A feeling of sadness accompanies reading Bill Clinton’s new book, Citizen: My Life After the White House. Although the former president wrote the book before Election Day, it is impossible to forget that Donald Trump is preparing for his second term. Reading Clinton’s recollections since 2001, when he became a citizen again—albeit with Secret Service protection, worldwide fame, and a wife who spent 16 of the 24 years since rising to the near pinnacle of American politics—one can’t help thinking of Trump’s long-shadow as he prepares to undo so much good work. Crystal balls are unreliable, but it doesn’t require clairvoyance to realize that the four years that Trump will spend as an octogenarian president in his second term will result in the dismantlement of progress toward shared prosperity, institutional efficacy, and social equality that Clinton achieved, and for which he has still not received rightful recognition. Despite the significant accomplishments of Barack Obama’s administration and the simultaneous enlargement of rights and opportunities for women, gay, and transgender Americans, our country’s life after Clinton’s residence in the White House is one of decline.
The major events of the past 24 years make it difficult for even the most avid optimist to argue otherwise: The September 11 terrorist strike, the two wars that followed, the financial crash of 2008, the election of Donald Trump to the office of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, the catastrophic and divisive mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and finally, the second election of Trump, even after his countless offenses against decency, democracy, and truth. Globally, the Oslo Accords gave way to October 7, while tensions with China and Russia only grew. Most of these events inspire lengthy passages in Clinton’s second memoir; the first, My Life, covered his rise from Hope, Arkansas, through his presidency. The Rhodes Scholar offers his characteristically learned and insightful analysis, fusing his experience and ideas with the unparalleled ability to articulate complexity in simple terms. It is the latter gift that Obama cited when nicknaming Clinton, the “explainer-in-chief.”
Citizen is a fascinating presentation of a productive post-presidency, cataloging the benevolence and importance of the Clinton Foundation and the necessity of Clinton’s centrist—but not bland—philosophy of governance, leadership, and politics. In the middle of the book, Clinton details criteria for evaluating the exercise of political power for civic health:
Did government make a meaningful difference, positive or negative, with a change of policy? What was the purpose of a given action – was it to empower all our people or to consolidate power for one group at the expense of the rest of us? And how has politics changed for better or worse with new technologies, unlimited big money, shortened attention spans, the calculated effort to get guns, especially assault weapons, into as many hands as possible, the loss of locally owned newspapers, radio and television stations, and the growing economic, political, and psychological pressure on the mainstream political media to sell a simple storyline instead of telling the full story?
As if returning to his early role as a law professor at the University of Arkansas, a job he held when making a failed bid for Congress in 1974, Clinton issues the above paragraph as a guide for readers to consult when considering the developments he describes. The answers to his questions are not good.
Politics, always a human mix of the noble and profane, has, undoubtedly, become the Olympics of sewer diving. Slack-jawed “influencers” have more authority than intellectuals and experts, nuance is tantamount to treason, and the Republican Party, which will soon run the federal government, has become a cult of personality. Most of all, the belief and practice that Clinton employed as president and asserts throughout Citizen is on life support and seemingly a nostalgic souvenir from a bygone era. That is the simple commitment to using government as a force for the public good—enhancing freedom, opportunity, and happiness to the extent possible while trying to avoid or mitigate suffering and dysfunction.
In the opening and closing passages of Citizen, Clinton references how everyone “keeps score.” (His scoreboard moves up or down, depending on whether “you left things better than when you started.”) Clinton agrees with Aristotle, who argued that politics is meant to improve “things related” to the community and give the most people a chance at “the good life.” It is still the only conception of politics that matters, but it has fallen out of fashion, as “owning the libs,” or other forms of petty and cruel condemnation dominate the political arena. One pines for Clinton’s 1996 presidential race that, fierce though it was, represented a choice between him and Bob Dole, sane candidates capable of leading the nation.
In his riveting account of the Clinton presidency, The Clinton Wars, Sidney Blumenthal writes that the president was always fond of saying, “America doesn’t need a culture war.”
Well, America disagreed. The consequence is that politics no longer serves the public interest, which, in turn, makes the electorate (and those who refuse to participate) even more cynical. Cynicism and rage fuel the culture war. It is an ironic loop. Few understand its circular motion and cost—and few have done more to try to end it—than Clinton.
The first half of Citizen details his work as the United Nations’ special envoy for disaster relief and his tenure overseeing the Clinton Foundation. On behalf of the UN, Clinton traveled the planet, leading recovery management programs in India, Indonesia, Haiti, and New Orleans. He often enlisted the Bush family—first George H.W. Bush and later the 42nd president, George W. Bush.
On occasion, it is frustrating to read Clinton’s glowing praise for the younger President Bush. The author of Citizen gives his friend a pass on some of the most monumental failures in federal government history, namely the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq and the horrific mismanagement of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. While some pangs of irritation accompany the passages on Bush, there is a wistful longing for an era in American politics when cross-party collaborations and friendships were common. Fair enough, but the bipartisanship that led to the Iraq War doesn’t merit nostalgia.
Still, to take Clinton’s point, not even Lewis Carroll could imagine circumstances in which Donald Trump would partner with Joe Biden or Barack Obama to raise funds for disaster relief. Donald in Wonderland has too many pathologies for that.
The right-wing extremism that insists “Every Democrat is Satan” is responsible for the attempted demolition of the Clinton Foundation. Throughout the first half of his new book, Clinton explains precisely how his eponymous foundation is a force for humanitarian aid, sound policy, and self-determination worldwide. It is responsible for millions of people accessing low-cost drugs for HIV and treatable diseases. It has overseen billions of dollars to fight climate change, bringing sustainable energy and stable infrastructure to the global south, and it has also funded and staffed education programs in the poorest part of the world, most often focusing on empowering young women through literacy and job training. The foundation has received the highest ratings from organizations that evaluate the integrity of charitable organizations. Yet, millions of Americans believe that the former president administered a “pay to play” scam in which foreign despots bribed him to broker meetings with Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State in the Obama administration. This Oliver Stone-like delusion is one reason why Trump won in 2016.
Clinton recalls, with outrage and bafflement all these years later, how The New York Times partnered with Peter Schweizer, a Steve Bannon-funded button man, by running excerpts of his slanderous hitjob, Clinton Cash—which alleged without evidence that the Clintons were akin to mafiosos shaking down donors. Schweizer’s so-called “reporting” was disproven by credible journalists, but it was too late by then. Bannon and The New York Times had already inflicted damage on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
The story functions as a grim preview of what Clinton spends the second half of Citizen dissecting and lamenting—the poisoning influence of right-wing propaganda and populism on American society. The former president borrows the terminology of a Venezuelan journalist to delineate how the “three P’s”— “divisive populism, political polarization, post-fact information ecosystem”—are a dangerous combination that can “destroy any democracy.” “Nobody does it better, at least rhetorically, than Donald Trump,” Clinton adds.
He labels the threat facing liberalism and democratic governance as an “old story in new clothes,” careful to note that while human beings have inherent tendencies toward cooperation and solidarity, we also have a dark side to our nature. We are hardwired to fear and often even hate those who are different (racially, religiously, sexually, or ideologically). We look for simple, recognizable patterns that frequently deceive us into accepting demagogic answers to complicated questions.
“In a highly polarized time,” Clinton writes, “serious policymaking often takes a backseat to name-calling designed to distract voters from considering the actual consequences of what the candidates are proposing.” Republicans have mastered paranoid distraction by disguising conspiracy theories as entertainment and with what Clinton calls the “Always Say No” program. No matter how beneficial or reasonable a policy proposal is, if it has a Democratic sponsor, Republicans must oppose it. Compromise is heresy.
Clinton forcefully argues that the reactionaries who have conquered the Republican Party, elevating Trump as their demigod, constitute the gravest threat to American democracy and stability. Still, leftists also have their own delusions to shed. He examines Berne Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton’s run for the Democratic nomination in 2016, showing exactly why even if the socialist senator’s ideas were appealing, they had little basis in reality. Sanders failed to explain how he would pass any of the pie-in-the-sky programs he proposes—a silence made worse by the mainstream media’s refusal to press him for an explanation. In the chapter “The Hazards of Rewriting History,” Clinton effectively dismantles the fashionable ridicule of his presidency as a corporate giveaway no different from Ronald Reagan. He details how a series of distortions about the crime bill he signed, the welfare reform that he championed, and his trade policies have erased the memory of many Americans, including Democrats, of the successes and achievements of his liberal, middle-class-based economics. For many on the left, Clinton’s presidency is merely the Defense of Marriage Act (something he enabled to slow the rush to an anti-same-sex-marriage Constitutional Amendment) and “neoliberal” backstabbing of the social compact.
Were some Clinton policies naïve? Certainly, the financial industry reforms of his second term were not a great idea, and greater antitrust enforcement—although he can boast the Microsoft win—and other measures would have added to his successful legacy. The fact remains that during the Clinton years, wages grew for every income group, especially those in the middle and bottom, first-time home ownership and college graduation rates skyrocketed, and small business startups increased while unemployment, crime, teenage pregnancy, and foreclosures dropped. The Clinton administration also balanced the federal budget while enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, which lifted four million people out of poverty and created SCHIP. This health program insures millions of children and their mothers. When Clinton left office, it was an optimistic time.
As we prepare for troubled times, it is instructive to read Clinton’s recollections and recommendations. Near his conclusion, he remembers feeling a bolt of inspiration when Robert Kennedy, running for president in 1968, while Clinton was a student at Georgetown, quoted Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” telling his young audience, “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
Citizen is one important explorer’s cartography. It should inspire readers to commit to their own expeditions.
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