Bill Clinton is counting on populism

I never met Bill Clinton. But several of my friends who have met him report the same thing: that in those 30 seconds he shakes your hand, looks into your eyes and says, “How are you, sir?”, he makes you feel, that you are the only person in the world who matters to him. These friends of mine—some ardent Republicans—are all well aware of the man’s more sinister side. Yet they speak of their encounters with Clinton’s charms as a quasi-religious experience.

The irrepressible love comes through Citizenthe 42nd president’s post-presidential memoir. As the author describes his life in retirement—the obscenely paid speaking gigs and book deals, the friendships with world leaders, the philanthropy, the ongoing politics of his party—you can’t help but root for him.

But this is tinged with sadness: Clinton embodies the technocratic, globalist, sunny-optimistic, unapologetically Third Way post-New Deal American liberalism, and he can’t figure out why that worldview has come under attack at home and around the world, especially since mid-2010s; or why anyone would blame him for what came after him. Beneath the narrative’s smooth surface, as such, churns the impotent rage of an old man—yes, I know how ironic it is for me to attribute impotence to Bill Clinton, of all men.

Americans of a certain generation associate the Clinton era with good times. In my case, it was late in his tenure (Thanksgiving 1998, to be exact) that my mother and I arrived in the US, green cards in hand. The economy was booming, interest rates and unemployment were low, and the crackling whir of the dial-up modem promised unprecedented connectivity. The bad guys, in the movies as in real life, were Yugoslav ultranationalists and a handful of easy-to-punish “rogue regimes.” Things were so good, in fact, that the Americans could afford to be outraged by an intern in a tight blue dress falling over the Commander-in-Chief.

Then came the flurry of disasters that have defined my adulthood: 9/11 and two decades of fruitless regime change wars; the dotcom recession and the Great Recession; the global migrant crisis and the rise of populism; the pandemic and the new cold war. During this terrible quarter of a century, Clinton no longer figured as a major figure on the stage of history. Nor was he exactly marginal: His wife, Hillary, made two bids for the presidency (campaigns in which Bill was actively involved) and then served as secretary of state. The Clinton machine was a potent force for much of this time.

But not at first. By the time he left the Oval Office, Clinton writes, he and Hillary were broke and “facing millions of dollars in legal fees” related to the various investigations he faced in office: an impeachment for lying under oath regarding the aforementioned blowjob, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Vince Foster’s suicide. If you’re not a student of 1990s political arcana, the Clintons could certainly be shady, but they weren’t the lawless monsters of Republican demonology. It is also a reminder that the use of legal skills to inhibit a political opponent did not begin with Donald Trump and the #Russiagate hoax (in part mediated by Hillary Clinton in the wake of her 2016 defeat).

In this case, Clinton’s post-presidency money situation was so bad, he recalls, that he was “embarrassed … to ask my friend Terry McAuliffe,” Virginia’s Democratic boss, “to co-sign my first mortgage” on a house in Chappaqua, NY . Fortunately, Knopf, the prestigious imprint, and the Harry Walker Agency, representatives of high-end public speakers, followed with lucrative contracts. He and Hillary would go on to earn $153 million in speaking fees from 2001 to 2016 (good job if you can get it).

Clinton also established an NGO, called the Clinton Global Initiative, and a family foundation to support their work. Much of the first two-thirds of the hefty volume is devoted to his speaking and philanthropic work, occasionally interrupted when he is called upon to assist his successors in special missions: to testify before the 9/11 Commission (where he laid bare his own shortcomings, above all the failure to ensure greater coordination between the intelligence services); rescuing American filmmakers taken hostage by North Korea; led post-disaster fundraising, often alongside his former rival George HW Bush.

As far as presidential prose goes, Clinton doesn’t come close to the high standards set by predecessors like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, but his plain Arkansas twang comes through and there are poignant moments. In one, he meets an Egyptian-American crying in front of a memorial of the victims’ photos in the wake of 9/11, raging against the terrorists who had made his fellow citizens distrust all Muslims. In another, a visitor Al Gore points to a refrigerator sitting in the Clintons’ driveway (they were renovating the Chappaqua house) and says, “I know you wanted to bring your Ozarks culture to New York, but this goes too far.”

After a while, one gets tired of chapter after chapter of Clinton bragging about his efforts to empower women in Africa and his generous donations to this and that cause. But in these early chapters, Clinton establishes the book’s underlying political theme: his showdown with populism throughout the developed world, and especially at home with the rise of Donald Trump. (Or rather, his refusal to reckon with the meaning of populism.)

Clinton likes to characterize the outbreak of the mid-2010s as “divisive populism” or “divisive tribalism” or “divisive nationalism.” If there’s a political leader or phenomenon Clinton doesn’t like, whether it’s Xi Jinping or Brexit, you can be sure it’s because of “divisiveness.” Early on, he admits that he once thought the United States was immune to such “poison.” But in 2016, Americans succumbed to it, as a result of “our fractured political culture, our uneven economic geography, our twisted information ecosystems.”

The deeper problem, Clinton writes, is an “us-versus-them” mentality that has been responsible for almost all the dark episodes in American and world history. He tells how, at his paid speaking gigs, he would encourage participants to look at the people around them and notice how much they share as people who transcend cultural differences. It is a worthy message. But Clinton was paid about $210,000 per pop to approach the likes of UBS and Goldman Sachs, and one wonders if bankers associating with other bankers had more to do with shared class interests than Clinton’s inspirational ascendancy.

Condemnations of “us-versus-them,” “divisive populism” dominate the last third of the book, in which Clinton links the rise of Trumpian populism to Southern opposition to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and the like. The comparisons are certainly not unfounded. It bears repeating that Trump was a major proponent of the “birther conspiracy” that Barack Obama was not American and therefore legally barred from the presidency. But Clinton’s analysis is ultimately too self-explanatory, eliding his own role in creating the “uneven economic geography” he rightly blames on Trumpism.

Consider the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which Clinton negotiated. Along with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO, which he also oversaw), Nafta decimated American industrial capacity, destroyed millions of factory jobs, and created opioid-addled ghost towns in once-proud industrial heartlands.

It caused a rift between the Democrats and the rural working class, the social basis of the party dates back to its founding in the early 19th century. The consequences of this rupture—the discord between Democratic Party workers and their growing alignment with the GOP—continue to shape American politics, and most recently Trump delivered a resounding victory. Yet, astonishingly, there are only three references to Nafta in the book, two of them tangential. In the only material reference, Clinton simply admits that the agreement needed an update after 25 years. There is no reference to the WTO at all.

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Critics of Clinton’s political economy sometimes get caught up in caricature, to be sure, forgetting that Hillary promoted universal health care in the 1990s and that her husband enacted paid family leave, allowing workers to take time off to care for their dear. At one point, Clinton quotes an African-American flight attendant who took advantage of the law to care for her elderly parents, telling him, “You know, a lot of politicians talk about family values, but I think how our parents die is an important family value. ” Amen, and it was those efforts, plus a stellar job market, that helped Clinton leave office with enviably high approval ratings, despite his own indiscretions and relentless attacks from the GOP.

Yet the thrust of Clinton’s policy, like its Blairite counterpart, was across the Atlantic to detach the left from the working class – indeed, from the notion of class as such. The Clintonians bought wholesale the neoliberal idea that it didn’t matter what a nation produced, that it would be harmless to swap a manufacturing-led economy for one dominated by finance and services. They cared little (and welcomed as inevitable) the loss of collective bargaining power of labor as a result of corporate arbitrage (mainly through offshoring).

Instead of so-called redistribution—labor winning a larger share of social income through higher wages—the Clintonian or neoliberal left created a low-wage, high-welfare economy. (When we say “high welfare” we do not mean that the American welfare net is particularly comfortable; on the contrary, it is thinned out, not least thanks to Clinton herself. Rather, it means that the working poor of the total income need to make ends meet to meet, public welfare accounts for a large portion—up to half in the case of fast food workers, for example.)

In such an economy, large donor-supported philanthropies and NGOs play a much larger role than grassroots, mass membership organizations such as trade unions, political parties and voluntary groups (all of which have been eroded). Clinton is more or less at peace with this transformation, rejecting the accusations of left-wing populists who blame him for his closeness to the wealthy. In fact, his new memoir could have been subtitled, “How Bill Gates and My Other Billionaire Buddies Floated My Various Charities”.

It helps that his worldview is based on an opposition to an “us versus them” (except, that is, for people who subscribe to such politics – they are certainly a you). But for the Democratic Party, Clinton’s turn from populism has proved disastrous. Billionaires and NGOs, as Kamala Harris learned to great cost in the 2024 election, can distort the ability of progressive politicians to know and understand what ordinary people want.

Perhaps the path back to power for a Democratic Party in disarray is to recognize that politics is, by definition, divisive, and that “divisive populism” aimed at Bill Clinton’s rich cronies may be exactly what’s needed. Bill would no doubt be upset. Then again, he might not be around to see it.

Citizen: My life after the White House
Bill Clinton
Cornerstone, 464 pages, DKK 30

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