A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 24 Summary & Analysis

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, many believed that he would be a transformative president. In the end, he was not. His final years in office were full of scandals, and he repeatedly “surrendered” to corporate and conservative interests. He barely won both of his elections, reflecting many Americans’ indifference to the existing political order. While Clinton was a charismatic, likable figure, “his rhetoric was not matched by his performance.”

Clinton repeatedly demonstrated his loyalty to the market system and made efforts to make the Democratic party a “business party.” When appointing cabinet members, Clinton took care to appoint black, pro-labor people to lesser positions, but his main advisers were mostly “wealthy corporate lawyers” or “traditional players on the bipartisan Cold War team.” His unwillingness to follow through on his rhetoric of equality and change became clear when Lani Guinier, a prospective hire for the Justice Department, made comments about racial equality that conservative critics found too strong; faced with a controversy, Clinton abandoned Guinier. Similarly, when nominating Supreme Court justices, Clinton chose two fairly moderate figures, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, rather than a genuinely transformative justice in the tradition of Thurgood Marshall.

Clinton tried to prove that he was “tough on crime.” During his campaign, he oversaw the execution of a mentally retarded criminal and later he sent the FBI to attack a group of religious fanatics in Waco, Texas. Instead of waiting to negotiate, the FBI fired on the fanatics, starting a fire that killed 86 people, including women and children. Clinton also introduced laws to toughen drug sentencing, ultimately adding around one million people to the prison population. During the Clinton presidency, immigrants—one of the quintessential “bogeymen” that American politicians have used to frighten their voters into obedience—began to face harsher treatment. Clinton’s crime bills strengthened the power of America’s border guards; Clinton also supported bills to allow the deportation of any immigrant ever convicted of a crime, “no matter how long ago or how serious.”

The Clinton administration did not “establish government programs to create jobs.” Indeed, Clinton claimed, “The era of big government is over,” probably to appeal to more conservative voters in the 1996 presidential elections. Clinton’s remarks were hypocritical, since his administration made no significant cuts to the military budget, even after it cut some forms of welfare.

Clinton supported an active, aggressive foreign policy. Within six months of inauguration, he ordered the Air Force to bomb Baghdad, allegedly because of a plot to assassinate George H. W. Bush, the evidence for which was weak. In so doing, Clinton violated Article 51 of the UN Charter, which expressly forbids military action that is not “in defense against an armed attack.” Clinton also deployed troops to Somalia, though when a genocidal campaign broke out in the country of Rwanda the next year, Clinton ordered the UN forces in Rwanda to step down, effectively allowing the genocide to continue.

Clinton’s foreign policy followed the Cold War paradigm of “maintaining friendly relations with whatever governments were in power, and promoting profitable trade arrangements with them, whatever their record in protecting human rights.” The administration maintained alliances with Indonesia, a country with a horrific record of mass-murder. Military interests continued to drive policy; for instance, when the Red Cross launched a campaign urging governments to suspend the use of “cluster bombs,” the U.S. refused to cooperate.

It’s instructive to compare the Clinton administration’s relations with two Communist nations, China and Cuba. China has a lengthy history of human rights abuses, and yet Clinton gave the Chinese government economic aid and trade privileges in return for its support of U.S. corporate interests. Cuba, by contrast, has “no bloody record of suppression as did Communist China.” And yet the Clinton administration continued to place an embargo on Cuba that deprived Cubans of food and medicine.

During the Clinton presidency, “free trade” became an important slogan. In Clinton’s first term, Congress signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which “removed obstacles for corporate capital” and allowed American business to move across the Mexican-American border. Later economic studies found that NAFTA had resulted in a net loss of tens of thousands of American jobs, since American corporations, now based in Mexico, hired cheaper Mexican labor. In reality, free trade was not “free” at all; the government interfered with trade whenever it felt that interference benefited “the national interest.” For example, the Clinton administration prevented shipments of food and medicine from entering Iraq, a decision that may have killed as many as half a million children.

In 1998, Clinton faced his biggest challenge: the accusations that he’d had sex with a young government worker named Monica Lewinsky. Clinton proceeded to lie about his relationship, and, as a result, he was impeached (i.e. called to stand trail before Congress). Congress impeached Clinton for his private sexual behavior—not his dangerous welfare cuts, his aggressive, illegal foreign policies, or his child-killing sanctions in Iraq. The same year, Clinton deployed NATO forces to Yugoslavia, supposedly to suppress the “ethnic cleansing” policies in Kosovo. However, data later showed that bombings had forced almost a million people to leave the country, including civilians and children. Some writers have argued that the international community should have pursued diplomacy instead of resorting to bombing. Yet the Clinton administration, like its predecessors, preferred displays of military force to diplomacy.

During the Clinton years, the richest one percent of the country grew to control a larger portion of the total wealth in the country—around forty percent. For many, the nineties were a time of economic growth, since the stock market was healthy. However, an appalling percentage of the population lacked health insurance, even while the military budget continued to grow. There continued to be a racial gap in America: children of black families were far less likely to attend college and succeed in life than children from white families, a gap largely attributable to a “terrible environment” that prevented success for “millions of Americans, whether white or black.”

Clinton did not profoundly change the structures of American society. Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy by a “pitifully” small amount, but continued to lavish money on the military. Clinton often claimed that his policies were moderate because the American people were moderate in their beliefs. However, polls regularly showed that most Americans wanted major cuts to the military, universal health care, and government help for the poor.

Americans protested and demonstrated against the Clinton administration. After the government announced that it would be bombing Iraq because Iraq had failed to allow anyone to inspect its “weapons of mass destruction,” students at the University of California at Berkeley made banners saying that Madeline Albright, the Secretary of State, was a war criminal. Many writers and professors pointed out that Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, had previously fought wars in the Middle East with CIA funding. Other activists participated in the “Million Man March” on Washington, D.C. in 1995, and founded the Black Radical Congress in Chicago in 1998. Unions continued to strike, often under female leadership. Also during the nineties, students united with unions to demand better pay for school employees. Leftists founded alternative media to challenge the Establishment consensus. Evidently, some of the “spirit of the sixties” had survived into the nineties, despite the Establishment’s efforts to wipe it out.

Perhaps the most dramatic display of activist strength in the nineties took place in 1999, when hundreds of thousands of activists demonstrated outside a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, showing their opposition to the hypocrisies of “free trade”—which is to say, “the freedom of corporations to roam the globe in search of cheap labor and no restrictions on industrial policies that poisoned the environment.” The corporate world found it hard to ignore popular opposition. Many businesses and international organizations declared their “concern for the environment and the conditions of their workers,” though whether they’d do anything substantive to alter their policies remained unclear.

As America entered the 21st century, it remained clear that real, profound social change would not come from the “top.” The country would change if and only if ordinary citizens worked together, “threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.”