misha Chellam, how the California Environmental Quality Act becomes a Swiss Army knife for blocking development. I don’t think they’d want to have seen that happen. I think it’s unintended consequences. Frankly, I think most historians would argue that these are often unintended consequences.
I think it’s undeniable that the push towards procedural kludge — making it harder for government to do things, protecting citizens from government power — I think it’s undeniable that that impulse emanates from the same kind of highly educated, socially liberal segment of society that the New Liberals come from. But I would have a hard time believing that New Liberal figures like Dukakis and Tsongas and even Clinton — I would have a hard time believing that they would have wanted that to be the outcome, if that makes sense.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, I agree with you. In an effort to move toward closing, I suggest we talk about three figures who appear throughout your book. One of them is Bill Clinton; one of them is Paul Tsongas, who you mentioned earlier, the representative and then Senator from Massachusetts; and the third is Jesse Jackson, who’s not exactly a New Liberal, but who is somebody whom you were describing as having some overlap, maybe more than we think.
Now, of course, Clinton is somebody we know about, and there have been a number of recent and very hostile histories of the Clinton presidency whose attitudes are reflected in their titles: Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center by Ed Burmila. A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein.
But Paul Tsongas was the Senator in Massachusetts from ’79 to ’85 (preceding John Kerry), ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1992, won the New Hampshire primary but then ended up losing the nomination to Bill Clinton. Tsongas comes across as much better than Clinton here, and better than the Democratic Leadership Council, too. Do you think that an Earth 2.0 where Tsongas not Clinton won the presidency in 1992 would be a different world, a better world?
Henry Tonks: Well, I will say that the editor of an academic journal article I published recently was talking about revisions with me, and he said, “You seem to be on some sort of one-man mission to rehabilitate Paul Tsongas’ reputation.” I’d also say that the professor I mentioned before, Jeff Pasley, who taught me at Mizzou, who’d worked for Al Gore — I remember him saying to me, “I knew a lot of people who worked for Paul Tsongas, and none of them seemed to find him as interesting as you do.” So I can’t quite account for my fondness for him.
But I think on an Earth 2.0 where Tsongas becomes president… It’s interesting to contemplate what would have happened. I mean, to mangle a Marxist quote, “Men make history, but not in circumstances of their choosing.” I think the structural factors I described — the changing nature of the American workforce, the decline of Japan as competitive threat, and also the unleashing of globalization with the end of the Cold War — I think those factors were beyond the ability of any single political leader or group of political leaders to control.
And in fact, you’ve said that Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein’s book, A Fabulous Failure, is hostile, but actually it’s less hostile than some historical scholarship about Clinton. And they take seriously the intellectual credibility of the figures who I’m also writing about. I really recommend that book. It’s quite subtle in its depiction of these figures.
I think in an Earth 2.0, where Paul Tsongas by some miracle managed to defeat Bill Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then became president, I think it is highly plausible that there would have been a more serious industrial policy-style investment instead of the kind of initial emphasis on fiscal retrenchment that you see in the first year and a half of the Clinton administration. A Fabulous Failure and Lily Geismer’s book Left Behind put this as a bit of Robert-on-Robert violence: There’s Robert Rubin advocating for fiscal retrenchment, and there’s Robert Reich advocating for industrial policy-style investment. I personally would say it’s very plausible that a Tsongas presidency would have done something resembling Bidenomics in the early ’90s. Before Noah Smith gets annoyed that I’m being favorable about Bidenomics, I hasten to add that we had a very different economic picture in 1993 than we had in 2021, and I think a more prudent form of Bidenomics then would not necessarily have overheated the economy in the way that we saw in 2021.
But yes, I do think that a Tsongas presidency actually would have been likely to undertake that sort of investment and not reprioritize around fiscal retrenchment in the way that the Clinton administration did. I think healthcare reform, if Tsongas would have pushed something like that, it would always have run into this problem I identified earlier with the changing nature of the American workforce. I think Japan’s decline would always have discredited some of the bolder ideas that you saw emanating from the New Liberals.
And I ultimately think that 1994, the Republican Revolution led by Newt Gingrich, when Republicans retake the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades… I think some of that is due to electoral backlash to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, which I think plausibly you can say… I’m persuaded that NAFTA had net top-line economic benefits, not harms, but I think politically there’s no doubt that it angered a lot of ancestrally Reagan Democrat-style Democratic voters. Tsongas was a big supporter of NAFTA, so I think we would’ve had passage of NAFTA with or without Clinton. I do think there would have been more industrial policy-style investment than there was under Clinton.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me add something about Tsongas. I was glad to see your bigging-up of Tsongas, because he was actually my Congressman.
Henry Tonks: Wow.
Geoff Kabaservice: Not that I was old enough to vote at the time, but I grew up a town over from Lowell, which was his hometown. I’m not sure I would characterize “the Lowell miracle” in quite the same terms that Tsongas did. Lowell was an old mill town, whose mills had fled South in the 1950s. Actually, my grad school roommate, David Koistinen, whose book you cite, did a lot of work on this. And in the 1970s, Lowell looked horrible. It did eventually rebuild itself in some ways. A lot of those old mills are now lofts, because that’s kind of the way things have gone. And Lowell also took in an enormous number (by the standards of the day) of refugees from Cambodia in the wake of the genocide there, and Lowell really seemed to have regenerated itself through immigration, in a way that you do see with other towns.
Massachusetts is also a bit strange. It’s the most educated state in the country. It essentially came back to prosperity, largely I would say through a combination of having the most educated population in the country as well as certain companies like Wang Laboratories, which did a lot for Lowell’s economy — and then Route 128, a sort of pre-Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley, a set of electronics firms and the like. I’m not quite sure that that model could have been replicated nationally, but it did point the way toward what the Democratic Party has become.
Henry Tonks: Yes. And really interested listeners, if they want to hear even more from me… I published an article this year in a journal called Modern American History all about the Lowell experiment and Paul Tsongas’ efforts to revitalize it.
I am skeptical of anyone saying there is one single model that can be replicated in a country as complex as the United States. And frankly, I think that one of the dangers of turning Abundance into a movement is you don’t want to over-index on the San Francisco Bay Area. You need regional as well as ideological varieties of Abundance, and you needed regional as well as ideological varieties of the Democratic Party in this period. So I agree that it’s hard to generalize from one single model to a national scale.
But I would say that another key reason that Lowell has, compared to other similar cities — perhaps not Bethlehem, Pennsylvania but compared to, say, Flint in Michigan, Kalamazoo in Michigan, or Lawrence in Massachusetts nearby Lowell — one reason Lowell has sustained its revitalization better than similar cities I think is actually the presence of the National Historical Park and sustained federal investment — sustained public-private partnership essentially. I’m trying to insert the “public” back into “public-private partnership” and not just see it as a case of privatization.
I think there are some lessons from Lowell, but I certainly think it is a bad idea to think you can simply magnify one area of success to the national level. With that being said, I hope you do get to ask me a couple of things about Jesse Jackson. But yes, I would say in conclusion that I think that a Tsongas presidency would have likely involved a more prudent version of Bidenomics three decades before we saw Bidenomics. But there would still have been NAFTA, there would still have been the difficulties with healthcare reform, there would still have been the decline of Japan.
And tragically, Paul Tsongas died quite young in 1997, so there is a sense of irony in which I could imagine a world in which he becomes president and is succeeded by Vice President Bill Clinton after he sadly passes away. So we could still well have got a Clinton presidency even if he’d won the presidency.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me just parenthetically add that Lowell is where James Whistler, the American painter, was born, and his home is actually now a museum. You can visit it. It’s excellent. And Lowell was also the setting for the 2010 film, The Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg, which I think also shows Lowell to good advantage.
So yes, let me ask about Jesse Jackson. In your dissertation, you’re in a way juxtaposing the DLC to Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition. And you seem to prefer the latter to the former, whereas I prefer the former to the latter. So tell me about why the one comes off not so well and the other quite well in your account, if I’m reading you correctly?
Henry Tonks: Oh, Geoff, we’ve been furiously agreeing — now at last a disagreement! I would say that is accurate to an extent, but I would say I think when it comes to the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Council, my core aim with evaluating the DLC is actually to deemphasize their centrality to the Democratic Party’s transformation. They really loom large in a lot of accounts, and I am trying to somewhat deemphasize them. And the piece you generously mentioned I wrote for Niskanen about Reinventing Government explains some of why I think they need to be deemphasized.
I would say it isn’t so much that I’m saying, “Oh, Jesse Jackson is this great hero and the DLC’s a great villain.” I would say I’m really concerned with giving a more complex account of Jesse Jackson. I don’t know how familiar listeners are with Jesse Jackson, but he was a civil rights activist, ran for president twice, and really was a remarkably successful Black candidate for the presidency. In 1984, he shocked a lot of people by running a lot more competitively against Walter Mondale (this Democratic establishment figure) and Gary Hart (a New Liberal) — he ran far more competitively against them than people expected.
And I would say that to the extent that Jesse Jackson remains a very well-known public figure — he was extremely famous in the ’80s and ’90s — to the extent he remains a very well-known figure, I think there’s almost a tendency to say Jesse Jackson is the antecedent to Bernie Sanders. There’s a book by the journalist Ryan Grim called We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC. That sort of sums up the view of Jesse Jackson.
It’s not so much that I’m saying he is simply this great figure. It’s more I would say he anticipates where the Democratic Party actually is going more than he anticipates Bernie Sanders and the left populists of today. And the reason I say that is that Jesse Jackson, if you look into his presidential campaigns, and especially the second one in 1988, he’s really offering a form of socioeconomic uplift via economic empowerment. There’s a famous quote he gives before he’s a politician in the 1970s, when he says something like, “We’ve worked for civil rights, and now we need our silver rights.”
And Jesse Jackson — yes, he’s a movement figure. He is a lifelong civil rights activist. He’s famously at Martin Luther King Jr.’s side when he’s assassinated in Memphis. But he is also a profound believer in the ameliorative power of enterprise and capitalism. And in 1984, his campaign is a little bit adopted by a real left-wing movement, including then-Burlington mayor Bernie Sanders. But I would say that Jesse Jackson really had this vision of a genuinely multiracial, cosmopolitan meritocracy that is not the vision of today’s populist left.
I don’t think it’s easily accessible online, but it’s published in a book called Straight from the Heart that Jackson edited: He has a debate with Charles Murray in 1987 just as he’s about to run for president again. And you can read Charles Murray’s condescension dripping through the page. Charles Murray essentially sets off by trying to say, “All you believe in is government handouts,” and all of that. And Jesse Jackson completely runs circles around him. He dresses him down and explains how he has this much more nuanced view of government working in partnership to stimulate local community-driven enterprises and economic uplift. And the decidedly cosmopolitan, meritocratic, socially liberal Democratic Party of the twenty-first century — I think in a profound way that is Reverend Jackson’s party just as much as it is Bill Clinton’s party or Paul Tsongas’ party.
Geoff Kabaservice: I believe that that Jackson-Murray debate was reprinted in Harper’s magazine under the title “What Do We Owe the Poor?” And it is very worth seeking out. I have my issues with seeing Jackson as an agent of meritocracy, but that’s sort of a different question. And I also fully admit that we’re all a mixture of liberal and conservative in different ways and different measures. One of my major parts of conservatism is academic conservatism. I have a very hard time getting beyond Jesse Jackson leading a 500-strong crowd at Stanford University in 1987, shouting, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.” I realize he’s referring to the Western Civ required course, not Western civilization as such, but still…
Henry Tonks: Yes, you make a fair point. And if I could just conclude quickly, Geoff, I think in the interest of shouting out our colleagues, there’s a really brilliant book — it won the Pulitzer Prize — called Franchise by the historian Marcia Chatelain. And that book is a rare example of treating Jackson somewhat more similarly to how I treat him. I think he’s a very significant figure, but I think he’s often presented simply as this left-wing antecedent to Sanders and AOC. There’s a new book out by Abby Phillip from CNN that goes along that line: “Jesse Jackson walked so that AOC could run.” And I think he’s a lot more complex than that. I accept your point that no one’s perfect, of course; I didn’t mean to suggest anyone is. But I think I’m trying to push back a little bit against this received wisdom of him as simply a left-wing populist figure.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree that he’s a complicated figure. And for all that he was presented as the foil to Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, Jackson was welcome in the Clinton White House. And you do point out that, for example, his affinities to Black capitalism and entrepreneurialism is also what commended him to some of the moderate Republicans in earlier decades. So I agree with you on that.
I think the difficulty, however, is that the left, seeing so much it doesn’t like about neoliberalism, is actually in some danger of underrating Bill Clinton. I should know this, but I believe he was the first Democratic candidate to win back-to-back reelections since — Roosevelt? And he also, I’m pretty sure, was the last Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson to win a plurality of the white vote, and then also the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of white non-college-educated voters.
And to be honest, in a lot of what you’re talking about with the New Liberals’ interest in industrial policy and building productive enterprise, we see the long tail of the New Deal and can understand all the more how Democrats suffer when they cannot win the working class — when they have alienated the working class to the point that they’re no longer just alienating the white working class, they’re alienating an entire multicultural, multiracial working class. And so I think that Clinton, although he is also a complicated figure, his story and that of the DLC holds some lessons that perhaps even the left wing of the Democratic Party ought better to appreciate.
Henry Tonks: There are some lessons to the left. And actually I would say that there is a very useful and perhaps unexpected tie-in of the politics of Abundance and Bill Clinton, which I hope your listeners might find interesting. So you mentioned the Sister Souljah moment… To cut a long story short, Bill Clinton criticizes inflammatory remarks by the rapper and activist Sister Souljah, and he does so at a meeting of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
Now, if you looked that up and read the sort of standard left-wing Nation magazine gloss on it, it would be: “Bill Clinton does this to show he’s not a creature of Black voters and especially of Jesse Jackson.” There’s some truth in that. But it’s important to note the reason Clinton has the credibility, so to speak, to criticize Sister Souljah is that in the Democratic primaries in 1992, he was overwhelmingly more popular among Black Democratic voters than his competitors. For example, in the Maryland primary in 1992, Paul Tsongas cleans up in all of these wealthy suburbs (regardless of the racial composition of the suburbs), and Clinton cleans up in the Maryland primary basically on the backs of lower-income African-American voters. So the reason he has credibility to do the Sister Souljah moment is that basis of support.
And I think there’s a counterintuitive lesson there for the politics of Abundance. I think it’s easiest to challenge your own side, or to politically signal distance from your own side, when you’re distancing yourself from the constituency that is most loyal to you. I think there’s something in there about Abundance advocates. We know that upscale, suburban, college-educated voters are increasingly a Democratic bedrock. And so I think actually there is political space to challenge affluent, metropolitan NIMBYs precisely because those are ever-more loyal Democratic voters.
There was that line from figures of the 2000s: “Where else do working class voters have to go?” — and Democrats found out, to their cast, that the answer was Donald Trump’s Republican Party. I think for the foreseeable future at least, you could ask: “Where else are bougie NIMBYs going to go except the Democratic Party?” And I think there’s space to challenge those sorts of homeowner association interest groups and know that at least for the next few election cycles, as long as it may take to implement reforms, they aren’t going to abandon the Democratic Party.
So I would say we need a Sister Souljah moment in 2025. But unlike maybe Matthew Yglesias, I would say we don’t need a Sister Souljah moment directed against the activist left. We need a Sister Souljah moment directed against wealthy suburbanites, because at this point a lot of them are pretty loyal Democrats and will probably take a little bit of the heat.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s an article I’d like to see. And Henry, this is why I brought you on the program, because you’re just that smart and original. So thank you so much again for joining me on the program. And congratulations again on your dissertation, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: Remaking American Liberalism in an Age of Crisis, 1972 to 1992.”
Henry Tonks: Thank you so much, Geoff. It was a real pleasure to be on.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to The Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@NiskanenCenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC.
