Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality

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. (Mar.)