We Can't Go Home Again--Rethinking the New Deal and Its Legacy

I've been working on a short book with Nick Salvatore called The Long Exception: An Interpretation of the New Deal in American History for Princeton University Press that grew out of some lectures and an article we wrote for the journal International Labor and Working Class History (and a small firestorm of responses). For a scholarly project, it's already whipped up a surprising amount of interest in places like The Nation and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. People immediately, almost viscerally, feel like they have to figure out where they stand on our argument. There is, I admit, a lot at stake.

I boiled our thinking down to its very essence--just a couple thousand words--for New Labor Forum's "On the Contrary" section. You can read this readily-digestible version of our argument here: Why We Can't Go Home Again: Why the New Deal Won't be Renewed.

Two New Radio Interviews

WSKG's book program Off the Page did a wide-ranging hour-long program on Stayin' Alive, complete with some Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, and Bruce Springsteen. It's archved here: Stayin' Alive on Off the Page with Bill Jaker.

Doug Henwood, of Left Business Observer fame, did an interview for his show "Behind the Headlines" for Berkeley's KPFA (and syndication). You can listen to it here or find it as a free podcast on iTunes. Choose the January 15, 2011 show--Stayin' Alive is covered in the second half of the hour.

Some New Reviews

I think one of the most intelligent reviews of Stayin' Alive thus far has been Kim Phillips-Fein's in the Winter 2011 issue of Dissent ("Decisive Decade: Re-evaluating the Seventies"--not online except with library databases). As has become typical, this is a comparative review essay with Stein's Pivotal Decade and Kalman's Right Star Rising (these collective reviews do wear thin). 


It's not just that she says nice things: "the book that gives the best sense of the way that it felt to live through the decade—the confusion, desperation, and anxiety, but also at times the exhilaration—is Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive" or "Cowie’s book captures the contradictory nature of 1970s politics better than almost any other ever written about the period." That's nice. Very nice. But what makes this one stand out is her command of the subject matter, that quality of her prose, and the sharpness of her thinking. Her own excellent book on conservative, anti-New Deal, thought, Invisible Hands, has also made her aware of the dangers of naturalizing liberalism. As she says in the review, there is a risk of "making conservatism appear to be an accidental choice, instead of something deeply rooted in American politics." Couldn't agree more.