Lessons That Can't Be Learned

Does anybody really care about historiography, or is it just a hazing ritual for grad students?

There must be a word for ideas that are both commonplace and commonly ignored. In a chapter that came out in 2022, I wrote “Most scholars now accept that the rise of neoliberalism meant the transformation of the state, not its withering away.” I really thought this was the case. I wasn’t alone: I know more than one person who has given someone else the feedback that they shouldn’t frame their arguments against this strawman. But weird things happen. You come across a well-received book that claims Ronald Reagan wanted to “eliminate” the government. You hear people who should know better say the book is the last word on neoliberalism. You hear Ivy League professors cite the book’s powerful definition of neoliberalism as a process of unleashing the market, an argument they have already internalized so deeply that they react with genuine surprise when they accidentally encounter evidence of the persistence of the strong state within neoliberalism. What’s going on?

My previous post consisted of a list of factual errors in Gary Gerstle’s Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, focused on those which did not require much unpacking (and did not require shared normative commitments) to explain. While such a list is a common feature in academic book reviews, it barely scratches the surface of what matters. An accumulation of avoidable errors may indicate something, especially when the errors point in one direction or if they suggest conceptual incomprehension. But there are wonderful books that contain mistakes, and no one escapes from error. If it needs to be said, I have been wrong in print, and have been saved from embarrassment more than once through the unmerited grace of editors and fact-checkers.

A list of errors matters if you’re considering assigned a book, or citing it, or if you’re a graduate student deciding whether to spend time trying to figure out what people like about it. But the heart of the matter is the overall relationship between evidence and argument. In the historical profession, these are built around two things: original research in primary sources and historiographical intervention (historiography is the slightly annoying word historians use to describe trans-generational arguments between historians). There is none of the former in Gerstle, but that is acceptable in a synthesis (though perhaps not in one that makes so many dubious claims to novelty). But a synthesis is supposed to engage somehow with what people have said before, both in the monographs which provide the raw material and in the competing syntheses which one hopes to revive, qualify, or displace.

You can probably guess that I don’t think Gerstle’s book contains its own compelling synthesis. The post that follows suggests that the problem runs even deeper: Gerstle doesn’t even accurately represent the existing literature which he claims has inspired and informed his own work. It raises the question: is historiography a real thing, or is it just a hazing ritual for graduate students?

Gerstle vs. Slobodian

Gerstle praises Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists as among “the best work on neoliberalism written by historians.” The big takeaway from Globalists is that “it is wrong to see neoliberals as critics of the state per se.” Accordingly, we should abandon “the idea that the goal of neoliberals is to liberate markets or set them free.” This is so not just because of mystification (neoliberals could claim to be anarchists, but in fact rely on the state) but because “even a cursory reading of the main theorists shows that a positive vision for the state is everywhere.” Thus, even “if we want to understand neoliberal thought on its own terms—an essential first step of critique—we should not be misled by the notion of a self-regulating market liberated from the state.” We should also follow the lead of scholars who argue that “the question of ‘how much’ state should be replaced by ‘what kind’ of state.”

You can also sample Slobodian’s argument in this interview:

the phrasing that I use, especially in the introduction there, is to push back against a common metaphor that we hear about, especially the period since the 1970s, as an unfettering of markets. You hear about unfettered trade or unfettered capital movements. When you study the practice and the history of international economic law, it’s a strange way to describe what has happened since the 1970s….So, this pushes us away from the idea of neoliberalism as deregulation, which I think is really misleading; it pushes us away from the idea of market fundamentalism on the premise that we actually have anything that could be called a free market or a disembedded market. Rather, what we see is a particular kind of an embedded market, a particular form of regulation.

It is worth emphasizing again that Slobodian is not merely arguing that neoliberalism has failed to result in the creation of “free” markets or the elimination of the state. He argues just as forcefully that neoliberals did not even set out to liberate markets by eliminating the state. He says that the the language of disembedding or liberating markets is an “obstacle to understanding neoliberals on their own terms.” When critics are seduced by this image, the result is error: “the market becomes a thing capable of being liberated by agents, instead of being, as neoliberals themselves believed, a set of relationships that rely on an institutional framework” (emphasis added).

Reading Gerstle’s book, it is difficult to believe he has really grappled with Slobodian’s view. Most stunningly, Gerstle writes that Reagan believed that “the economy would flourish only when…a tax- rich government [was] brought to heel and, if possible, eliminated” (122). Gerstle also writes (all emphases are my own):

“The neoliberal order…was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls” (2)

“Neoliberalism…celebrates deregulation as an economic good that results when governments can no longer interfere with the operation of markets” (5)

[Ludwig von Mises] “wanted the purest market economy possible unleashed” (87)

“Reagan began to implement his neoliberal vision for American life across a broad front: deregulating the economy; stripping the government of power and resources.” (107)

“Reagan quickly deployed neoliberal policies [such as] deregulation: removing government from the business of overseeing private industry” (121)

“deregulation…entailed liberating the market and individuals from government control” (129)

[Bill Clinton] “argued for more market freedom and less government regulation” (155)

“Clinton may have done more to free markets from regulation than even Reagan himself had done” (157)

“Freeing market forces was the animating spirit of the Clinton administration” (158)

[neoliberals believed] “the forces of the private sector had to be unleashed” [and that] “releasing the market from all restraint was the key to restoring American greatness” (170)

“The campaign to unshackle the telecommunications industry marched hand in hand with the campaign to unshackle finance; only then would full free market capitalism be achieved” (173)

[Bush thought] “establishing a neoliberal regime required little work beyond the removal of government from economic affairs” [with] “the release of market forces thought to follow automatically from government’s removal” (202)

“[George W.] Bush believed even more fervently than Clinton that the era of big government was over. Government, in his eyes, did little more than suffocate human talent and drain away innovative market energy. The market, not the state, was the solution to vexing economic problems” (204)

I probably missed a few but you get the idea.

Also notable is Gerstle’s discussion of the libertarian Murray Rothbard, who Gerstle calls “a relentless advocate for establishing a market economy free of government meddling of any sort” (103). As it turns out, Slobodian has documented how Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism led him to become an outré neo-Confederate. This is completely unthinkable to Gerstle, who believes that “free market [sic] capitalism” is “the enemy of what conservatives in the classical sense value: order, hierarchy, tradition, embeddedness, continuity.” By contrast, “neoliberals wanted to shake things up.” As we saw too in the previous post, Gerstle is willing to distort primary sources in order to defend Goldwater against the charge of racism. But Rothbard’s “paleo-libertarian” synthesis was less paradoxical than it sounds: it would certainly “shake things up” if the South rose again. Far from providing support for Gerstle’s crude oppositions, Slobodian’s work explicitly unsettles the basic dichotomy.  

Gerstle vs. Offner

Along with Slobodian’s Globalists, Gerstle praises Amy Offner’s Sorting Out the Mixed Economy as one of “the best work on neoliberalism written by historians.” On this, I agree with him—it’s a wonderful book that should generate more conversation (Nicholas Mulder’s valuable review essay offers a nice gloss but there is more to say).

However, as with Slobodian, I find it hard to connect Gerstle’s views with Offner’s. Consider Gerstle’s sentence: “The architects of the neoliberal order set out in the 1980s and 1990s to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its forty-year span” (2). Not only is this not true, it is completely at odds with Offner. Consider this passage of hers, possibly my favorite thing written so far on the problem of periodizing post-1945 history (emphases added):

When capitalist economies came to crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, North Americans and Latin Americans did not merely reach for new ideas; they reordered their political-economic systems using the tools already at hand. They sorted out the mixed economy, selectively redeploying its practices of decentralization, private delegation, and austere social welfare provision, setting each in a new political-economic order that altered its meaning and purpose. Policies born together at midcentury came to appear in hindsight as expressions of two opposing impulses. Some became remembered as iconic features of Keynesianism and developmentalism, while others became known as hallmarks of neoliberal capitalism. Comprehending midcentury political economy requires recognizing that our own moment has changed the meanings of words and practices in ways that make our world legible while obscuring the past.

All this is to say that if we want to understand the cataclysm of the late twentieth century, we should study it as we do the Age of Revolutions, the era of slave emancipation, the crisis of the Great Depression, and the postwar process of decolonization. All of those upheavals remade societies not by inverting their every feature but by extinguishing a few of their defining elements and breathing new life into others. All were multisited, transnational processes in which influence moved in many directions across lines of imperial, national, and social division. And all of them involved a great deal of narration in the moment and commemoration afterward that produced memories of colonialism, slavery, and economic liberalism convenient to the projects that succeeded them. Our own world is the product of just such an epochal transformation, and we should recognize stories of total rupture and inversion as a form of memory that makes contemporary political conflict possible.

For our purposes, two points are essential. First, Offner argues that “stories of total rupture and inversion” are misleading frameworks for historical analysis. It is misleading to narrate (as Gerstle does) a transition from “big government” to “private markets,” since both neoliberalism and the pre-neoliberal “golden age” were forms of mixed economies. As she writes, “Mixed economies relied on the imagined dichotomy between public and private while systematically conjoining the two, producing manifold articulations of state and capital and multiple accounts of the relationship between public and private interest.”

Second, and more particularly, she argues against a nostalgic misreading of the pre-neoliberal mixed economy: it was not, as Gerstle writes, one in which everyone agreed that “that public good ought to take precedence over private right” and “that government was the instrument through which public good would be pursued” (25-26). Rather, as Offner shows here, and as she demonstrates in the body Sorting Out, the midcentury mixed economy already contained a heavy admixture of “decentralization, private delegation, and austere social welfare provision.”

That last point—that it is a mistake to glorify the pre-neoliberal era as an one in which public purpose triumphed over private power—has a converse. It is also a mistake to think that the neoliberal project has aimed at, as Gerstle writes, the “dismantling” of all that came before. As happens throughout Gerstle’s book, this conceptual misunderstanding leads him into claims which are outright false, such as “The apogee of America’s welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War.” I can think of no definition of “the height of the Cold War” or “the apogee of the welfare state” which would make this sentence true.

Gerstle doesn’t define the height of the Cold War, but say the most intense periods were 1946-1953 (Long Telegram through death of Stalin) and 1957-1963 (Sputnik, Berlin Crisis, Cuban Missile Crisis). It is hard to see how these, or even the extended New Deal Order period, were the apogee of the welfare state. As the graph above shows, the shares of GDP devoted to state and local government; to federal transfer payments; and to federal civilian purchases all followed a trend which contradicts the apogee/dismantling schema. The crude contraposition of “the pro-government creed that lay at the heart of the New Deal order” and the “anti-government” neoliberalism which succeeded it finds no echo in Offner’s subtle and rigorous work.

Gerstle vs. Robin

As we have seen, Gerstle is adamant about separating neoliberalism and conservatism. In my view, they are not coterminous, but they are clearly compatible and overlapping. Gerstle takes a more rigid view: “Goldwater and Reagan embraced the label conservative. But we should not mistake that embrace for an affiliation with classical conservative values of order, hierarchy, tradition, embeddedness, and continuity. They, like other neoliberals, wanted to shake things up.”

Two points. First, it is false to say that Goldwater and Reagan did not value order and hierarchy. Surely Gerstle would not deny that these two and most of their followers believed that social order should be maintained by subordinating blacks to whites, and women to men? As we saw in my previous post, Gerstle is bafflingly eager to distort the record in order to defend Goldwater against the charge of racism, but even he has to admit that Reagan pursued a politics focused on “restoring white supremacy” (119). In what way is that not an affiliation for “order, hierarchy, tradition, embeddedness, and continuity”?

In addition to the specific question of whether figures like Goldwater and Reagan valued these things (which obviously they did), there is the question of whether there is actually a contradiction between “classical conservative values” and the neoliberal urge to “shake things up.” Different people will define a term like “classical conservative” differently, but Gerstle’s own cited authorities on conservatism are strongly opposed to his style of interpretation. The book's second footnote (and the first to mention conservatism) cites Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. Anyone who has read Robin knows that he is violently opposed to the idea that conservatives (classical or otherwise) “see society is an inheritance ‘best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action.’”

Rather, Robin argues, “Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy,” that “conservatives oppose [revolutionary and progressive] movements because they threaten public and private hierarchies of power,” and that this characterization, “I show, [is] shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to [foundational neoliberal] Ludwig von Mises.” Robin’s arguments could not be more at odds with Gerstle’s claim—that Goldwater and Reagan are not conservatives—or his premises (that conservatives do not want to shake things up and that neoliberals are not invested in hierarchy). 

Recall that Gerstle’s defense of Goldwater claimed (falsely) that a prominent speech “focused not on race but on restoring to America the creative, entrepreneurial spirit that Goldwater regarded as the nation’s birthright.” What could racism possibly have to do with America’s entrepreneurial birthright? Gerstle has no interest in finding out, even if there are a dozen or so reference to Goldwater in the index of Reactionary Mind. It might be too late to edit the paperback edition of Gerstle, but the rest of you will find pp. 192-195 of The Reactionary Mind instructive on Goldwater.

Gerstle vs. Cooper

Gerstle says that the work of Melinda Cooper is “penetrating” and “indispensable.” Cooper’s insights, indispensable though they are, did not penetrate very far. According to Gerstle, the neoconservative Gertrude Himmelfarb believed that:

The individual must regulate himself. She had in mind not Margaret Thatcher’s individual, alone in society, but one appropriately nestled in congeries of institutions— in family and church, of course, but also in the vast archipelago of voluntary organizations (133, emphasis added)

This passage indicates that Gerstle has not digested Cooper, whose Family Values is built around the proposition that “it would be a mistake to think that neoliberalism is any less invested in the value of the family than are social conservatives.” Worse, it appears Gerstle has not even read to the end of Margaret Thatcher’s most famous quotation, in which Maggie declared “there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Pointing out that this famous quote continues after the first period has been something of a parlor trick for years. I did it in 2015, and even then I was aware I was recycling a move I had seen someone else make (quite possibly Corey Robin). The full Thatcher quote is emphasized in Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos (2015), a book Gerstle cites at least three times. But the phrase itself is hardly the main point: the point is that it’s mind-bending to imagine reading Cooper’s book and coming away thinking, as Gerstle does, that “neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior” (13).

Cooper and Slobodian think alike on many questions. Like Slobodian, Cooper thinks that many prominent critiques of neoliberalism not only fail to grasp the reality of neoliberal practice but even fail to recognize basic elements of neoliberal self-understanding. Writes Cooper: “In contrast to both neoliberals and social conservatives, and in spite of the prominence of family in contemporary social policy, a certain kind of left-wing critic has come to see neoliberal capitalism as itself destructive of family life.” Like Slobodian, Cooper blames the ghost of Karl Polanyi, whose pendulum model (in which periods of market-driven disembedding alternate with cleanly-distinguished moments of socially-minded re-embedding) has become “pervasive and well nigh uncontested in contemporary left-wing formulations of anticapitalist critique.” Like Slobodian, Cooper studies the “ongoing collaboration between neoliberals and social conservatives,” not their polar opposition.

Wherever Cooper and Slobodian agree, Gerstle is dead-set against them, though he never explicitly acknowledges that he rejects their entire interpretation. In a passage we have already seen in an earlier section, he helps himself to the language of embeddedness in the process of drawing a sharp distinction between conservatism and neoliberalism/capitalism:

Free market capitalism connotes dynamism, creative destruction, irreverence toward institutions, and the complex web of relations that imbed individuals in those institutions. This sort of capitalism, in other words, is the enemy of what conservatives in the classical sense value: order, hierarchy, tradition, embeddedness, continuity (105).

This is like something written by ChatGPT to drive Melinda Cooper crazy. So is this:

Neoliberalism is a creed that calls explicitly for unleashing capitalism’s power. Invoking this term allows us to shift the focus of political history in the last third of America’s twentieth century somewhat away from white southerners and family patriarchs resisting change to venture capitalists, Wall Street ‘modernizers,’ and information technology pioneers seeking to push change forward. That shift in emphasis, this book suggests, is long overdue. Central to the politics of the Clinton years were major legislative packages…whose influence on twenty- first- century political economy has been decisive. And yet those restructurings have attracted less attention than they deserve, their significance hidden by the smoke generated by the decade’s fiery culture wars. Those culture wars cannot be ignored any more than the racial backlash against the civil rights movement can be slighted. But it is time to bring the project of economic transformation more into focus, to give it the kind of careful examination it deserves, and to adjust our views of late twentieth-century America accordingly. A focus on neoliberalism can help us do that (5, emphases added).

Note the dualisms: “culture wars” vs. “economic transformations,” with culture and economy not merely being opposed but with culture wars serving as a literal smokescreen which obscures economic processes. Gerstle says explicitly that understanding neoliberalism requires a deemphasis on white racists and jealous patriarchs, on whom too much attention has already been lavished, and a shift in emphasis to the “venture capitalists, Wall Street ‘modernizers,’ and information technology pioneers”—a group which is somehow imagined not to include racist white men and/or patriarchs.

This despite the fact that Gerstle himself writes about figures like William E. Simon, a bond trader and Treasury Secretary during the crucial 1974-1977 juncture. As Gerstle himself indicates, Simon was simultaneously a partner in the Wall Street firm of Salomon Brothers,” an “Ayn Rand devotee,” and an influence on Jerry Falwell (111; 332). Gerstle may have encountered Simon in work by Slobodian and/or Cooper, but he somehow fails to draw the intended lesson about the relationship between what Gerstle insists on calling “culture wars” and “economic transformations.”¹

Forging Novelty

Along with the outright errors, Gerstle’s book also contains more than its share of arguments which are true but unoriginal. One of these is the idea that there was some affinity between the New Left/counterculture and the New Right/libertarianism (and especially Silicon Valley). Gerstle is proud of this argument: “Broadening our understanding of neoliberalism’s rise beyond an elite-centered model of politics to include the way in which popular and left forces spread its appeal,” he writes, “is one way in which this book’s account of neoliberalism is distinctive” (9).²

This claim is as stunning as it is false. I was born in 1991, and by the time I was in high school there was already at least one shelf of books in the proverbial library exploring exactly the thesis that Gerstle now claims as his own: Barbrook and Cameron’s “The California Ideology”; Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool (1997), not to mention basically every issue of the old Baffler (est. 1988); Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism (English trans. 2005); Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), etc. By the time Gerstle’s book appeared in 2022, these works (and others) were not just extant but acknowledged classics. Gerstle even cites Turner (2006). I once advised a (very good) undergraduate thesis on the politics of Silicon Valley. My advisee understood before he even came to me with his proposal that there was already an extensive literature on the “extraordinary and ironic transformation” that Gerstle claims to have discovered. If my student had claimed this, we would have had to have a conversation about what it means to write a senior thesis.

At one point, Gerstle pauses to evaluate his bold new argument : “Given that similar sentiments were percolating in districts both of GOP rebellion, soon to be styled the New Right, and of New Left insurgency, it is fair to ask: Was there any cross- pollination or coordination between the two groups?” He answers: “Not much, not even on campuses…But there were at least three points of intersection.” Two of Gerstle’s examples are well-trod ground. Especially well trod is the Silicon Valley angle. The second example is the New Left-libertarian alliance crystallized in Murray Rothbard’s short-lived 1960s journal Right and Left, and more generally in the “corporate liberal” historiography which was developed by Marxists like Martin Sklar (later a conservative) as well as by anti-interventionist libertarians like Rothbard. All this is less famous than Steve Jobs taking acid, but it is by no means obscure. Already in 1976, “assertions that the political economy of the New Left and the ‘libertarian right’ are converging” had become commonplace enough for someone to call for “A Reappraisal of the Convergence Thesis.”³

The other “point of intersection” is “the novels of Ayn Rand.” Huh? “Rand’s formal political affiliations were firmly on the right,” Gerstle adds helpfully. But her “constant railing in her novels against what the New Left called ‘the system’…also intrigued many who regarded their politics as lying closer to the center or to the left side of America’s political spectrum.” No doubt true, but how many of these people were New Leftists? Were there enough of them to justify the claim that Rand’s novel were one of most important links between the New Left and neoliberalism? And what do people “who regarded their politics as lying closer to the center” have to do with the New Left or the counterculture?

Some examples would be helpful. Gerstle obliges:

The legal scholar and Obama administration official Cass Sunstein has confessed his own enchantment with Rand when he encountered her fiction in the 1960s as a teenager. Sunstein’s Rand attraction did not last long (102).

This must be the first time that Sunstein has been described as a New Leftist. Sunstein was 14 years old in 1968. More to the point, Sunstein is the kind of person who could write—in a book about FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights!—that minimum wage laws “have the unfortunate effect of throwing people out of work.” So Gerstle’s big example of the New Left-Rand crossover is someone who was briefly a teenage Randian before growing into a lifelong neoliberal. This is no more ironic than it is a noteworthy event in the fall of the New Deal order.

Then Gerstle writes about sex, and things get weird:

Rand’s female characters were no simple replicas of 1930s cinematic stereotypes, however. Though women in Rand’s novels were expected, in the final analysis, to submit to male power, they were granted a level of sexual desire and a freedom from the obligations of marriage, monogamy, and domesticity that received little expression elsewhere in 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s popular or middlebrow culture.⁴

I have no doubt there were women who responded to Rand this way. Rand sold so many copies in paperback that I’m actually surprised Gerstle can’t come up with the name of a single New Leftist. But why is it worth so much space?

This brings us back to Cooper. The supposed point of the side-trip into Randworld is to link the New Right/neoliberalism and sexual release/emancipation. This fits into Gerstle’s anti-Cooperian dichotomy between conservatism/the New Deal order, both of which involve “embededness,” and emancipation/neoliberalism, neither of which has anything to do with “order, hierarchy, tradition, embeddedness, and continuity.” Cooper’s major target is a form of leftism which blames neoliberalism for breaking up the family, or sees feminism as the handmaiden of neoliberalism. Gerstle does not do this: instead he gives two cheers for the fact that neoliberalism brought personal liberation. But regardless of the valence, Gerstle shares with Cooper’s antagonists a politically suspect (and historically untenable) divorce of solidaristic political economy from the “cultural” project of gender emancipation.

For example, what can we make of Gerstle’s claim that “[Hillary] Clinton championed the cause of gay rights far more than either Sanders or Trump.” Characteristically, Gerstle provides no evidence for this claim, which in the case of Sanders is laughable. The only evident explanation is that he has deduced this incorrect conclusion from his dubious first principles: neoliberals like Hillary place an “emphasis on personal freedom” (119) while counter-neoliberals like Trump and Sanders focus (at least rhetorically) on the bread-and-butter travails of “ordinary working-class Americans” (206).⁵ Ergo, Hillary must support gay rights more strongly than Bernie.

Gerstle’s crude dichotomies also require erasing huge swathes of actually-existing cultural history. How else could anyone take seriously the claim that Rand’s novel’s “granted a level of sexual desire and a freedom from the obligations of marriage, monogamy, and domesticity that received little expression elsewhere in 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s popular or middlebrow culture”? Here, as with the Silicon Valley/New Left example, Gerstle ignores famous books that are now over a quarter century old. The Hayes Code and the male gaze notwithstanding, there is no shortage Hollywood films from this era that compete with Rand in their representations of desire and independence. Perhaps novels could go further than films in certain directions, but Rand was hardly the only racy best-seller of the period. The Rand detour is such a stretch that it can only be understood as part of Gerstle’s compulsive (and misguided) sorting exercise: personal liberation on one side, the New Deal order on the other.

Given all the ink he spills on Ayn Rand, it is almost unbelievable that Gerstle basically ignores abortion. The first entry in the book’s alphabetical index is “Abrams, Stacey.” I may have missed something (I hope I did), but I find only two uses of the word: Reagan’s attorney general “alleged [that the Constitution] did not contain an implied right to privacy granting women access to birth control (and abortion)” (123). The parentheses around abortion feel apt. The next and last mention comes in a footnote noting Trump’s “liberalism on several social issues, including a belief that women had a right to an abortion” (371n38). I find no other mention of “birth control,” one mention of “reproductive rights” (138), and no mention of Roe, Casey, or Dobbs (I don’t know when the book went to press, but Gerstle’s narrative at other points continues “into the fall of 2021” [283], which is months after the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in Dobbs).

As we have seen, the same white male boomer historian who found no place for abortion in his 400 page book about recent American political history does take time to tell us that “[Hillary] Clinton championed the cause of gay rights far more than… Sanders.” This dig is the only substantive mention of “gay rights” in the book (it shows up one other time, as an item in a list of “liberation movements of the sixties and seventies— civil rights, feminism, and gay rights” (133). There is no mention of gay marriage, Obergefell, or trans-anything: oversights which should feel bizarre to anyone alive in 2023. But Gerstle’s neglect of these issues should not surprise us. No matter how many footnotes he throws Melinda Cooper’s way, he tells us who he is in his introduction: a man who believe that the “culture war” is a smokescreen to distract from more fundamental “economic” issues. Forewarned is forearmed.

1. Also quite telling, on a different point, is Gerstle’s obliviousness to the implications of his own acknowledgment that the “secretary of the treasury under Nixon and Ford” was also a “radical” Randian/Reaganite/neoliberal. Elsewhere in the book, these administrations are treated as uncomplicated (if harried) bastions of the New Deal order, e.g. “Richard Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford, both coming of age politically under the aegis of the New Deal order, faithfully deployed the various Keynesian instruments available.” One might also wonder how the same Nixon who always “subscribed to the principles of the New Deal order” (117) wound up making a Supreme Court Justice out of Lewis Powell, whose famous “Powell memo” Gerstle dutifully glosses as “A Neoliberal Call to Arms” (108). The root of this confusion is what we might call the punctuated equilibrium approach to periodization: everyone in the New Deal Order period is fully within the New Deal Order; then a rupture comes, after which everything is different. Gerstle is hardly the only historian to employ this flawed approach. But his failure even to ask the right questions about Nixon and Ford is a perfect demonstration of how the punctuated equilibrium model makes it impossible to understand precisely what needs to understood: the transition decade of the 1970s.

2. Possibly even more stunning, in the same paragraph: “Emphasizing the influence of classical liberalism on neoliberalism…is one way in which this book’s account of neoliberalism is distinctive.”

3. Back in 2012-13, I wrote my own undergraduate thesis about Studies on the Left, related journal, founded by a group including Sklar. I remember coming across the existence of Right and Left and finding it somewhat interesting, but by no means enough of a discovery or a skeleton-key to mention in my final draft, though naturally I discussed the (quite different) conservative turns taken by Studies associates including Sklar, Eugene Genovese, and Christopher Lasch.

4. The only other evidence Gerstle presents is that Lisa Duggan’s finding that; “Voluminous commentary testifies to the appeal of Rand’s novels to adolescents who grow into adults with a wide variety of political commitments,” including queer readers. Duggan does not mention any New Left readers, but she does point out (as Gerstle does not) that Rand wrote her own book about the New Left. As Duggan explains, Rand’s book “The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971, later retitled as Return of the Primitive) reads like a series of screeds on contemporary issues scrawled by a cranky recluse whose only sources of information are popular news magazines and television reports. The essays are unified by her critique of the New Left, as a manifestation of primitive regression. They include complaints about ‘hippies’ and ‘beatniks,’ especially at Woodstock in 1969—dirty descendants of Dionysius, as compared with the Apollonians (including herself) in attendance at the launch of Apollo 11 that same year. She takes a swipe at ‘Women’s Lib’ as a bunch of unattractive women (like her character in We the Living, Comrade Sonia) who are demanding ‘special rights’ rather than legitimate ‘equal rights.’ She focuses especially on the movement for ecology, which she describes as at the core of an anti-industrial revolution. In ‘The Age of Envy’ she summarizes her view of the threats to Western civilization, as represented by the primitive, the disabled, and the stupid.” (Duggan, Mean Girl, 75).

5. Gerstle goes on to say that Sanders and Trump hold “virtually indistinguishable” on the global economy (259). More on all this in a later installment.