Left Behind
The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The 40-year history of how Democrats chose political opportunity over addressing inequality—and how the poor have paid the price
For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent.
The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political history: a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it.
Historian Lily Geismer recounts how the Clinton-era Democratic Party sought to curb poverty through economic growth and individual responsibility rather than asking the rich to make any sacrifices. Fueled by an ethos of “doing well by doing good,” microfinance, charter schools, and privately funded housing developments grew trendy. Though politically expedient and sometimes profitable in the short term, these programs fundamentally weakened the safety net for the poor.
This piercingly intelligent book shows how bygone policy decisions have left us with skyrocketing income inequality and poverty in America and widened fractures within the Democratic Party that persist to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Geismer (Don't Blame Us) delivers an incisive critique of the Democratic Party's embrace of "market-based" solutions to social problems in the 1980s and '90s. Contending that the private sector could "do well by doing good," Bill Clinton and other "New Democrats" abandoned America's poorest and most vulnerable people, according to Geismer. She delves into Democrats' enthusiasm for the kind of "microenterprise" lending programs pioneered by Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh, and explains how similar initiatives in the U.S., such as the Chicago-based ShoreBank, had difficulty replicating and scaling their early successes. Geismer also claims that the razing of high-rise public housing projects and their replacement with "mixed-income, low-density" housing built by private developers "exacerbated racial segregation, economic inequality, and gentrification." Elsewhere, she documents how Silicon Valley's enthusiasm for charter schools made them "effective symbols of the control that wealthy private forces have come to wield over public policy," and documents the welfare reforms, including a $24 billion cut in food stamps and a "five-year lifetime limit" on receiving benefits, that Clinton signed into law during his 1996 reelection campaign. Framing the story as a tragedy of good intentions gone wrong, Geismer transforms wonky policy matters into an unlikely page-turner. Readers will gain valuable insight into the Clinton presidency and its legacy in today's distrust between progressives and centrist Democrats.
