T o read Axios reporter Felix Salmon’s description of it, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to shareholders is an epochal event. The prominent banker’s “61-page manifesto” sets out a vision not just for his institution but for the country. It’s one that imagines America occupying an extroverted presence on the world stage while robustly championing its commercial and political values at home and abroad, marrying market-oriented liberalism with reparative racial initiatives. Salmon brands Dimon’s philosophy “Pugnacious Hegemonic Neoliberalism,” which, cautious readers might conclude, is a scary-sounding polysyllabic synonym for something far more mundane: Bill Clinton–style “Third Way” liberalism.
Unless you’re unaccustomed to hearing Democrats argue that anything short of revolutionary alterations to the existing social compact cannot cure what ails America, Dimon’s policy preferences read as banal. In his “manifesto,” Dimon argues for free trade, a navigable regulatory environment that favors entrepreneurs and capital managers over the bureaucrats who would constrain them, “consistent tax policies” aimed at spurring growth, and “carefully constructed and limited” public-sector incentives designed to preserve domestic industries vital to national security. On security, Dimon seeks to balance U.S. reliance on hard-power deterrents with a renewed American investment in diplomatic and economic overtures to countries that remain committed to the “international rules-based order.”
Beyond that, Dimon seems hopeful that he can incept a paradigmatic shift among his co-partisans on the center-left by rehabilitating the concept of patriotism. The banker describes swelling with pride upon encounters with the American flag — an image that “reminds me of the values and virtues” codified in the nation’s founding documents. “Much of the world yearns to be here because of those principles — the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he wrote. “We can acknowledge our flaws and strive to constantly correct them, without denigrating our nation.” Toward that end, Dimon does not reject “diversity” or “equity” in concept. He and his firm see these buzzwords as instruments designed to equalize access to opportunity across the ethnic spectrum.
“Without cohesiveness and unity with our allies, autocratic forces will divide and conquer the bickering democracies,” the letter posits. “Only America has the full capability to lead and coalesce the Western world, though we must do so respectfully and in partnership with our allies.”
It’s not outrageous to call the doctrine Dimon outlined “Pugnacious Hegemonic Neoliberalism,” though each of those words seem chosen for their power to trigger a gag reflex in progressives. Indeed, the American far Left is likely to experience an involuntary physiological reaction at multiple points in Dimon’s memorandum. It’s a full-throated rejection of the nervous introspection and insecurity progressives display upon contact with anything that resembles American chauvinism. But the vision Dimon outlines is not so remarkable.
Thirty years ago, Dimon’s outlook would have sounded to observers like an articulation of the philosophy to which the “New Democrats” were partial. Third Way politics were designed to break Democrats’ attachment to sclerotic New Deal and Great Society liberalism, and to coach the Left out of its discomfort with expressions of American hard power overseas. The Third Way Democrats were not allergic to markets, capitalism, or tax rates that encouraged investment. They didn’t look askance at costly public works or progressivity in the tax code, but they also didn’t see the government’s confiscatory power as a tool to mete out a cosmic comeuppance to the well-off.
They were comfortable with progressive evolution on social issues, but not at a tempo that radically outpaced the public. Clinton’s efforts to reconcile his support for affirmative action with emerging court precedents that found the practice inconsistent with the Constitution illustrate the rocky straits he successfully navigated. Indeed, in emphasizing the point, Dimon cites a famous 1992 Wall Street Journal op-ed by radical Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, whose pivot to small-business ownership in private life led him to embrace small-c conservative economic policies. And in Clinton’s tenure, he gradually chipped away at the vestiges of “Vietnam syndrome” afflicting his party, culminating in what E. J. Dionne described as the “decisive break” with the onset of NATO-led intervention in Kosovo.
Making Dimon’s appeal into something scandalizing is sure to become a top priority for the American Left. After all, chasing away the ghosts of Third Way liberalism has been a progressive project for decades. The insufficiently enlightened Democrats of the Clinton era rejected “viable left responses to the crises wrought by a newly globalized information-age capitalism,” The Nation’s Lilly Geismer wrote. The “neoliberalism” Salmon derisively describes as “hegemonic” channels the language in a Jacobin interview with sociologist Stephanie Mudge, who rejects the Third Way approach as antithetical to the Marxian ideal of the modern labor movement. Clinton’s own secretary of labor, Robert Reich, decried the unambitious and wrongheaded “tiny symbolic gestures” that typified the movement, which were designed to appease voters who would not back Democrats electorally while simultaneously alienating the party’s natural constituencies.
This tension will become more acute if the party in power in the White House loses its hold on the levers of government in November. Progressives will surely argue that the party’s electoral woes are attributable to its failure to articulate progressive values unapologetically or somehow muscle dramatic revisions to the status quo through a reluctant Congress. The faction for whom Dimon presumes to speak is sure to be less confident given Joe Biden’s association with Democratic centrism (in theory, if not practice). The JPMorgan Chase CEO’s letter is best read as a pep talk in anticipation of the fight to come.