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In this episode, we’re not just skimming the surface; we’re taking a hard look at the Democratic Party’s long and winding road—from its noble roots in the New Deal to its current identity crisis. Joining me is the brilliant Lily Geismar, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College and the author of two must-read books that dissect the failures of the Democratic Party in addressing inequality.
We’re going to tackle the big questions: How did the party that once championed the working class betray its core values? What role did elitism and opportunism play in shaping today’s political climate? And why is it more crucial than ever to reclaim the narrative of genuine progressivism?
Her article It’s Time for the Democrats to Throw Off the Dead Hand of Clintonism is here:
If you’d like to read a transcript, you can find it here — just note that it was rushed and isn’t perfect. Thanks for understanding:
00:00.77
Robert Scheer
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, which I no longer do for NPR because they tightened up their act in the face of criticisms, but we’re still out and alive. Scheer posts elsewhere, Apple, Spotify, what have you.
00:17.45
Robert Scheer
ah But the spirit is the same. ah Basically, i want to get people to read some books. Sometimes I get into a book that I’m critical of, but generally I’m um’m old enough and I do this as a This my civic responsibility. ah You know, and and it’s a commitment to read books, to get involved.
00:38.70
Robert Scheer
It’s that i’m basically unashamedly hyping or dealing with books that I think have incredible merit and are worth the time. You know, I guess not always. we And we have a right to disagree and agree about things.
00:54.50
Robert Scheer
But what i I really feel is great about your work. I should mention, I’m sorry, I didn’t give a proper introduction, that you’re a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, which is in L.A.
01:06.39
Robert Scheer
County. I keep thinking of somewhere else like Orange County and so forth.
01:07.33
Lily
Yeah.
01:11.58
Robert Scheer
ah And you’ve written ah really a couple of very important books, ah Left Behind, The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality and Don’t Blame Us, Southern Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.
01:28.04
Robert Scheer
And you’re writing, and then what i’m really hanging this discussion on is an excellent article you did, I think, for the March edition of The Nation. More than 20 years after Bill Clinton left office, Democrats remain in the grips of his new democratic politics.
01:45.31
Robert Scheer
That’s a serious problem. And I think you’re really onto something very important, which is obviously we’re in big trouble. Our system is in trouble. And we have this president who’s scaring the wits out of a lot of people.
01:59.25
Robert Scheer
And the knee-jerk response, basically, ironically, is to become more like him. You know, it’s sort of, oh it’s all because, you know, the Democrats so were too soft on different issues and so forth.
02:14.84
Robert Scheer
And you you really nail it, I think, in this Nation article very clearly, ah that the failure of the Democrats was their opportunism.
02:26.30
Robert Scheer
And I’ll let you put it better than I do. i don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me very clearly you zero in on on the triangulation, the opportunism, not just a Bill Clinton, but it followed by Obama and so forth.
02:41.76
Robert Scheer
And to be ah more Republican than now. And ironically, the Republicans who were then in the Tweedledee, Tweedledum, the Democrats and Republicans, supposed to be the same, they moved in a radical direction.
02:55.05
Robert Scheer
And they moved in a radical direction and not obviously quite opposite to what Bernie Sanders would have wanted, but a connection that recognizes that we as a society ah have real problems, are really in trouble.
03:10.77
Robert Scheer
And I, so for me, got summarized in the debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the first time around, where she accused him. She said, you say you’re going to make America great again.
03:23.10
Robert Scheer
America has always been great. And I thought that particular exchange just captured the whole thing. You know, so it means America was great when it destroyed genocide against Native Americans. It was great when it was slavery.
03:37.60
Robert Scheer
It was great when it had segregation. it was great when women couldn’t vote until 1920 or 21 or whatever it is. You know, so it’s an absurd position. and it’s done for propagandistic point of view.
03:50.09
Robert Scheer
And what you point out is it’s a point, it it aims at appealing to, I think, a mythical a group of moderates and suburban soccer moms or what have you, who are basically assumed to be only interested in the affectations of their life. And, you know, that’s, what I guess, what it means to me, this caricature of a suburban, but that they don’t really care about meaningful jobs, meaningful wages, decent schools, you know, the stuff that Democrats used to talk about.
04:22.29
Robert Scheer
You can get them with a con job. So I’m already probably stretching your article in ways that you don’t like. So why don’t you just summarize what you’re onto to here and why what the message is that you think Democrats had better pay attention to?
04:36.54
Robert Scheer
Okay.
04:37.24
Lily
Yeah, well, thank you for your words and for having me on. um i Yeah, so it as you mentioned, but I’ve written a ah couple of books on this topic, and this article was sort of a ah building on it in the aftermath of um Donald Trump’s reelection and Kamala Harris’s loss um and sort of thinking about this kind of the ways in which the the sort of Clinton vision has both come to dominate the party in terms of its um policy, but also in terms of its political strategy.
05:04.70
Lily
And so in my work, I really looked at this this question of the kind of class based transformation of the Democratic Party um as it’s moved from being traditionally a party of ah working class, um work it sort of the working union union member working class people in cities to being more suburban and suburban focused and much more at kind of an upper echelon of knowledge-based workers um and the kind of policy dimensions that ah have matched that.
05:30.40
Lily
So as the party’s um politics policies have really targeted more people based on kind of policies that um that are focused on things like tech, finance and trade. um So this kind of what i call like a trica of different um of different um approaches. And these really come together in during the Clinton administration. And so one of the ideas was that like this kind of, um that the party needed to adapt. um And this really starts in the 1980s with a group of people who first become known as the New Democrats and then under the Democratic Leadership Council of which our DLC called the New Democrats, of which the Clinton was the kind of um the becomes the head of and is really the kind of figurehead of.
06:11.99
Lily
And their idea was that like sort of that um that instead of trying to go after non voters or who they saw people as who and people who are kind of traditionally part of the Democratic Party’s base, like marginalized people,
06:24.81
Lily
um that that that instead what the party should do is to kind of focus on this group of people who had, um who are kind of drifting towards the Republican party. And so that becomes really the focus of both their kind of message, but then also their but they kind of um their policy strategy. And you can really see this coming together when Clinton is in office. um And the question of like kind of appealing to this this, the political strategy and the article talks about this really comes together in the um his 1986 reelection campaign.
06:55.62
Lily
which he very much targeted on this idea of kind of triangulating. um taking ideas from, which that the idea of triangulation comes from um Dick Morris, who was his campaign strategist, which is like really to take the ideas of the, like kind of steal the best ideas of the right um and triangulate them um with the traditional Democratic Party. And so one of the classic examples of this becomes welfare reform, which um Clinton passed, Clinton, um signs it signs after over two vetoes, but signing a pretty draconian version of welfare reform. And so that sort of signals this kind of approach that he’s going to take.
07:33.55
Robert Scheer
Yeah. And, you know, the the interesting, well, you’re a professor of history and I gather specialize since World War II, right?
07:44.10
Robert Scheer
That’s your area.
07:44.97
Lily
Yeah, primarily 60s and 60s and beyond. So…
07:46.66
Robert Scheer
Yeah.
07:47.26
Lily
ah
07:47.52
Robert Scheer
And when i so I ah thought about that and looking at your work. And I’m much older than you, so I was born in 36. So I remember the post-war period.
07:58.67
Robert Scheer
And the post-war period was a time thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thanks to the shock of the Depression before it, and then the Great War, and so forth, in which um there was a recognition that the laissez-faire celebration and the you know the roaring 20s and all of this stuff wasn’t going to work.
08:21.17
Robert Scheer
You weren’t going to call it socialism, but some sort of what they had developed very energetically in Western Europe and and so forth. some notion of of the marriage of government and the private sector and celebrating education, knowledge, knowledge industries, all of these things were in place, ah was was needed.
08:43.35
Robert Scheer
And that it would also have to involve a great deal of equality of opportunity, not just the meritocracy where people who went to the better schools or, you know, who were gifted and had money and capital to begin with could get ahead.
08:58.88
Robert Scheer
But because of the GI Bill, because of the ordinary Americans from all parts of the country swept up into the armed forces, that when you came out, you not only were entitled to a decent house, if a small one, ah ge you know of mortgage help and so forth, but education.
09:16.37
Robert Scheer
And, you know, this is the flourishing of the land grant colleges and everything else, the GI Bill and what have you. And the irony is ah the Democrats, whatever else their problems, were big believers in that. This was the legacy of Franklin Del Rosso. I grew up in the Bronx, you know, and working class back when when Roosevelt died, everyone was poured into the streets crying, even the few Republicans, you know.
09:44.34
Robert Scheer
And then somehow or other, the Democrats, and it really began in the name of the Cold War, became Taft-Hartley, Harry Truman, and so forth, went to war against Roosevelt.
09:57.14
Robert Scheer
It’s very odd. You’re a historian. I’m not. i’m a journalist. But it seems to me, ah you know, Roosevelt’s death and then they gave the opportunity. They rejected Henry Wallace, who was in that progressive tradition. They went, you know, for Harry Truman and so forth. They were surprised they won. They beat Dewey.
10:19.62
Robert Scheer
I mean, I’m not going to go through all the details, but somehow the Democrats also became known as the War Party. And, you know, stress that very much. So the degree that they wanted government, they wanted the big military and what have you.
10:33.79
Lily
Thank
10:34.80
Robert Scheer
remained for ah Republican Eisenhower to sort of try to pull it a little bit. back. But in in the main, they also went to war against something that you’ve written about quite persuasively, these um um institutions of a robust labor movement, ah people who cared about working people, ah you know, and they abandoned labor, basically undermined And I think something you don’t mention in that clearly, they kind of created the basis for the regan ah Reagan Democrats, or whatever they were called, that Reagan’s appeal to working class ah people who were Democrats.
11:17.84
Robert Scheer
And Reagan, whom I did interview some lengths before he was governor and after and before was president, you know, i would always say, i didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.
11:29.79
Robert Scheer
And he would evoke the party of his childhood. His father had worked for for the New Deal. you know, and he would talk about bread and butter stuff.
11:40.72
Robert Scheer
And he actually, even when he went to work for GE, celebrated an industry that was heavily unionized. And GE workers were doing well. And he made a point to going to every plant and saying, look how, you know, he didn’t give the unions, but he himself was would say he was head of a union.
11:59.59
Robert Scheer
He was head of the Screen Actors Guild. So I wanted to just begin with that. how would it the Democrats not only fall out of concern for workers, they actually had contempt for working stiffs. They had contempt for people who only went to high school and yet got a job as an electrician or a machinist.
12:19.49
Robert Scheer
It’s a weird cultural phenomenon.
12:22.91
Lily
Yeah, I think there’s a bunch of different things going on. I think you’ve hit on a really important um topic. So one of the things about the Democratic Party, like from, I mean, and it’s not all Democrats, but certain certain um certain aspects of of it, um who really, the commitment was to growth. And that is that does evolve from the New Deal. I mean, the New Deal was really committed to like economic growth, economic recovery as a kind of core part of what it was trying to do.
12:44.75
Lily
um And so in the post-war period, like that that commitment to growth, mean, Often was not necessarily in union based sectors. um So ah especially as you talked, I mean, the the rise of the kind of military industrial complex is really important to that and sort of ah the and the the growth of.
13:03.42
Lily
So I mean, some of that is ah the actual building of the weapons, but things like research and development, which is heavily tied towards people like engineers who are non um not unionized. So that, that leads to a kind of, um, a kind of move away and shift to, to certain kinds of industry at the same time, actually, like, I do think the growth of, of, as you mentioned, the, like the explosion of, um, higher education, that more and more people are educated and more professionalized. Um, and that, and oftentimes those people skew to the Democratic Party.
13:32.92
Lily
So that you have ah a kind of a group of people who’ve never been part of it, like never been part of a union, um That’s not kind of their their worldview or very committed to ideas of meritocracy and um and as you brought up, like opportunity like opportunity, which actually also are not always aligned with how ah how with like the values of unions.
13:51.41
Lily
I think the other thing from a Democratic Party strategy, and sort of see this. And so then when you have the major, I mean, it’s for the Democrats of like the kind of generation that I really focus on of the kind of Atari democrat who first are called Watergate babies, then called Atari Democrats, the new Democrats.
14:05.46
Lily
there They come of age in the in the early nineteen seventy s like when they come into political office. And they’re um at that point, the United States was going through a major recession. And so they actually really saw industrial, like industrial, the industrial sectors as like not the future.
14:19.39
Lily
um And so instead, like really where the Democratic Party should put its like attention, both politically, but also in terms of policy is in these sectors like tech, finance trade, which are not are not necessarily, but which are actually like um have really, really low union density.
14:34.92
Lily
And so that leads to kind of an abandonment in some ways of the um the working class um or or and in terms of its like policy orientation. The other side of it is that I think that, um i mean, there’s a many people felt that unions were actually like, many of them thought the unions were actually like a drag on the Democratic Party.
14:52.25
Lily
And so that that like the Democrats were too in um to close to unions that people like um George Meany, where who was like the head of the um longtime head of the AFL-CIO, had too much power.
15:04.10
Lily
and that they needed to kind of take away that power. But I think the other piece of it that um was a calculation that working class people had nowhere to go.
15:14.49
Lily
So that’s actually the surprise of re the Reagan Democrats, because there was this idea of like that that, like working like the working class would not never vote for a Republican. So like we can just take these voters for granted. Instead, we should be going after middle class, like these kind of middle class moderates.
15:29.37
Lily
um And I think you know one thing about bill like that comes up with bill clinton is he actually did quite well with um with working class voters like he sort of like that that kind of piece of his um his politics like a lot of those were traditional reagan democrats actually do come back then like briefly come back to democratic party um obama actually does pretty well with them too um so it’s a current certain kind of politics but by no means is that like but i think that what you see is a systematic just taking those voters for granted and what becomes really surprising you know, and we’ve seen this happen in the last decade has been that um watching as that that that group has like really um sort of realigned with the Republican Party. So I think one of the main or the major issues that’s happened in American politics in the last 20 years has been this kind of class realignment um that um that is very different than the kind of class alignments um of the post-war period, but even of the nineteen eighty s
16:24.77
Robert Scheer
You know, it’s interesting though. ah Clinton, well, first of all, Clinton, and and if you you want to be a little more tough-minded about it, Clinton and Obama were great demagogues.
16:38.09
Lily
Thank you.
16:38.54
Robert Scheer
And they could they could pretend to be on the side of workers, you know, all they want while they were screwing workers. I mean, it was really quite, and we can get we will get into that in terms of the financial deregulation.
16:51.20
Robert Scheer
the freeing of Wall Street, the ah the insistence on the internet being unregulated, the new tech being unregulated, so you don’t even have antitrust concerns or anything. You know you don’t have competition.
17:05.18
Robert Scheer
ah But I want to stick to the point a little bit because C. Wright Mills, a very famous sociologist, wrote a book called White Collar ah back in the 50s, and he pointed out the working class was changing. Obviously, there’s, you know,
17:20.01
Robert Scheer
new technology and so forth. And it extends even to firemen and policemen, certainly school teachers, heavily organized. You know, with one of the ironies ah is that most cities, ah your’re your you know, you you have two sides of and any protest are probably both in the unions, you know.
17:41.08
Robert Scheer
and And so the argument really, and it goes to, I want to get to a central failing of of the Democratic Party under Clinton was they ignored the interest of working people no matter what, whether they’re in a factory or not in a factory or so forth, or if they’re in a factory, but they’re doing, you know, engineering or so forth, they’re still working.
18:04.27
Robert Scheer
and And they went for an elite. And I remember talking to ah Bill Clinton’s mother once about this and found her quite sympathetic. I don’t want to use that.
18:16.73
Robert Scheer
But they they got intrigued with going to Yale. You know, that became the big deal. That’s where you made your good friendships. That’s where you learn what was what it really meant to be smart, you know, and you were kind of embarrassed by where you’d come from, you know. And and that that whole shift of the new Democrat reeks of that, you know, we’re the best and the brightest, the sort of thing David Halberstam wrote about relation to the Vietnam War.
18:46.61
Robert Scheer
And not recognizing that most people who have those kind of jobs, even with a college education, and we’re seeing that right now dramatically, need to be organized, need rights.
18:59.43
Robert Scheer
You know, at universities now, we have big battle about academic freedom. It’s the elite schools that have been less willing, although I noticed Harvard has ah strong chapter.
19:10.49
Robert Scheer
ah But, you know, you have an old-fashioned union like the UAW, organizing where I teach at USC, you know, on these campuses, organizing graduate students, organizing non-tenured faculty and so forth.
19:25.08
Robert Scheer
So, and it’s ironic, Ronald Reagan was a strong leader of the Screen Actors Guild. the The most, one most profitable industries we have in America, entertainment, you know, certainly in the film industry, but also music and a lot of it was the most heavily organized.
19:42.74
Robert Scheer
you can To this day, you can’t really work in that industry without being in some sort of of union. And they benefited from that. And Reagan was quite proud ah of that in a way.
19:54.44
Robert Scheer
So what the decision that was really made, I think, was ah not one of all the workers don’t need us so much anymore. It was an elitist conception of who the good people are. And it came out in Hillary Clinton when she talked about the people who would support Trump being the deplorables.
20:16.01
Robert Scheer
You know, that whole idea, you know, whatever you call them, you know, ah that that they’re they’re they’re the other, they’re the lesser, they don’t they’re no account. And the shift that you’ve described so eloquently and thoughtfully,
20:31.45
Robert Scheer
ah of the new Democrat Party was really an elitism. That’s what defines it. We are the special people. We know what to do.
20:42.25
Robert Scheer
And where they… ran into it ah is that the other elite were the people in the financial industry. And some of them could talk a good game. They could pretend to be liberal. They could pretend to be enlightened.
20:56.72
Robert Scheer
And so I want to, whatever time we have left, shift a little bit because the real betrayal of of Clinton and the new Democrats was under deregulation of Wall Street.
21:08.50
Robert Scheer
and And we’re paying, that’s the big price that the world has been paying ever since, the incredible increase of income income inequality, you know.
21:19.83
Robert Scheer
And then there’s two pieces of legislation that came in his second term. that you described and it and really was not in the name of identity politics that becomes a cover for it you know we’re so sensitive and so liberal and care so much about these issues but it really was the total destruction of the new deal the social democracy that had saved western europe saved the united states right that was really the main achievement
21:52.02
Robert Scheer
and And it required, know, everybody misuses this word regulation. it’s It’s like automobile safety and Ralph Nader. You know, he wasn’t trying to control people. He’s trying to make them safe.
22:04.85
Robert Scheer
For that, you had to require seatbelts. You had to require speed limits and and so forth. And what happened in the like two pieces of legislation he put through, the Financial Services Modernization Act,
22:19.66
Robert Scheer
and the and and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. The key word was modern. We want to go with the new thing, right? The new thing is not regulation and safe working conditions or anything, okay?
22:34.69
Robert Scheer
And so they did two things. One, in terms of the rise of the internet, this is such a wonderful new technology. It shouldn’t be regulated. There’s no antitrust.
22:45.43
Robert Scheer
So you get Apple, you get vertical integration, you get what we see now. There’s no restraint, ah no competition for Google and so forth or for a cartel as such.
22:56.70
Robert Scheer
you know and And the other was the freeing of the financial community to be not an adjunct to the economy, but to be the center of and of the world economy. And that’s what blew up in the whole banking meltdown. So I’d like it if you talk about that.
23:12.64
Robert Scheer
And if I could just throw in a news thing now to prime architect, the one that was unleashed by Bill Clinton was, was Summers, Larry Summers. And he was the one who,
23:24.47
Robert Scheer
ironically, in a regime that claimed it cared about women’s rights and identity politics, went out to destroy a true hero or heroine, I should say, of American politics, beginning Clemson, Brooksley Bourne, highly well-educated, had been editor of the Stanford Law Review, had worked for big banks, really understood banking.
23:46.14
Robert Scheer
She was running the Commodity Futures Commission And they went out to destroy her. And it was Lawrence Summers who made this crusade against her. So maybe we could just the the crimes of Bill Clinton go on and on. But this is the current manifestation.
24:01.49
Robert Scheer
If there’s some reason for Trump being president, it’s because we have a lot of people who thought they were in the middle class and suddenly find they’re nothing of the sort. They’re living paycheck to paycheck and they can hardly…
24:13.30
Robert Scheer
hold on and their kids are not doing well, even if they get through the state college. So maybe we can focus on that a little bit.
24:20.71
Lily
Yeah, I think, I mean, and there’s a, there’s a ton there, there, and it is a really super important issue. i mean, I think some of the questions about like that, that match these things is the combination, I mean, of both taking away certain, um certain of the sort of core New Deal, New new Deal regulation. um And that is this kind of the, like the symbol that often gets used is like Bill Clinton announcing in the, um in the his 1986 state of the union, the era of big government is over. And that scene is this kind of like nail in the coffin ah of, of, of the new deal, but it really does come with the passage of the financial modernization act at the end of his president, which comes in 1999 to near the end of his presidency.
24:57.61
Lily
um And I think, I mean, some of the logics behind it um and a lot of the things you described is this would be better. like So it’s like slightly different than like kind of like classic Republican arguments around it, that this would be like better for consumers that like having more,
25:11.13
Lily
that um that um having more access to markets would sort of bring prosperity. And so in some ways, like the market could do what um what was what the New Deal state had done. So that’s one thing I’ve argued a lot in my work is like when you look at what they were arguing was that like the state would but provide sort of security and opportunity.
25:29.25
Lily
um That’s sort of at the core of kind of the social, like of the kind of New Deal thinking. um And that this was the idea that this would come through the um through the market. And it’s proven like, as you say, mean, I think one of the things that ended up happening is that like this this has been proven quite inaccurate.
25:43.94
Lily
um And the other thing that it did was kind of eviscerate um at the simultaneously as you have the you have the um the um the things like welfare reform, like an evisceration of anything of a social safety net.
25:57.57
Lily
So people leave. So there’s often this idea that like the 1990s was this time of like great economic boom and where you have like overall economic prosperity. But underneath is like a profound period of creating like like just evisceration, which could leave people in a much, much more precarious position.
26:14.84
Lily
And I think this goes to the question that you had brought up earlier about the kind of the rise of like white collar violence. workers going into unions. um And so sectors are now unionizing that never had before. Like academia, I mean, academia had long had like an AAP, AAUP has been a well-established institution, but you see sectors like journalists organizing um who had not had previously not been a unionized sector.
26:38.80
Lily
um And that has to do with the fact that there’s just like not the same stability, like there’s not the same level of stability that you can’t, that you’re in a, there’s no social safety net. And so looking to a union to provide those um those various functions that have once been provided by government.
26:53.51
Lily
And I do think many of that is the legacy of um of the um the kind of Clinton era Democrats. And one thing that I think comes up is like this idea of like that. um I actually are in a different piece, not the one that um that for it was a piece for Jacobin, but about um the question around you that you write about opportunity, which is this kind of like core buzzword of the Democratic Party. Like that’s the core of the New Deal. It’s core to the Great Society. um And that’s one thing Clinton really repurposes that everything was about opportunity and this idea of like opportunity to succeed in the marketplace, like to take away regulations that everyone has a chance to kind of succeed, which is like a classic meritocratic idea.
27:30.69
Lily
And I think that one thing that has come up and and Kamala Harris made this like the the um centerpiece of her campaign as well, like with the the opportunity economy and this like similar idea is that right now people want is not I argue most people don’t want ah want opportunity. What they want is stability and security.
27:47.51
Lily
um And they want they want to go back to kind of some of those those um those types of like assurances, a sense of like that things are not are not completely out of whack, that like everything is not unaffordable. and I think that’s like, as we look to kind of what where the Democratic Party can go forward, it’s to kind of embrace those messages and less these kinds of ideas of of of Clinton around.
28:09.30
Lily
opportunity, pro-market. So that’s one thing that I was arguing in the piece. um And I do think there’s a, to be the question, like looking back in retrospect, like um much of the kind of many of the policies established in the 1990s did play like a critical role in both and creating the um the means for the financial crisis and the kind of reconstruction that happens to. I mean, so you have in the Obama administration, many Clinton alums, um like as you brought up someone like Larry Summers,
28:42.00
Lily
You have Robert Rubin back. I mean, all these people who had had ah played a really heavy hand. And that sort of also comes to shape Obama’s policies. And so by the time you get to 2016, people are just really frustrated and alienated by these policies.
28:54.80
Lily
They’ve watched like like they’ve watched decades of them not panning out. And I think that that frustration has led to this kind of um some of the kind of either not voting at all or voting for Trump.
29:05.99
Robert Scheer
Well, yeah, and it goes further than that. these It wasn’t that they were creating opportunity. They were creating opportunity for themselves. They’re thieves. I mean, let let’s be honest about it. Lawrence Summers, when he was advising about why you need to deregulate Wall Street, got six million bucks from the shortcoming. mean, the record is, you know, this Jeffrey Epstein is just typical.
29:30.48
Robert Scheer
of what of the world they lived in. Or Bill Clinton going on those era the Lolita Express. I mean, the corrupt the personal corruption, the loss of idealism and among the Democrats is astounding. What they identified meritocracy with is not doing wonderful things ah for people.
29:50.00
Robert Scheer
They identify as doing wonderful for yourself, lining your own pockets. That’s the meritocracy. We make yeah and unbelievable salaries. went after.
30:00.65
Robert Scheer
And, you know, like you even in this current scandal, again, some is, I don’t know what his relationship to his wife was or is, but one of the, he went to Jeffrey Epstein for advice about some girlfriend or some woman he was, i don’t know what, inappropriately involved with.
30:17.93
Robert Scheer
On the other hand, he also went to to Jeffrey Epstein for a million bucks to support his academic wife’s research. or something.
30:29.49
Robert Scheer
So ah suddenly, you know, there was no longer the pure academy. This guy was the head of Harvard. It was no longer, you know, where is integrity? It’s all where do we get the big bucks? I mean, why was Jeffrey Epstein invited to Harvard? Why was he coddled there even after being convicted? Because really what they cared about was being on the right side of wealth for themselves.
30:52.85
Robert Scheer
You know, and the irony in the banking meltdown, for instance, which everybody forgets, but the Federal Reserve studies are very clear. The group that was most viciously exploited and targeted were were the people that had been discriminated against in housing.
31:08.40
Robert Scheer
So a great liberal idea. Let’s make housing more available to black and brown college graduates, mind you, college graduates, because they don’t have the family money. They’re excluded and so forth. The neighborhoods, redlining and what have you.
31:23.91
Robert Scheer
And it ended up that these were the two groups most severely hit. and And black people lost, according to the Federal Reserve, 70% of their wealth, not their annual income. Brown people lost over 60%. They were just college graduates, college graduates.
31:39.64
Robert Scheer
So Yeah, I mean, you know, your your writing has a certain spirit to it. And not that you’re not a great academic and doing scholarly work, but you you indicate in this piece, particularly in the nation piece, that you’re pissed off with these people, the that that they’ve made they’ve made a real mess of everything.
32:01.39
Robert Scheer
It’s not just that the some well good intentions went awry. They actually caught.
32:07.61
Lily
No, i i didn’t I wouldn’t say that I think that just get attention is what I write. No, I do think that, i mean, when we look to kind of understand responsibility, that this plays a critical role. And so in my mind, like looking to those, you know, when you look to the the one of the reasons you study history, like I’ve studied history is that like to understand what you want to understand what happened to understand like different paths forward and why this is like, you know, this is this has been repeatedly replicated. I think that the Democrats often take the very like take both.
32:31.45
Lily
mean I mean, take a very safe path forward um in terms of who, like in a a very moderate path, it was this idea that that’s the way to win um and that that’s not the way to do it. I think you’re right in the the fact that like this system that,
32:46.00
Lily
it created has benefited a a particular band of um of democratic elite in all kinds of ways. I mean, I think the other question that you brought up is like, it’s not just with Larry Summers, it’s not as also like giving money to Harvard to incur like certain kinds of status that is afforded by these elite institutions. So all of that is like replicating itself. And I think one of the things that’s hard about this this particular moment, I think about this with like especially You know, what what I personally think what the moment i don’t think I’m alone in this needs is like a radical reconstruction of what the Democratic Party, um you know, and like, I mean, government more broadly stands for.
33:22.06
Lily
And I think that one of the things that’s really hard is to to look to people who have actually benefited from the system as the people to lead that forward. So that’s where it needs to be like different kinds of things.
33:32.59
Lily
different kinds of leadership, different kinds of thinkers who are pushing where kind of where where Democrats should be, what the Democratic Party should be.
33:43.12
Robert Scheer
Yeah. Okay. We’re going to run out of time, but it’s interesting. You dance around in the Nation article on this woke question or identity politics.
33:56.18
Robert Scheer
and And that’s not disrespectfully intended. By a dance, I mean, yeah you don’t, no one wants to throw out a debt I mean, it’s very good that we’re sensitive to people who are underrepresented. I mean, women,
34:09.63
Robert Scheer
didn’t get the vote until 1921. So clearly misogyny and you know ah the denigration of women is real and one should be conscious. And certainly that’s true of gay people. Certainly it’s true of people of color and you know the historic impact of segregation.
34:28.42
Robert Scheer
So what what what what you really is talking about is using identity politics as a cover for betraying the very people you claim to care about.
34:41.52
Robert Scheer
You know, I mean, maybe that’s pushing you into a corner, but that’s the way I read it. If you really care about women, you don’t do welfare reform.
34:47.19
Lily
Yeah.
34:51.01
Robert Scheer
You’re hurting women.
34:51.13
Lily
ah you Oh, absolutely. I think that there’s, ah i mean, I think also that like, I mean, I think that um that’s a, you know, at all at all points that there, that a lot of the kind of idea, I think it’s particularly trying to promote a particular class-based version of women or people of color.
35:07.00
Lily
um And, you know, one of Clinton’s, I mean, i think about this a lot. And like in my larger book, I talk about this extensively that like it’s promoting a particular kind of person of color um that oftentimes, so like the Clinton administration was obsessed with these like success stories.
35:18.65
Lily
But also like part of the whole, that like the whole, their whole approach to like questions of poverty and equality is like to work hard and play by the rules. And so that like, that’s privileging a particular person who like plays by the rules, but then like, we’re going to set, going to, we’re going to basically like incarcerate people who we see as not playing by the, or deport people are not playing by the rules.
35:38.32
Lily
So I think there’s another thing. And that’s actually another whole other thing. If you want to get into like the legacy of the Clinton years is also like, that so much of the kind of um the like there the immigration, um reforms they passed the 1990s are like, we we’re like living out those constantly um into the 2000s and beyond. So a lot of the kind of the like immigration politics gets, you know, and and it’s and like the Trump administration has been abysmal, but like much of that is also the legacy of kind of major Clinton era reform. So which has to do with this idea that like we believe in like good immigrants who are going to like succeed and contribute to the economy, but other groups we ah we will, we will deport and destroy their families.
36:15.27
Robert Scheer
Yeah. So if we have one or two minutes, I just want to pick one one bone here and in your article. You advanced the argument that trade agreements, well, that we were too kind to China and and that this helped the immiseration of the American worker, right?
36:42.29
Robert Scheer
That’s right there.
36:43.03
Lily
and they like there ah brothers of that I would say not too kind, but like very, very, established very, very general trade deals with China.
36:44.61
Robert Scheer
um that
36:51.21
Robert Scheer
Yeah.
36:51.33
Lily
and
36:51.96
Robert Scheer
And and i I don’t agree with that. Let me just put it cold. ah And we’re seeing it now because the Chinese were not going to stay put making T-shirts or exploiting female labor to make little iPhone things with small fingers and so forth. The fact is ah that what whether in the world admitting them to you the world trade system helped, I think it ended discrimination that was ridiculous, excluding them. you know
37:22.70
Robert Scheer
But the fact the matter is what we’re seeing now And here again, the Democrats are on the wrong side of this, I think, because it is a multipolar world. And at least Trump seems to understand that just in terms of power, that you’ve got to give him something. You’ve got to make concessions. You know, even in his rewrite of NAFTA in his first term, whether he knew it or not,
37:45.59
Robert Scheer
They put in some protection of organized labor and that you could take grievances to a a local court, not an industry court. And that 40 percent of a car that was made in Mexico had to pay $16 an hour or something to workers.
38:01.76
Robert Scheer
And so once again, it seems to me the Democrats are on the wrong side of it. They want to blame the success of people outside of this country, whether they’re in India or China, or Brazil, what have you, for improving their standard of living, getting a piece of the pie, right?
38:18.48
Robert Scheer
And they’re saying that’s the reason, rather than if they were really progressive about this, getting back to the labor union, and I’m willing to wrap it up here if you probably have to go, but they never put labor rights in as their basic human right.
38:33.42
Robert Scheer
They never said, let’s, you yes, as far as, criminal ah you know, convict labor or something, but they never said, let’s have free trade, but one basic human right was your right to join a union, to withhold your labor.
38:48.12
Robert Scheer
And that always struck me as odd because I interviewed a lot of these people um in both parties, worked for the LA Times for 29 years and talked to Reagan, talked to all of these people. And every time I would bring that up with them,
39:00.83
Robert Scheer
You know, if you want to help American workers, don’t exclude the product of Chinese workers. Just say they should also have minimum wage. They should have the right to a labor union. They should have occupational health standard.
39:12.73
Robert Scheer
And that should be factored into human rights. It’s not just the right to march at Tiananmen Square.
39:19.32
Lily
No, i I completely agree with that. And I think that that you know and the reality is like having done that would have actually bolstered the idea of labor rights more broadly um in the U.S. too. I mean, i i know like a little i mean i I know more with NAFTA.
39:32.37
Lily
And I do think the at the AFL ceoo did try to really push on having certain kinds of labor agreements, but not quite to the degree that you were describing. And then they weren’t actually ever… enforced. So I think what happens is like they’re part of and I like and I also know a little bit about the stuff that happened like like things like Vietnam, like it’s part of the conversation, but then actually always got dropped out. And so I think it is like about actually not seeing workers rights as like central to um to like the Clinton administration’s vision.
40:00.23
Lily
And had that happened, you would have had a maybe different set of constant like a different kind of constellation. So other things took press like other other priorities took precedent.
40:09.21
Robert Scheer
okay And final point, I promise, you had ah Robert Reich in the Clinton administration, and he has proved to be a consistent defender, a honest, wonderful public official.
40:16.32
Lily
Mm-hmm.
40:25.54
Robert Scheer
I mean, you know, i I’m just talking about his record of what he did. he opposed the welfare reform. you know But even Robert Rubin opposed the welfare reform.
40:37.49
Robert Scheer
Not making sense. But still, the real the thing that happened to Clinton and it happened to Obama, yeah, they had some good people around them. Boksi Boyne was an example. They ignored them. they they you know They were kind of like the trappings.
40:52.65
Robert Scheer
They went for Robert Rubin. Okay, we talked about Lawrence Summers. Why would you pick somebody from the financial community who would pioneer these things, who had done these and went back, went back to work for the very bank that he made legal, you Citibank, after being in Goldman Sachs. And these are the very people they turn to.
41:13.45
Robert Scheer
So I want to end this with maybe because you could describe the culture better. Their culture of success basically is an elitist notion that describes virtue to the acquisition of money.
41:29.03
Robert Scheer
it’s Really, if you think about it, it goes against every basic um ah religion. It’s a denial of all of the the great philosophers, you know beginning with Confucius, but go up.
41:42.87
Robert Scheer
And yet, at this weird moment in history, and this goes back a little early even to the best and the brightest again that gave us the Vietnam War.
41:53.54
Robert Scheer
These people concocted the most onerous stew of policy. And they left us with a legacy of the most deeply divided, class divided, economically divided society that we’ve seen in the history of the world. You will now have a situation where three of these people in Silicon Valley ah that they made they enabled, Clinton enabled and courted and everything, have wealth equal to 50% of the American population.
42:26.05
Robert Scheer
How do you do that and and and not be tagged with it? It’s incredible. You know, I can show you a letter from Bill Clinton where he takes issue with me and says, oh, no, I did this thing and all chicken, nothing, little programs.
42:41.50
Robert Scheer
But the guts of it was you allowed a handful of now, you know, billionaires about to become trillionaires to take over the whole American dream, the whole American experiment.
42:55.44
Robert Scheer
And there’s no stopping them now that I can see because they they can buy these elections, you know, and some will do it in the name of the Democrats. Some will do it in the name of Republicans. But they’re after the same prize.
43:07.29
Robert Scheer
They kiss the ring of whoever is going allow them to get even more obscene wealth. Is that not really the message here of your work?
43:16.85
Lily
um yeah i Well, yeah I don’t know. i’m since I’m probably a cautious academic, say it different ways. But yes, I mean, I think part of it is that this is like that this system the that, you know, there’s so much blame on often and especially amongst, I mean, traditionally amongst liberals on on Republicans. And it’s not to say that that like that is not helped. And I would i do think like one of the things I’ll just caution with that is that like in the interim, you did have between Clinton and Obama, you did have the Bush administration. who wasn’t It wasn’t like they were great regulators. So I don’t think that… like mean that you it was not i mean it was It’s a system that like got i mean got put into but got put into being, but I think was like also was also aided and abetted
43:57.12
Lily
by um by the bush administration as well um into this period. But yes, I think that like part of the issue is that like we often, especially people, um I would say more like liberals than the left, look to blame so many things on the Republicans. And then it’s also really, really important to understand how consequential the Clinton administration um was to the kind of to the kind like to the contemporary landscape and contemporary issues that we have.
44:25.38
Robert Scheer
yeah And they not only made it fashionable, ah they were able to sell it. And of course, they’re worse. They’re no worse than the Republicans. I mean, that that that that goes without saying.
44:36.83
Robert Scheer
But Ronald Reagan had the savings loan scandal. He had to back off. He actually ended up doing less deregulation by far. And so my only point is it’s about, yes, what they were able to do is package it in a way and shift the emphasis from how are people surviving.
44:57.96
Robert Scheer
So we really have a situation now where people, could Trump could say, we have good statistics here or there, but you take your, I took a couple of kids out to Subway, cost me 60 bucks for, you know, for nothing, you know, and that’s the pain.
45:13.26
Robert Scheer
that people are feeling and their insecurity and the paycheck to paycheck. Anyway, my hats off to you for capturing it. I’m talking to Lily Geismar. She’s a professor of history and gets it right, mostly post-war Claremont McKenna College, University, I guess.
45:31.71
Robert Scheer
and written two very good books, Left Behind, The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, Public Affairs 2022, and then one a bit later, Don’t Blame Us, Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, Princeton University Press, 2015.
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