Reevaluating the New Liberals, with Henry Tonks

10 snips

Jan 21, 2026

Henry M. J. Tonks, a historian at Kenyon College specializing in American political history, dives into the often-overlooked New Liberals of the 1970s. He argues these figures—like Bill Clinton and Robert Reich—didn't abandon the New Deal but sought to revitalize liberalism. Tonks also discusses the impact of industrial policy on modern politics, the role of Japanese competitiveness, and the misinterpretation of workforce trends. His insights challenge the narrative of a purely conservative shift, emphasizing a dynamic and complex liberal transformation.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

New Liberals Sought To Reinvent Liberalism

The "new liberals" tried to upgrade New Deal liberalism rather than abandon it, centering industrial policy over market purism.
They aimed to craft a growth strategy for a globalized, tech-intensive productive economy to restore Democratic majorities.

ANECDOTE

Family Story Sparked The Research

Tonks describes his family roots in Granite City and how his mother's stories sparked his research into party and economic change.
That personal history motivated his focus on post-war industrial decline and Democratic realignment.

INSIGHT

Electoral Shift Plus Policy Stasis

Tonks argues new liberals re-engineered the Democratic base toward professional-class, metropolitan voters while failing to embed a market-crafting growth agenda.
This produced political transformation plus policy stasis focused on redistribution rather than pre-distributional industrial investment.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

When most people think about the 1970s, they’re likely to conjure up images of Watergate, oil shortages, disco, and outrageous hairstyles. When academic political historians have thought about the 1970s, they have tended to see the era largely as one in which the forces of conservatism gained strength, setting the stage for Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 and the subsequent decades of “neoliberalism,” in which both parties tended to agree that market forces needed to be liberated from the heavy hand of government.

But a new generation of historians argues that this reading shortchanges many of the Democratic politicians active in the 1970s and the years that followed, particularly the New Liberals. These were the people who wanted the Democratic Party to regain its political momentum by reforming liberalism as well as the party. The New Liberals included intellectuals like Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner, business figures like Felix Rohatyn and Robert Rubin, and politicians including Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and of course Bill Clinton, who arguably brought the New Liberal project to fruition by winning the presidency in 1992.

Henry Tonks, a historian at Kenyon College, has written a dissertation reevaluating the New Liberals. He argues that while they did pave the way toward the modern Democratic Party, they didn’t capitulate to Reaganism or repudiate their New Deal heritage. Rather, they tried to reinvent liberalism by adapting it to an economy that was becoming more globalized as well as less industrial and more reliant upon financial services and advanced technology. They embraced industrial policy and worried about whether America was falling behind its commercial rivals, particularly Japan. Tonks argues that while New Liberals didn’t correctly diagnose the changes to the economy in all of its particulars, their policy vision retains considerable relevance to today’s politics — and particularly the discussion around the Abundance movement.