History
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: Remaking American Liberalism in an Age of Crisis, 1972-1992
During his victorious 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton frequently declared that his was “a new generation of Democrats,” who “don’t think the way the old Democrats did.” The truth was far more complicated. Clinton’s victory marked the culmination of two tumultuous decades for liberalism: the United States’ postwar social and economic order collapsed, and a conservative movement represented by figures such as Ronald Reagan ascended within American politics. My dissertation, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: Remaking American Liberalism in an Age of Crisis, 1972-1992”, traces how industrial decline, social upheaval, and racial politics intersected in those tumultuous decades to forge the liberalism of the contemporary United States, a liberalism committed simultaneously – and often contradictorily – to both inclusion and individualism.