Bill Clinton did not enter the White House a neoliberal; circumstances, however, forced him to become one.

In their new book, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein tell the story of Bill Clinton’s move from left- to neo-liberalism. In many ways, however, their book isn’t really about Clinton. At the start of his presidency, they show, Clinton hoped to manage capitalism to the benefit of ordinary people. He ended up a booster of deindustrialization and deregulation. His failures were, according to Lichtenstein and Stein, not his alone but those of postwar liberalism, which was fundamentally incapable of understanding capitalism or defending the small enclave of social democracy it had erected against economic slowdown and deindustrialization.

Stein, who passed away in 2017, was the author of two indispensable accounts of twentieth-century political economy, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (1998) and Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (2011). Both explained the transformations of American domestic politics in the context of the country’s broader Cold War crusade against communism. It was, Stein argued persuasively, the decisions of US policymakers, driven by hubris and anti-communism, that created the conditions that made deindustrialization possible. In her words, “Europe and Japan prospered after World War II because American leaders decided that they would not retreat behind two oceans, as their predecessors had done after World War I.” But a world of fast-growing capitalism powered by manufacturing exports drove down costs and sped up the pace of deindustrialization in the United States, undermining the social compact on which the New Deal order was predicated.