“Left Adrift” by Timothy Shenk
The rivalry of two men tells the story of how Democrats fumbled with their traditional base—and how they can win again.
Synopsis
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 use big data and sophisticated mathematical models to turn electioneering into a science.
Meanwhile, a permanent class of political consultants has emerged, replacing the party hacks of yesteryear 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.
The characters who will lead us into this history are Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen. They were two of the leading political consultants in their time. And 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 has made.
Or read this review from Ben Metzner at The New Republic
“American politics, Timothy Shenk quips in his newest book, Left Adrift, “used to be simple: Republicans were for business, Democrats for labor.” But since the 1970s, class dealignment—the delinkage of voters and the political parties that claimed to represent their economic interests—has chipped away at that once-ironclad organizing principle. As the story goes, Lyndon Johnson upset the uneasy New Deal coalition with civil rights legislation; the decline of organized labor in the 1970s weakened key Democratic networks of working-class association; deindustrialization blasted a hole through remaining working-class Democratic strongholds; and the New Democrats, with their deference to the free market and willingness to be pulled to the right, delivered the twentieth-century Democratic Party its last rites. The 30 years since have been marked by Democratic helplessness and indifference as the party morphed into a home for the wealthy and highly educated, while the right loomed in the background, slowly making inroads among working-class voters Democrats once called their base…
This story is convenient, and mostly true, but it ignores a key historical reality: Dealignment occurred across the world, sparing few left-liberal parties. The degrees to which it affected parties in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and South Africa (the countries Shenk explores, but by no means the only ones) varied, but trends are common. Parties with which working-class political activism was once synonymous lost key voting blocs and with them their identities. Some were more willing to embrace this development than others, pivoting to chase new demographics to fill new coalitions, and the autopsies of each revealed unique pressures to each country. And yet Left Adrift is not so much a corrective to popular accounts of class dealignment across the world as it is 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.
