Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in American Politics
Episode: Ryan M. Brooks, "Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Description: "In other words, like David Foster Wallace — who celebrates McCain for his display of “‘moral authority’” and commitment to “‘service’ and ‘sacrifice’ and ‘honor’” — Clinton responds to the extremes of free-market ideology by imagining that “American community” can be rebuilt through the practice of what he calls “old values,” or what Hillary Clinton calls, in a 1993 speech, the “politics of meaning.” In this sense, Clintonian rhetoric offers a particularly clear, particularly influential example of the kind of centrist “communitarianism” that would shape American writing and politics – including the politics of the party’s next president, Barack Obama, a self-described “New Democrat” – for at least a generation."...