In the end, Clinton’s main political accomplishment was a defensive one. He won reelection easily in 1996 and thus stalled the growth of the right. Since the late 1960s, conservatives had feasted on an image of liberals as arrogant, effete, and out of touch with the problems of ordinary Americans. Clinton—with his campaign bus tours, his empathy for voters “in pain,” and his praise of Americans “who work hard and play by the rules”—helped make at least a mild brand of social reformism palatable again to whites who had grown wary of the image of the party as a bastion of cosmopolitans and ghetto dwellers. His sponsorship of a crime bill that increased the number of police and boosted the incarceration of African Americans was intended to assuage their fears, although the Congressional Black Caucus backed it, too. That Clinton’s second term was marked by an unemployment rate under 4 percent, coupled with low inflation and lower crime rates, further brightened the public’s mood.
For such an astute politician, advocating a robust vision of moral capitalism and programs to embody it would have required a robust progressive insurgency. But those movements on the left that did exist in the second half of the 1990s were just beginning to awaken from a long spell of insularity and division. Black and Hispanic activists lacked a common agenda, and most spent their energies defending affirmative action and/or immigrant rights against right-wing attacks like that in California. Organized labor was a demoralized movement until John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union became president of the AFL-CIO at the end of 1995, and it took the rest of the decade for him and his allies to persuade even a minority of unions to devote sizable resources to organizing new members. There was, to be sure, no shortage of liberal and radical intellectuals in the universities.
But many humanists and social scientists mistook an enthusiasm for postmodern discourse theories for political insight and wrote prose only an insomniac could appreciate. The fifty thousand demonstrators who occupied the streets of Seattle in the fall of 1999 to shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization were able to unite environmentalists and labor groups behind a shared contempt for a system that seemed to cherish no value but the bottom line. But this infant campaign for global justice failed to mature into a sustainable one.