I’ve never met Bill Clinton. But several friends of mine who have met him report the same thing: that for the 30 seconds he shakes your hand, looks into your eyes, and says, “How are you, sir?,” he makes you feel like you’re the only person in the world who matters to him. These friends of mine – some are ardent Republicans –are all well aware of the man’s sleazier side. Still, they speak of their encounters with Clintonian charm as a quasi-religious experience.
That irrepressible affability comes through in Citizen, the 42nd president’s post-presidential memoir. As the author describes his life in retirement – the obscenely remunerated speaking gigs and book deals, the friendships with world leaders, the philanthropy, the ongoing politicking for his party – one can’t help but root for him.
But this is tinged with sadness: Clinton embodies the technocratic, globalist, sunnily optimistic, impeccably Third Way post-New Deal American liberalism, and he can’t figure out why that worldview has come under attack at home and around the world, especially since the mid-2010s; or why anyone would blame him for what came after him. As such, beneath the narrative’s smooth surface churns the impotent rage of an old man – yes, I know how ironic it is of me to ascribe impotence to Bill Clinton, of all men.
Americans of a certain vintage associate the Clinton era with good times. In my case, it was late in his tenure (Thanksgiving 1998, to be exact) that my mother and I arrived in the United States, green cards in hand. The economy was booming, interest rates and unemployment were low and the crackling hiss of the dial-up modem promised unprecedented connectivity. The bad guys, in the movies as in real life, were Yugoslav ultra-nationalists and a handful of easy-to-punish “rogue regimes.” Things were so good, in fact, that Americans could afford to get worked up about an intern in a tight blue dress fellating the Commander-in-Chief.
Then came the barrage of cataclysms that have defined my adult life: 9/11 and two decades of fruitless regime-change wars; the dotcom recession and the great recession; the global migrant crisis and the rise of populism; the pandemic and the new Cold War. During this dreadful quarter-century, Clinton no longer figured as a main character on the stage of history. He wasn’t exactly marginal, either: His wife, Hillary, made two bids for the presidency (campaigns in which Bill was actively involved) and then served as secretary of state. The Clinton machine was a potent force for much of this time.
But not at the outset. Upon leaving the Oval Office, Clinton writes, he and Hillary were broke and “facing millions of dollars in legal fees” related to the various investigations he faced in office: an impeachment for lying under oath in regard to the aforementioned blowjob, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Vince Foster’s suicide. If you aren’t a student of 1990s political arcana, the Clintons could definitely be shady, but they weren’t the lawless monsters of Republican demonology. It’s also a reminder that the use of lawfare to hamper a political opponent didn’t begin with Donald Trump and the #Russiagate hoax (disseminated, in part, by Hillary Clinton in the wake of her 2016 defeat).
In the event, Clinton’s post-presidency money situation was so bad, he recalls, that he was “embarrassed… to ask my friend Terry McAuliffe”, the Virginia Democratic boss, “to cosign my first mortgage” on a house in Chappaqua, NY. Luckily, along came Knopf, the prestigious imprint, and the Harry Walker Agency, representatives of choice for high-end public speakers, bearing lucrative contracts. He and Hillary would go on to earn $153 million in speaking fees from 2001 to 2016 (nice work, if you can get it).
Clinton also established an NGO, called the Clinton Global Initiative, and a family foundation to support its work. Much of the first two-thirds of the hefty volume is dedicated to his speechifying and philanthropic work, occasionally interrupted when he is called to assist his successors in special missions: testifying before the 9/11 Commission (where he forthrightly laid out his own shortcomings, above all, a failure to ensure greater coordination between the intelligence agencies); rescuing American filmmakers taken hostage by North Korea; leading post-disaster fundraising, often alongside his erstwhile rival George HW Bush.
As far as presidential prose goes, Clinton doesn’t come close to the high standards set by predecessors such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, but his plainspoken Arkansas twang comes through, and there are poignant moments. In one, he meets an Egyptian-American crying before a memorial of victims’ photos in the wake of 9/11, railing against the terrorists who’d caused his fellow citizens to distrust all Muslims. In another, a visiting Al Gore points to a refrigerator sitting on the Clintons’ driveway (they were renovating the Chappaqua house) and says, “I know you wanted to bring your Ozarks culture to New York, but this is going too far.”
After a while, one wearies of chapter after chapter of Clinton boasting of his women’s-empowerment efforts in Africa and his generous donations to this and that cause. But in these early chapters, Clinton establishes the underlying political theme of the book: his reckoning with populism across the developed world, and especially at home with the rise of Donald Trump. (Or rather, his refusal to reckon with the meaning of populism.)
Clinton’s likes to characterise eruptions of the mid-2010s as “divisive populism” or “divisive tribalism” or “divisive nationalism.” If there’s a political leader or phenomenon Clinton doesn’t like, whether it’s Xi Jinping or Brexit, you can be sure it’s owing to “divisiveness.” Early on, he admits that he once believed that the United States was immune to such “poison.” But in 2016, Americans succumbed to it, as a result of “our divided political culture, our uneven economic geography, our twisted information ecosystems.”
The deeper problem, Clinton writes, is an “us-versus-them” mentality that has been responsible for nearly all the dark episodes in American and world history. He recounts how, at his paid speaking gigs, he would urge attendees to glance at the people around them and notice how much they share as human beings that transcends cultural differences. It’s a worthy message. But Clinton was getting paid about $210,000 a pop to address the likes of UBS and Goldman Sachs, and one wonders if bankers bonding with fellow bankers had more to do with shared class interests than Clinton’s inspirational cant.
Denunciations of “us-versus-them”, “divisive populism” dominate the final third of the book, in which Clinton associates the rise of Trumpian populism with Southern opposition to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and the like. The comparisons aren’t baseless, to be sure. It bears repeating that Trump was a chief promoter of the “birther” conspiracy that Barack Obama wasn’t American and therefore legally barred from the presidency. But Clinton’s analysis is finally too glibly self-exculpatory, eliding his own role in creating the “uneven economic geography” he rightly blames for Trumpism.
Consider the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which Clinton negotiated. Together with China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO, which he also oversaw), Nafta devastated American industrial capacity, destroyed millions of factory jobs and created opioid-addled ghost towns in once-proud industrial heartlands.
It caused a rupture between the Democrats and the rural working class, the party’s social base going back to its founding in the early 19th century. The consequences of that rupture – the unalignment of workers from the Democratic party and their growing realignment with the GOP – continue to shape American politics, most recently delivering a resounding victory to Trump. Yet astonishingly, there are only three references to Nafta in the book, two of them tangential. In the sole substantive reference, Clinton merely grants that the deal was in need of an update after 25 years. There is no reference to the WTO whatsoever.
Critics of Clintonian political economy are sometimes given to caricature, to be sure, forgetting that Hillary promoted universal healthcare in the 1990s and that her husband enacted paid family leave, allowing workers to take time off to care for loved ones. At one point, Clinton quotes an African-American flight attendant who took advantage of the law to care for her elderly parents, telling him, “You know, a lot of politicians talk about family values, but I think how our parents die is an important family value.” Amen, and it was these efforts, plus a stellar job market, that contributed to Clinton leaving office with enviably high approval ratings, notwithstanding his own indiscretions and relentless attacks from the GOP.
Even so, the thrust of Clintonian policy, like its Blairite counterpart across the Atlantic, was to detach the left from the working class – indeed, from the notion of class as such. The Clintonians bought wholesale the neoliberal idea that it didn’t matter what a nation produced, that it would be harmless to trade a manufacturing-led economy for one dominated by finance and services. They cared little about (indeed, welcomed as inevitable) the loss of labour’s collective bargaining power as a result of corporate arbitrage (mainly through offshoring).
In place of so-called pre-distribution – labour winning a larger share of the social income through higher wages – the Clintonian or neoliberal left brought about a low-wage, high-welfare economy. (When we say, “high welfare” we don’t mean that the American welfare net is particularly comfortable; on the contrary, it’s thinned out, not least thanks to Clinton himself. Rather, it means that of the total income the working poor need to make ends meet, public welfare takes up a big chunk – up to half in the case of fast food workers, for example.)
In such an economy, big donor-backed philanthropies and NGOs play a much bigger role than do grassroots, mass-membership organisations like trade unions, political parties, and volunteer groups (all of which have been hollowed out). Clinton is more or less at peace with this transformation, dismissing the reproaches of left populists who chide him for his proximity to the wealthy. Indeed, his new memoir could have been subtitled, “How Bill Gates and My Other Billionaire Buddies Floated My Various Charities”.
It helps that his worldview is premised on an opposition to an “us versus them” (except, that is, for people who do subscribe to such politics – they’re definitely a them). But for the Democratic Party, the Clintonian turn away from populism has proved disastrous. Billionaires and NGOs, as Kamala Harris learned at a high price in the 2024 election, can distort progressive politicians’ ability to know and understand what ordinary people want.
Perhaps the way back to power for a Democratic Party in disarray is to recognise that politics by definition is divisive, and that “divisive populism” targeting Bill Clinton’s rich buddies might be precisely what’s needed. Bill would no doubt be chagrined. Then again, he might not be around to see it.
Citizen: My Life After the White House
Bill Clinton
Cornerstone, 464pp, £30
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