Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics

by Timothy Shenk

Overview

A rivalry that remade the political world as we know it today

Politics today doesn’t look much like it did fifty years ago. Electorates that were once divided by economics—with blue-collar workers supporting leftwing parties while the wealthy trended right—are now more likely to split along cultural lines. Campaigns have gone high-tech, hoping to turn electioneering into a science. Meanwhile, a permanent class of political consultants has emerged, with teams of pollsters, message gurus, and field operatives. Taken together, all this amounts to a silent revolution that has transformed politics across much of the globe.

Left Adrift provides a new perspective on this transformation by following the lives of two political strategists who watched it unfold firsthand. Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen were Zeligs of the international center-left, with an eerie talent for showing up at just the right moment to see history being made. But they could not stand each other. The mutual disdain was, partly, a result of professional jealousy, of decades spent nursing private grievances while competing for the same clients. But it grew out of a deeper conflict, a clash of political visions that raised fundamental questions about democracy itself. Left Adrift is about that battle—and the world it made.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798987053669
Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Timothy Shenk is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. A senior editor at Dissent magazine, he has written for the New York Times, the Nation, the New Republic, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Washington Universityin St. Louis and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New America Foundation. He lives outside Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

[A] deft and nuanced narrative.” —Nation

“An alternative history of how left parties came to embrace the set of market-friendly, triangulating policies, eventually known as the Third Way, that quickened the loss of working-class voters... [Shenk] is altogether convincing.” —New Republic

“The most useful takeaway of Left Adrift is that the 2024 election is, contrary to what many seem to think, a rather ordinary one for the post-1968 era—as, indeed, were the 2016 and 2020 contests, Donald Trump’s personal eccentricities notwithstanding.” —Compact magazine

“Left Adrift is a short book offering a small window onto a vast subject of global importance.... Shenk offers an absorbing, well written and often entertaining account of how four centre-left parties across three continents over five decades have responded to their loss of working-class support and the increasing polarisation of their electorates.” —Inside Story

“A wise analysis on the past, present, and future of liberalism.... Perfect for political junkies.” —Kirkus Reviews

“If the Trump Era were a television series like Game of Thrones, Left Adrift would be the fascinating prequel. Timothy Shenk has written a riveting portrait of the moment when the subterranean plates of American politics began to shift. By focusing on two of the key players in the internal struggles of the Democratic Party, he brings a vividness and emotion that makes Left Adrift much more than a political science treatise. I’d urge anyone who finds the politics of today perplexing—and don’t we all?—to read Left Adrift. No one else has told this story and it’s compelling, entertaining and important.” —Stuart Stevens, political consultant and author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“Left Adrift may be the wisest, most original book to explain the dilemmas of class and culture that bedevil the electoral left in the U.S. and its counterparts around the world. It’s also a delight to read. In zestfully narrating the parallel careers of two master consultants who despise one another, Timothy Shenk reveals how liberals got into this mess and what they must do to escape it.” —Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

“Fans of Timothy Shenk know him as a penetrating thinker and deft writer. And, gosh, he really is. Left Adrift is a clear-eyed account of how the left lost its political footing, written with insight, erudition, and a dash of hope.” —Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire

From the Publisher

12/20/2024

Dissent magazine editor Shenk (history, George Washington Univ.; Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle To Rule American Democracy) looks at the decline of the political left by examining the careers of rival political strategists Stan Greenberg and Douglas Schoen. Both worked for the Democratic Party in the U.S. during the 1990s. This book starts with establishing their influences and worldview. They held different views about voter motivations and operated accordingly. For example, Greenberg believed in a populist approach that speaks to blue-collar workers' economic concerns, whereas Schoen advocated for a more unified strategy that may have caused the Democratic Party to skew rightward. Shenk looks at both Greenberg's and Schoen's electoral strategies and dissects the results of major elections in which they participated. Greenberg and Schoen also worked abroad, and this book interrogates the waning popularity of the political left in Great Britain, Israel, and South Africa. Shenk's analytical title looks at the big picture, includes broad next steps for left-leaning parties and provides an extensive list of books for further reading. VERDICT Shenk's sobering but unsurprising conclusions will appeal to readers looking for answers after the 2024 U.S. elections.—Rebekah Kati

Library Journal

2024-08-02
A history professor finds a clue to what happened to the Democratic Party (and what might become of it) in the careers of two influential political consultants.

The U.S. hasn’t had the chance to deliver its verdict yet, but for the left in some parts of the world, this has been a pretty good year. Voters in the U.K., France, and Mexico handed electoral victories to liberal and center-left politicians, which U.S. Democrats might count as good news if they weren’t so worried about what might happen here in November. In his new book, Shenk refrains from predicting who might win the next U.S. election, but he does offer some context about how the Democratic Party (and its center-left counterparts in the U.K., Israel, and South Africa) came to be what it is today and what it might become. Shenk tells the story of the party through two influential political strategists, Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen, bitter enemies whose ideas, he writes, “provided guideposts for the careers that followed, shaping campaigns in the United States and across the globe.” Both men’s careers evolved as the Democratic Party was transformed from one dominated by the working class into what it is today: a party that, in Shenk’s words, “owes more to universities than to unions…an alliance between the most educated and the most oppressed, where the virtues of diversity are obvious but solidarity is harder to come by.” Future Democratic victories, he writes, won’t be possible “without restoring the party’s connection to a broad swathe of the working- and middle-class.” Shenk’s account of Greenberg and Schoen is fascinating but will likely appeal most to readers with a taste for the inside-baseball of U.S. politics. Anyone on the American left, though, will find a wise analysis on the past, present, and future of liberalism here.

Perfect for political junkies with an abiding interest in liberalism.

Kirkus Reviews