Beyond the New Deal Order

In 1989, Gary Gerstle and Steven Fraser edited The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, a collection of essays that provided a much-needed framework (and name) for an era bookended by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and defined by the ideas and political networks of a liberal, reform-oriented Democratic Party. Anchored by the voting power of labor unions and dedicated to the progressive potential of a strong federal government, the New Deal Order defined post-WWII America until Reagan's election in 1980.Now Gerstle is back with new co-editors to update what we know about the New Deal Order in light of new research that both challenges and deepens the essays in the original volume but also urges us to think more intentionally about what replaced the New Deal Order. The result is another important synthesis of twentieth-century US history with another much-needed framework, this time for the “Neoliberal Order” which could be said to have defined the US political-economy from 1980 to 2016.The book is organized into three sections. The first re-examines the nature of New Deal reform with essays about its economic inequality, its bottom-up state-building, its embrace by moderate Republicans, and its unexpected endurance in the Reagan Era and beyond. The second section looks at intersections of race, class, and gender in New Deal reform, explicitly challenging—or correcting—the absence of such analyses in the original volume. Essays examine how racialized, gendered assumptions about labor limited New Deal policy and reforms. Notable here is Sophia Z. Lee's explicit challenge to the idea that a “rights revolution” and “identity politics” created a backlash that led to the decline of the New Deal Order and “collective” economic rights—a narrative espoused in the original volume in essays by Jonathan Rieder and Thomas Byrne Edsall, and more recently by Jefferson Cowie (The Great Exception, 2016). Lee argues instead that the language of individual rights was already embedded in New Deal Order reforms and that economic collectivism was always a feature of civil rights movements.The third section points to the rise of what Gerstle calls the “Neoliberal Order.” This seems to be the real meat of the book, the beyond, to which the title refers. Here we find essays about how a younger generation of liberal Democratic Party reformers and thinkers adopted new ideas/policies about bureaucracy, automation, and environmental activism that undermined New Deal institutions (government agencies) and Democratic political power (unions). For instance, liberal environmentalists condemned and fought US agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority, once the paradigmatic symbol of New Deal possibilities. Here you see young idealists and progressives joining conservatives in attacking large government bureaucracies and labor union orthodoxies. Both liberals and conservatives embraced the language of a new political order—creative destruction, radical individualism, entrepreneurialism, globalization, deregulation—language that helped dismantle the New Deal Order's old-economy institutions and defined a new era of neoliberalism.Neoliberalism has been a slippery term for US historians because it has mostly been used as a pejorative by the left to describe pro-capitalist, anti-labor, free-trade tendencies associated with late twentieth-century conservative movements and globalization. In his masterful final essay, Gerstle sketches out a more historical framework for understanding how the term might describe the new political order that arose from the ashes of the New Deal Order. Neoliberalism marked a return to classical liberalism's laissez-faire ethic and free markets, which, Gerstle reminds us, was not originally conservative but rather progressive and emancipatory. Per Adam Smith, classical liberalism “discerned in markets extraordinary dynamism” and sought to liberate that dynamism from established hierarchies, bureaucracy, red tape, artificial borders, and tariffs (262). That emancipatory spirit was—and is—present in neoliberalism, which attracted not just conservatives, but also progressive liberals and even parts of the New Left, as suggested in section three essays. While rejecting “big government” New Deal liberalism, neoliberalism was liberal in its embrace of freedom: “the freedom of movement, the freedom to don different identities, the ability to live as a cosmopolitan, the ability to think outside the box, as the hippie capitalist Steve Jobs did so brilliantly” (263). This energy blew away the old, established (New Deal) Order and created a new economy based on finance, tech, and levels of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. Astutely, Gerstle calls Bill Clinton the Eisenhower of the Neoliberal Era. Just as the Republican Eisenhower grudgingly accepted the New Deal as a political reality, so too did the Democrat Clinton embrace welfare reform, globalization, and free trade, which further curtailed US-based manufacturing and labor unions, the heart of the old economy.Given this final essay on the Neoliberal Order, it is surprising that the volume did not contain any essays on globalization, trade, or the rise of the nonunion finance and tech sectors, which replaced manufacturing. This is a glaring oversight, especially since the roots of globalization, off-shoring, and international supply chains lay in the New Deal Order itself. The Democratic Party of Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy was internationalist and pursued lower tariffs, freer trade, and intercultural understanding throughout the years of its dominance, building the international infrastructure needed for the movement of goods, people, and services across borders. Moreover, there has been excellent work on the economic transformation Gerstle identifies in his final essay, including, for just one example, Gerald F. Davis's Managed by Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (2011). Nonetheless, this is an extremely valuable book for anyone looking to understand the limits and unfulfilled promise of the New Deal state

Democracy · Economics · Great Depression · Great recession · New Deal · Order (exchange · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Politics of the United States · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · Voting · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US

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