Nixon was operating under constraints and expectations that led to some positive things in spite of himself (e.g., environmental regulations, improved relations with China). It was the Ford administration that saw the advent of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush Sr., that defined the later trajectory of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations.
And while he was a much better human being than Clinton, I’d date the Democratic party’s neoliberal turn to Carter’s administration.
I mean, Carter came into the presidency at a time when Keynesian economics were at their weakest position, both publicly and academically, in decades. I suspect without Reagan achieving 8 years of absurd, cursed, idiotic electoral success, and then HW winning a 4 year term after him, we probably wouldn’t regard the Democratic Party as having had a neoliberal turn at all. Mondale and Dukakis were hardly in the neoliberal vein, and arguably even Carter was working from the constraints of his circumstances more than ideology.
clintons was very much a result of reagan. nixon would have liked to do more but his party was not ignoring everyone but their base at the time and recognized there had to be some give and take and they still had some connection to actual ideals. Nixon was kinda the start though its just reagan made it more publically so and its become more public with each new one.
Same graph, but I would just replace Reagan with Nixon.
Nixon was operating under constraints and expectations that led to some positive things in spite of himself (e.g., environmental regulations, improved relations with China). It was the Ford administration that saw the advent of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush Sr., that defined the later trajectory of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations.
And while he was a much better human being than Clinton, I’d date the Democratic party’s neoliberal turn to Carter’s administration.
I mean, Carter came into the presidency at a time when Keynesian economics were at their weakest position, both publicly and academically, in decades. I suspect without Reagan achieving 8 years of absurd, cursed, idiotic electoral success, and then HW winning a 4 year term after him, we probably wouldn’t regard the Democratic Party as having had a neoliberal turn at all. Mondale and Dukakis were hardly in the neoliberal vein, and arguably even Carter was working from the constraints of his circumstances more than ideology.
Clinton also did a fuckton of deregulation.
clintons was very much a result of reagan. nixon would have liked to do more but his party was not ignoring everyone but their base at the time and recognized there had to be some give and take and they still had some connection to actual ideals. Nixon was kinda the start though its just reagan made it more publically so and its become more public with each new one.