Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century by Brent Cebul (review)

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• Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century by Brent Cebul
• Darren E. Grem

Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century. By Brent Cebul. Politics and Culture in Modern America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. x, 466. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-5128-2381-3.)

Brent Cebul’s Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century argues that neoliberalism is neither “neo” nor “liberal.” [End Page 648] New Dealers invented it nearly a century ago, and it is better understood as a political economy that Cebul terms “supply-side liberalism” (p. 4). This approach privileged local business interests, public-private partnerships, and market solutions to poverty. Historians have long acknowledged the business- friendly approaches of liberal social policy. But none have delved as deeply into the archives and told as subtle a story as Cebul, who masterfully traces the American welfare state’s early and long-lasting capture by the market’s means and ends.

Half of Cebul’s book focuses on northwest Georgia, especially the small city of Rome, which he casts as a counterpart and contrast to Cleveland, Ohio, the setting of the book’s other half. Both Rome’s and Cleveland’s civic and business leaders privileged job growth and urban renewal–based development schemes, partnering with state planners, advisory boards, governmental commissions, and nonprofit entities to manage rural and urban poverty as primarily a local matter. “Liberals’ faith in economic growth also ensured that poverty continued to be immensely profitable for local elites,” Cebul argues, “cementing decentralized, administrative partnerships between liberals and often conservative businesspeople” (p. 91). Though hardly a radical policy shift, the War on Poverty presented “an unprecedented threat to their [business elites’] relationship with the supply-side state,” all while sparking revolt by the very communities under its administration (p. 148). Supply-side liberalism, however, would prove durable under protest. Urban renewal’s failures in Cleveland and the limits of liberalism’s growth-oriented platform in Rome set up space for a new round of Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s to “more muscularly articulate their producerist bona fides, expanded to include not simply their essential role in producing jobs, taxes, or affordable housing, but also their role in fighting poverty and reforming government itself” (p. 148).

For Cebul, the quintessential supply-side liberal was Jimmy Carter. Carter advanced a “generational suspicion about traditional public programs,” especially as he and other “younger liberals reckoned with the reality that even initiatives they supported were often underfunded, disjointed, and difficult to reform thanks to crosscutting intergovernmental administration and funding” (p. 267). Block grants, education reform, think tanks, balanced budgets, and subsidized entrepreneurialism became the policies of the so-called New Democrats, which replaced spending on what critics on the left and right called special interests. After Carter, Ronald Reagan’s dogmatic commitment to the idea that “the market was a space freed from public responsibilities or social obligations” chafed business interests indebted to supply-side programs, who looked to another southern Democrat, Bill Clinton, to privilege work as a sign of citizenship and austerity as pragmatic statesmanship (p. 291). Clinton did just that, doubling down on “the language of social progress, of democracy itself” as marketized (p. 291). In other words, Clinton finished a neoliberal project the New Deal started.

Cebul’s book adds balance to the historiographical overemphasis on business influence from the right, revealing how liberal endeavors also normalized marketization in American party politics and public policy. To make its argument, however, Illusions of Progress frontloads the presumably illusory effects of public policy on poverty reduction. This framework oddly [End Page 649] downplays the lasting influence of antipoverty advocates in places outside Rome and Cleveland, thereby reducing the antipoverty advocacy of civil rights figures and organizations to the periphery of historical import. Undoubtedly, this was not Cebul’s intent, but genuine postwar wins against poverty—especially extreme poverty—seem underexplained, whether in specific states, across the South, or nationwide. Still, it is not debatable that poverty under supply-side liberalism remained a stubborn reality for far too many, despite a multigenerational effort by a long line of elected and...