Book Talk: A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency

UCSB Library is pleased to present Nelson Lichtenstein in the Pacific Views: Library Speaker Series for Fall 2023. Lichtenstein will speak about his new book A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, published September 12, 2023, by Princeton University Press.

Chaucer’s Books will sell copies of the book before and after Lichtenstein’s talk.

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended 12 years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the American economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation’s economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. In his talk, Lichtenstein reveals why Clinton’s expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today.

Nelson Lichtenstein is Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An historian of labor, business and politics, he is the author or editor of 19 books, including State of the Union: A Century of American Labor; The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business; a biography of the labor leader Walter Reuther, and most recently, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism. He co-edited Beyond the New Deal Order: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession and a companion volume, Capitalism Contested: the New Deal and Its Legacies. Lichtenstein writes opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and The American Prospect.

This event may be photographed or recorded.