On the more recent past – Tyler Cowen in TLS:

‘By the standards of most Americans at the time the Clinton administration was a success. The US achieved high rates of economic growth, with increases in wages and productivity for much of President Clinton’s two terms. The stock market almost tripled, the federal budget was balanced and the Democrats and Republicans worked together to pass legislation. The interventions in the former Yugoslavia were controversial at the time, but the region has continued on a relatively stable course and some parts have prospered in the EU. If Clinton’s moral transgressions have aged less well, the public policy legacy has held up.
But there are always naysayers. Judith Stein was a professor of history at City University of New York, and she started this takedown of the Clinton administration from a left-leaning perspective. After her death in 2017 A Fabulous Failure was finished by Nelson Lichtenstein, a labour historian at UC Santa Barbara. In spite of this somewhat unusual dual-authored history, the book reads as a fully coherent and consistent narrative. To the extent that the arguments fail, they fail in exactly the same way throughout.’

(…)

‘More controversially, we are told that Clinton “had abandoned any attempt to preside over an investment strategy that made even the slightest attempt to manage American capitalism”. Yet his administration presided over a large military-industrial complex, boosted National Institutes of Health funding to keep America’s biomedical complex in the global lead, and made concerted efforts to increase government involvement in mortgage markets. The authors decry “the shift of capital from manufacturing to finance and real estate”, but the numbers show US manufacturing output rising steadily over decades, including during the Clinton administration. It is manufacturing employment that has fallen, and that is a near-universal trend around the world.’

(…)

‘What, then, would a more plausible set of criticisms of the Clinton administration look like? It would start with the observation that most economists think presidents have only a modest impact on economic variables. Perhaps they can wreck economies, but they cannot on their own generate high productivity. The Clinton administration to some extent got lucky. Another criticism is that it did very little to reformulate American government. Vice president Al Gore promised to “reinvent government”, but we got more of the same. Maybe Clinton is not to blame for that – who, after all, can reinvent American government? – but in retrospect American policy at the time was too cocky, whether at home or abroad. The Clinton administration reinforced rather than reversed that basic dynamic. If the disastrous second war in Iraq was step C, steps A and B were the Clinton-era interventions in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia.’

Read the article here.

It’s of course not only progressives who love to mistake adjectives for arguments, but it’s happening there also.

The idea that class warfare of better social systems would have kept the electorate from politicians like Trump, or Wilders in the Netherlands, or Le Pen in France is largely based on wishful thinking. And it’s extremely pejorative, give the bastards more money and they’ll behave better. Why not right away suggest to let them eat cake.
I’m not denying that a sense of doom makes the extreme right more attractive to many voters but the idea that better unions or more equality would have prevented the rise of populism seems to me absurd. This goes also against basic human psychology.
People want to know that they are doing better than other people, that’s the dirty little secret of our wellbeing.

As to Yugoslavia as a prelude to Iraq.
Interesting.

At that time, most of the leftist intellectuals wanted NATO to intervene. The Bosnians were the good guys, the Serbs the enemy.

In 2003 the intellectual enthusiasm for the war in Iraq was less overwhelming. Understandably.
In 2007 American soldiers in Iraq told me: ‘We are babysitting a civil war.’

After Iraq it became common wisdom that a dictator who keeps a lid on the population in the pan is preferable to chaos.
Lately, I haven’t seen much enthusiasm for peacekeeping troops in Gaza. And the solidarity with Ukraine faded away as a skirt from last year’s collection.

I repeat it, we don’t want to die for Kyiv, we don’t want to die for Gaza, but we are willing to boycott Germany, so we can become a martyr in a slightly more convenient way.