The Rebels

August 1, 2023

While Green's Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Nationalist Uprising plumbed the roots of popular dissatisfaction on the right, his new book focuses on the 2008 financial crisis as the cause of popular dissatisfaction on the left, arguing that until then the left was essentially an outlier in a U.S. politics ruled by Wall Street's market mentality. Among the players profiled her are Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Prepub Alert.

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November 20, 2023
Progressives battle to wrench the Democratic Party away from neoliberalism and back toward left populism in this searching study. Bloomberg journalist Green (Devil’s Bargain) pegs the 2008 financial crash as the watershed that mobilized formidable progressive politicians who ended the rightward drift of the party. He starts with the rise of Elizabeth Warren, who, as chair of a panel overseeing bailout funds and then as senator from Massachusetts, channeled Americans’ anger at the Obama administration’s bank-friendly policies and proposed such populist measures as lowering student-loan interest rates, expanding Social Security, and rejecting free-trade deals. In 2016, Vermont’s socialist senator Bernie Sanders stole Warren’s thunder, Green argues, with his antibillionaire invective and proposals for Medicare for All, free college, and paid family leave, and brought leftist protest movements into mainstream politics through his presidential campaign. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Sanders campaign volunteer, brought youthful identity politics to the Democratic progressive wing with her 2018 primary upset of New York congressman Joe Crowley. As background, Green shrewdly analyzes the pendulum swings in the post-Watergate Democratic Party—a chapter on Tony Coelho, a Democratic congressman and mega-fund-raiser who pivoted the Party toward Wall Street donors in the 1980s, is especially illuminating—and evocatively conveys his subjects’ charisma. The result is a revealing history of an epochal shift in American politics.

Starred review from January 15, 2024
A portrait of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as a renewal of the promise of the New Deal. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been sounding the theme for years, joined lately by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that their party has "lost its way and been captured by Wall Street." According to Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent Green, author of Devil's Bargain, that happened all the way back in the administration of Jimmy Carter. When he assumed the presidency, Carter announced plans to rewrite the tax code, tax capital gains to put the wealthy on the same footing as ordinary citizens, and close countless loopholes. For Carter, this was as much a matter of morality as fiscal policy, but alas, morality is a hard sell in Washington, and his own administration was sharply divided on Carter's "campaign promises to remedy the tax code in favor of working people." Enter a ramped-up Wall Street lobbying industry, which was richly rewarded when Reagan came into office and convinced Congress to scrap laws separating commercial and investment banking, even as a few Democrats argued, "presciently, it turned out," that doing so would usher in an era of bailouts of federally insured banks. Ever since, Green notes, bankers have led the list of major political donors, a hallmark of "a new political era that would lead Democrats to embrace big business." Perhaps ironically, Green notes, Trump's arrival provided Democratic progressives with new energy to rebuild from the left, forging new alliances with working people and unions and demanding more on their behalf, including significant reform of the laws governing finance and, yes, the tax code. Although the author allows that this new era is "still largely undefined," it's a return to the big-tent, multiracial ideals of old. A fresh approach to understanding the origin and aims of the Democratic left.

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