Notes for Next Time

When you get to be a certain age, you are inclined to do a stock-taking. What did I do with my life? How much of a difference did I make?

I’ve just published a memoir. It’s called Notes for Next Time. I’ve used the political and personal odyssey of my own lifetime to shed some light on the political struggles, the hopes, the gains and losses of the era in which I’ve lived.

If you’d like to learn more about the arguments of the book, Prospect Executive Editor David Dayen and I just recorded a conversation, which you can watch here:

My title, Notes for Next Time, suggests optimism tempered by sober realism. Optimism that there will be a next time—Trump will not succeed in destroying American democracy; but deep concern that we damned well get it right next time or we will just face more Trumps and lose our democracy for keeps.

What did we get wrong? It depends on who you mean by “we.”

It was the neoliberal corporate Democrats who got it wrong. They abandoned working families beginning in the 1970s, paving the road to Trump. Their critics got it right, including my own work and the work of The American Prospect, and another institution that I co-founded, the Economic Policy Institute.

Of course, if the real goal was shifting power and wealth to themselves, the corporate Democrats got it right. My book recounts just how this shift occurred, through three Democratic presidencies.

One of my chapters, and a key theme of the book, is called “Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics.” The neoliberals who contended that the mix of deregulation, privatization, and corporate globalization would energize the economy were dead wrong about the economics.

That recipe actually produced slightly slower growth and much greater disparities of wealth and income than in the postwar decades, when prosperity was broadly shared. But the neoliberal formula succeeded in redistributing power as well as wealth—upward.

At the Prospect, our franchise is to address Ideas, Politics, and Power. You can have the best ideas in the world, but unless they are married to a viable politics, the other side keeps the power.

When I was born, the legacy of FDR’s New Deal produced a stunningly egalitarian society, better than anything before or since. As my memoir recounts, you could buy a house without help from affluent parents, go to college without incurring crippling debt, look forward to a secure career. Factory workers, not just professionals, could be part of the middle class.

None of this was a lucky accident. It was the result of a deliberate politics that shifted power, security, and opportunity. That package is gone. Even if democracy survives Trump, we will need transformative policies to get it back, and a politics to match.

All of this is spelled out in my memoir. For more details, here is a very generous review of the book in the journal Democracy.

Even better, you might want to buy the book.

Next time, let’s get it right.