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Mar 25, 2025

Headline: Michael Lind: Trump represents a nationalist tradition that goes back to Nixon’

Sub-headline: Despite his inconsistencies, the American president has always criticized free trade and the American military umbrella. For four decades, he has described the United States’ allies as parasites, highlights the Texan writer and academic.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/03/23/michael-lind-trump-represents-a-nationalist-tradition-that-goes-back-to-nixon_6739441_23.htmlEditor: These Lind paragraphs are insightful :

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The Nixon-Connally strain of American economic nationalism was carried on in the 1990s by Connally’s fellow Texan Perot, like Trump a billionaire businessman who ran for the presidency twice, in 1992 and 1996. Perot denounced the North American Free Trade Agreement for allowing US automobile companies to transfer production from well-paid, unionized workers in the US to low-wage labor in Mexico. Perot complained that the Japanese and other allies had “picked our pockets” and declared that as president he would charge both Japan and Germany $50 billion [$114 billion in today’s dollars] to repay the US for the cost of defending them

In the 1992 presidential campaign, Perot received nearly 20% of the popular vote – more than any third-party party since former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt ran as the Progressive candidate in 1912. Nevertheless, following Perot’s defeats in 1992 and again in 1996, the US foreign policy establishment treated neo-Nixonian economic nationalism as a discredited doctrine favored only by marginal figures on the far right like the pundit and failed presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan – who had been a Nixon aide.

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Editor: As an Amrican I’m familier with Michael Lind ‘He is a fellow of the center-left think tank New America’ ! And its CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter a Clinton Fellow Traveler. Here is Lily Geismer on the evolution of The Neo-Liberal Democrats, while not a complete History, it offers enough valuable insights, that renders the Clinton Betrayel of the New Deal Tradition about politcal opportunism!

Democrats and Neoliberalism

Lily Geismer

The fallout from the 2016 election has created many surreal moments for historians of American politics and parties, but surely one of the oddest has been the introduction of the term neoliberal44 into the popular discourse. Even stranger still is that it has become a pejorative largely lobbed by the left less at Republicans and more at Democrats.45 As neoliberal has come to describe a wide range of figures, from Bill and Hillary Clinton46 to Ezra Klein47 and Ta-Nehisi Coates,48 its meaning has become stretched thin and caused fuzziness and disagreement. This muddle of meanings creates an opportunity to seek a more precise understanding of what I call “Democratic neoliberalism.”

It is actually not the first time Democrats have been called neoliberal. In the early 1980s, the term emerged to describe a group of figures also called the Watergate Babies, Atari Democrats, and New Democrats, many of whom eventually became affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council(DLC). In this iteration, the term neoliberal was embraced not as opprobrium. Rather, it used a form of self-description and differentiation to imply that they were “new Democrats.” In 1982, Washington Monthly Editor Charles Peters published “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto,”49 which aimed to lay out the core principles of this group; two years later, journalist Randall Rothenberg wrote a book called The Neoliberals50 that sought to codify and celebrate this cohort’s ascendency.

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In The Neoliberals, Rothenberg observed that “neoliberals are trying to change the ideas that underlie Democratic politics.” Taking his claim seriously provides a means to think about how this group of figures achieved that goal and came to permanently transform the agenda and ideas of the Democratic Party.

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The group of policymakers and politicians that circulated around the DLC suggests that the roots of many aspects of neoliberalism emerged less from free market conservatism than from the ideology, institutions, and social commitments of liberalism. This group updated and extended many of the core tenets of post-New Deal liberalism, especially the emphasis on technocratic expertise, individualist solutions to structural problems, growth over redistribution, and development of strong partnerships between public and private sectors, particularly nonprofits, businesses, and foundations. The efforts to portray the DLC as indicative of the rightward shift of the party, therefore, fail to acknowledge the ways in which they advocated retaining key aspects of liberalism.

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Figures like Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Tim Wirth, and Al Gore abided by the maxim “the solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties.”

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This group was heavily influenced by the work of figures like Lester Thurow, whose 1980 book The Zero-Sum Society53 essentially became something of a guidebook. Thurow argued that the solution to the multifaceted problems of the 1970s lay in “accelerating the growth of productivity,” which he believed could happen by investing public and private resources in sunrise rather than sunset industries.

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David Osborne, an early fellow at PPI, was especially influential in helping achieve and shape this mission. Osborne’s research centered largely on the rise of public-private partnerships and “third sector institutions”58 such as nonprofits and other community organizations, which he argued offered a more effective means of providing social services and economic development than traditional government bureaucracies. Osborne reduced the argument of his 1988 book, Laboratories of Democracies, to a slogan: “if the thesis was government as solution and the antithesis was government as problem, the synthesis is government as partner.”

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Along with co-author Ted Gaebler, Osborne expanded on this argument in Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Reinventing the Public Sector,59 published in 1992. The book’s model of “entrepreneurial government” advocated both efficiency techniques to make government more results-oriented and less costly as well as ways to decentralize authority and to shift more responsibility and control onto the community. It also suggested that the government should serve not as a service provider but as a “catalyst” in connecting the public and private sectors. Clinton, who served as the head of the DLC in the early 1990s, emerged as the most influential advocate of the ideas in Reinventing Government, praising it as a “blueprint” to “revitalize government.

Editor: The reader is here watching the birth of The Neo-Liberal New Democrats Bill And Hillery Clinton, and their Thatcherite Vision :

Crime Bill Signed
Enacted the Clinton-Gore Administration’s tough and smart crime fighting strategy. The Bill contained tougher penalties, including “three strikes and you’re out” legislation, helped states build more prisons and increased prevention and victims rights. As a result, the overall crime rate has dropped for 8 years in a row — the longest continuous drop on record — and is now at a 26 year low. (PL 103-322, signed 9/13/94)

Welfare Reform Enacted
President Clinton kept his promise to end welfare as we know it by requiring welfare recipients to work, limiting the time they can stay on welfare, and providing child care and health care to help them make the move from welfare to work. The landmark bipartisan welfare reform law signed by the President also enacted tough new child support enforcement measures proposed by the President. Since January 1993, the number of people on welfare has fallen by nearly 60 percent, from 14.1 million to 5.8 million, the smallest welfare rolls in 32 years, and millions of parents have joined the workforce. (PL 104-193, signed 8/22/96)

Created the Welfare to Work Partnership
The Welfare to Work Partnership was launched at the President’s urging to lead the national business effort to hire people from the welfare rolls. Now 20,000 businesses strong, the Partnership has helped an estimated 1.1 million welfare recipients move to employment. Under Vice President Gore’s leadership, the Administration has also done its fair share, hiring 50,000 welfare recipients, and has fostered partnerships between employers and community and faith-based organizations that help families move from welfare to work.

Welfare-to-Work Grants
Due to President Clinton’s leadership, the Balanced Budget Act included $3 billion over two years for Welfare-to-Work grants to help states and local communities move long-term welfare recipients and certain non-custodial parent in lasting, unsubsidized jobs. This funding, used for job creation, placement and retention efforts, has helped the hardest-to-serve welfare recipients and promotes parental responsibility among non-custodial parents who need to find work to honor their responsibilities to their children.

Achieving Victory in Kosovo
President Clinton led the NATO Alliance in a 79-day air war that expelled Serb forces from Kosovo and restored self-government to the province, ending a decade of repression and reversing Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. In the face of Allied unity, American military superiority, and strong Presidential leadership, Milosevic withdrew his troops and permitted international peacekeepers to begin returning refugees. (3/24-6/20/99)

Financial Modernization Legislation Enacted
President Clinton signed the Financial Modernization Act into law, finally revamping a banking system that had been in place since the Great Depression. The new law will increase innovation and competition in the financial services industry, including traditional banking, insurance and securities industries, giving consumers greater choice and lower prices. The President insisted that the new regulatory structure permit banking institutions to expand into these newly authorized lines of business only if they satisfactorily serve the credit needs of their communities, and that the law include many of the consumer privacy provisions he proposed. (PL 106-102, signed 11/12/99)

https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-02.html

Newspaper Reader.