Catnip for policy wonks and political junkies, offering solid lessons for Democrats going forward.
A history of the Democratic Party’s late-20th-century shift from anti-poverty programs focused on redistribution and governmental support to policies reliant on entrepreneurship and the private sector.
Beginning in the 1970s, the Democratic Party began to abandon the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. These so-called New Democrats, writes political historian Geismer, “contended that the forces of banking, entrepreneurialism, trade, and technology, which had created the economic growth and prosperity of the 1990s, could substitute for traditional forms of welfare and aid and better address structural problems of racial and economic segregation. In this vision, government did not recede but served as a bridge connecting the public and private sectors.” With the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1984 by several colleagues of Gary Hart, who had just lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, the New Democrats worked to replace the party’s traditional constituencies of labor unions, African Americans, and low-income families with college-educated, nonunionized workers. Anti-poverty policies, moreover, would now emphasize market-based solutions, personal responsibility, and the social obligations of corporations—all ideas that permeated Bill Clinton’s administrations. Geismer deftly weaves politics with policy to show how the Democrats reimagined poverty as a market failure. “The New Democrats,” she writes, “were genuinely convinced that the market could improve the lives of poor people.” The author provides detailed descriptions of the people and ideas behind microloan initiatives, such as SouthBank in Chicago and the Southern Development Bancorporation in Arkansas; Empowerment Zones, “which used tax incentives to lure business into distressed areas”; work-oriented welfare reform; the mixed-income HOPE VI program, designed to replace public housing; and charter schools. At the end of the 20th century, however, the U.S. was more unequal than when the New Democrats began their quest, and post-Trump, the Democratic Party is once again searching for a politically viable and cohesive identity.
Catnip for policy wonks and political junkies, offering solid lessons for Democrats going forward.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5700-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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