Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics

by Timothy Shenk

A behind-the-scenes look at how democrats lost their way

In the generation after World War II, voters around the world routinely split along economic lines, delivering reliable working-class majorities to parties on the left. Today, coalitions are increasingly determined by education rather than by income, driving educated professionals to the left and pushing blue-collar voters to the right. In Left Adrift historian Timothy Shenk provides a new perspective on this extraordinary shift by taking readers inside a debate that unfolded in a tiny circle of elite political strategists over how leftwing parties could win again.

At the center of this argument was the question of whether the left could once again become the party of workers. Built around accounts of individuals struggling against tectonic political changes—and featuring a cast of characters that includes Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela, and Benjamin Netanyahu—Left Adrift tells the story of how leftwing parties fought to hold onto the working class while reinventing themselves for a new era.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, American History

264 pages, Paperback

Published October 8, 2024

Reviews

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

We need more fun Poli-sci books! For a book covering changing party coalitions and political consultants, I was shocked by how engaging the book was.

Shenk tells an aggressively readable story of the hidden realignment of U.S. politics since the fall of the New Deal Order. Much has been written about the Brahminization of the Left, and the early history of the populist Right; how the Democratic Party has come to represent an aspirational, educated class, losing working class voters to a populist and nativist Republican Party. Shenk's narrative traces the quieter, more nuanced battles over messaging and policy by Democratic strategies fighting against these trends.

Shenk tells this political realignment through the lens of two key Democratic strategists who recognized the shifting winds and sought to reverse the party's fortune. Stan Greenberg attempted to bring back the New Deal coalition by bringing back a populist message focused on kitchen table economic messaging to bring the Reagan Democrat working class back into the Democratic Party. Doug Schoen, seeing early the appeal of right wing populism, tries to regain the trust of these voters by moving to the center on key issues rebuilding consensus. Following Bill Clinton's election, Shenk tracks these strategists across the world to the U.K., Israel, and South Africa showing how they applied their visions abroad.

Shenk is such an incredible writer. His last book, "The Realigners", completely changed how I viewed political coalition building. This book is the perfect sequel.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. What a timely read! The book talks through some major realignments happening — namely, that highly-educated/high-earning voters are shifting left while working class voters move right. The 2024 election was a continuation of this trend, but Shenk explains that the US is not alone here. The UK has undergone a similar realignment, along with a few other countries described in the book.

Left-of-center parties have a choice to make: will they try and make further inroads with college-educated/suburban voters or should they take more of a populist approach and try to win back voters in the working class? This debate was captured perfectly by the more idealistic, ambitious Stan Greenberg vs the centrist, poll-driven, incrementalist Douglas Shoen, both of whom were hoping to steer Bill Clinton’s administration in the 90s.

This book is very prescient and I recommend it to better understand the shifting electoral landscape.

[Hasan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timothy Shenk’s Left Adrift explores the Democratic Party’s ideological divide through Stanley Greenberg’s populism and Doug Schoen’s suburban centrism. While Greenberg prioritized working-class economic concerns, Schoen targeted moderate suburban voters, a strategy embraced by Bill Clinton after 1994 with short-term success but long-term setbacks for the party.

The book’s heavy focus on Clinton feels dated, overlooking the relevance of more recent presidencies like Obama’s. Clinton’s pivot to centrism helped him politically but left Democrats locked out of congressional power for over a decade, highlighting the risks of abandoning Greenberg’s grassroots approach.

Shenk argues that Greenberg’s vision, blending economic populism with cultural sensitivity, offered a more sustainable path. By shifting toward corporate interests, leaders like Clinton and Tony Blair alienated working-class voters, a legacy that continues to challenge liberal parties in the developed world today.

[Michael Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I should've taken the title more at face value; this felt heavy on the "how we got here" and light on the "what should we do next".

I generally like the books that Columbia Global Reports turn out, but this one felt like a bit of a miss for me. Just felt like an overall pessimistic argument that the natural state of voters (the world over, this isn't a uniquely American phenomenon) is to trend towards being racist, despising immigration, and eager to punish liberal incumbents. Which, I guess judging by recent real-world elections of the past decade or so has some truth to it and maybe I just don't feel comfortable facing the reality of that. But it still felt strange to come away from this feeling like I'm supposed to believe if a liberal candidate/party loses it was their fault but if a conservative loses, it was also because of the liberals; conservative opposition apparently has no agency and is just a latent, passive force that merely needs to field a candidate to have a chance at winning.

I appreciated the parallels and contrasts drawn with the UK, Israel, and South Africa, but some of the suggestions posited as obvious truths (if Dems move towards the right, Republicans will be forced to move to the left!) didn't successfully convince me.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had some moderately interesting historical and international perspectives on left-leaning political parties experiencing the boom / bust cycle of populist politics in the course of liberal coalition management. I'm not sure Stan Greenberg was really enough of a hero to serve as the basis for the whole book. There's also some confusion about whether this is a descriptive account vs. a normative one--the author seems to be rooting for the adoption of old-fashioned class warfare but doesn't usually come out and just say so. Some of the chapters felt like filler; you can get away with just reading the introduction and conclusion. I tend to think the trends described by the author are pretty far upstream from the individual political consultants who are profiled and have more to do with the fundamental tensions between democracy and industrial capitalism. Maybe that makes for a less superficially compelling narrative.

[Kirsten]

https://newrepublic.com/article/18579...

[Breann Hunt]

great starting point for reckoning with recent (and not so recent) events.

and while i can’t say i agree with everything the author put out there, you can’t argue with this book’s brevity

[Ryan Beltz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics" by Timothy Shenk is a thought-provoking exploration of the disjointed trajectory of left-wing politics in countries like the United States, U.K., Israel, and South Africa. Shenk takes us on a journey to uncover the strains within the global left, highlighting how it has drifted away from its working-class roots and transformed into a formation more reflective of elite interests.

One of the commendable aspects of this work is Shenk's insightful analysis of the evolving alliances within left-wing coalitions. He illustrates poignantly with the quote, “Today, it owes more to universities than to unions, and its coalition looks like an alliance between professionals and the poor, where the virtues of diversity are obvious but solidarity is harder to come by, especially with the middle of the electorate.” This paints a vivid picture of the current political landscape and underscores the challenge of fostering solidarity amidst diversity.

However, while Shenk's analysis is intriguing, there are moments where the book's reliance on Clinton consultants as benchmarks feels not only overused but also dated. What’s more intriguing is that these consultants coincidently worked in all the countries used as case studies, which perhaps offers a narrow perspective on a much broader issue.

The text would have benefited from a deeper dive into how certain policy positions, particularly around immigration, have failed the left once they gained power. These missteps seem to be either underreported or overlooked, which could have added more depth to the narrative and enhanced the reader's understanding of the challenges the left-wing faces in maintaining its coalition.

Furthermore, towards the end, Shenk alludes to the brewing conflict within the Democratic Party in the United States between a moderate, identity politics-driven coalition and a rising populist left. This dichotomy is particularly intriguing as it hints at a potential shift in the party's dynamics. The populist left appears poised to reclaim the blue-collar voters who have migrated towards Trump, while still holding onto segments of the minority coalition. This could be a captivating arena for future developments within political discourse.

In conclusion, "Left Adrift" is both interesting and well-researched, offering an insightful yet sometimes flawed examination of liberal politics' current state. Although Shenk could have possibly interwoven more threads beyond the Clinton consultant paradigm, the book remains a compelling read for anyone interested in understanding the complexities and evolving landscapes of modern-day left-wing politics.

[Jay Molette · Rating 5 out of 5]

The current state of the political Left in America can be a gloomy thing to read about these days. This book takes you on a journey across the globe to help understand the political forces at play for the global left wing parties and what they're up against or what brought them down. It's a fascinating collection of case studies, and well worth the read.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a concise and interesting historical work that's highly relevant to the present political moment, as well as pretty much all of post-Cold War politics. Shenk takes a historical approach to the question of why liberal/left parties are fading or struggling in the West, looking at the US, Britain, Israel, and South Africa. He has a brilliant device for the book in his profiling of two American Democratic consultants who ended up advising left-of-center parties in all of these countries. This allows for a more grounded personal history that unpacks larger trends as well.

There is no single big problem affecting liberal politics in the 21st century, but the major through-line the TS explores is how liberals/leftists lost the working class. The Democrats were the party of the New Deal, now they are a multi-racial, slightly more female party of cities and affluent parts of the country. Labour had a similar transformation in Britain, and . The white working class in all of these countries (including the poorer Mizrahi Jews in Israel) gravitated to conservative parties, a shift that is now highly apparent and consequential. The consultants in this book played a small role in these shifts. They confronted wide-scale cultural change, the shift to a service/tech/financial/expertise economy, globalization, and other forces that had hollowed out traditional working classes. Conservatives spoke more effectively to many of those anxieties about change, whether economic, cultural, or demographic.

Liberals struggled to find a counter-message, and they too joined the wave of neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s, supporting deregulation, globalization, immigration, and becoming more distant from unions. They found a new demographic in people, frankly, like me and my parents: highly educated, upwardly mobile, geographically mobile, professional types in the upper middle class. We tend to have liberal social views but aren't always economically progressive. At the same time, economic inequality grew, cultural polarization increased, and many people (mostly white, but not entirely) felt like the liberal parties didn't represent their interests any more. The right capitalized in all of these countries.

The chapters on Israel and Britain were the most interesting to me because they showed that what's happening in the US isn't necessarily unique. But Shenk is too subtle a thinker to just attribute all of these changes to structural forces; people matter too, including people on the liberal/left side of things. Shenk shows his two consultants trying to create new bases of unity in a polarized society, pursuing Clintonian strategies of economic reform with moderate stances on culture. These strategies were not total failures at all, but they haven't solved the problem of liberal parties losing the working class (if I had one critique of this book, it would be the modest conflation of working class with white working class, btw). There are also important contingencies in this history: if Tony Blair hadn't discredited himself by joining the Iraq disaster, would Labour have fared better or avoid its descent into Corbynite radicalism?

The big takeaway from this book is that there's no magic bullet to get the working class back without also alienating the middle and upper middle classes. If the workers really wanted democratic socialism, Shenk notes, then they would have picked BErnie Sanders in the 2024 primary. But they seem to be looking for something else, and they have been repeatedly have been disappointed by politicians like Clinton who promise to be for the people against the elite but then govern in a way quite conducive to the elite and often not that helpful to the people. Republicans have become excellent at using cultural issues and, frankly, lies to exploit these gaps, but that doesn't mean the gaps aren't real.

One criticism: this book tends to the side of voters being rational. I'm skeptical. Disinformation (to point out one problem) as well as media siloing so floods voters' minds at the moment that wild beliefs are becoming increasingly mainstream, especially on the right, where inane ideas like Trump actually won in 2020 have become basically official GOP positions. I don't know how the Democrats, Labour, or other left-ish parties can really break that cycle. Still, this is a concise and thoughtful history that can't cover everything, and I commend Shenk for this compelling but never vitriolic contribution to our understanding of post-Cold War politics.

[Maynard Handley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointing.
The subject is obviously very interesting, but all Shenk does is describe what happened, not explain why it happened!

So why did it happen? I can't speak to Israel or South Africa or the rest of the world, but what I think happened in the US and UK is we pivoted from an axis where the economy is primary (say up to the 60s) to an axis where identity is primary (feminism, gay rights, all that) to an axis where NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY is primary - are you a globalist or a "localist". (The traditional word would be nationalist, but that carries so much baggage I want to avoid it.)

What unites Trump's coalition is that they all support increased US sovereignty, a vague term that encompasses many details that all point in the same direction. Part of it is control over our economic destiny. Part of it is decoupling from the rest of the world (we've tried that since 1945, culminating in Iraq2, and it's clearly been a complete waste of time and money). Part of it is simply not caring what legal opinions in Europe might say, or what the UN might declare; we don't feel that owe Europe or the UN the slightest deference or respect.

You can say this is a return to the US of George Washington and no entangling alliances, or of Isolationism and rejecting the League of Nations. Sure it is. But the point is, this was not a political option available from 1945 until 2024...
However it was an option that people wanted -- as evidenced by the wide variety of people who moved to support Trump once he made it clear what he was offering.

So my analysis of what happened to "Liberal Politics" is that it stopped putting America (or the UK) first. At first in niche cases, eg Vietnam, but gradually expanding to everything. Gramsci was a more important thinker than Dewey. It was more important that foreign policy please France or Germany than that it please Alabama or Idaho. It didn't matter if 'oi polloi didn't want to be swamped by immigrants (legal, illegal, or refugees), what mattered was that taking in immigrants was approved of in Davos.
And so "the people" rebelled, cobbling together whatever they could to create a party of Sovereignty, to oppose the mainstream parties which all, regardless of their differences, supported globalism. Hence the rise of the term "far right" which (obviously) means nothing more than "parties of which I, a good college educated NYT-reading BBC-watching liberal, disapprove", but more precisely it means parties that take national sovereignty SERIOUSLY. Look at each of these parties (eg in Germany, France, Hungary, or UK again, with this decoder ring in mind...)

Shenk misses the point in assuming that "Liberal Politics" equals the US Democratic Party or the UK Labor party, and that what changed was something inside them. Both the GWB/Mitt Romney Republicans or the Boris/Rishi Conservatives were also Liberal in the sense that they were in thrall to a set of ideas surrounding globalism and refused to examine those ideas even in the face of immense opposition.
What's interesting is not that the Dems and Labor screwed up; what's interesting is that the *entire educated elite* screwed up; and so it's the fate of various outsiders (Trump and Elon in the US, maybe Dominic and Nigel under Reform UK?) to move into the vacuum that this elite failure created.

[Austin Lastowka · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief, readable, yet well-researched and insightful book that presents a series of capsule histories examining the political trends of the 1990s across the US, UK, Israel, and South Africa. The central theme traces the decline of meaningful left-wing electoral politics in each country. The narrative is framed through the careers of US political consultants Schoen and Greenberg who, despite their divergent strategies and political visions, found themselves employed by the same politicos at key junctures.

The book illustrates how electoral politics underwent "declassification" as liberal parties increasingly abandoned their traditional constituencies of labor and working-class voters in favor of the affluent and highly educated. Meanwhile, right-wing parties amplified cultural issues to make inroads with these displaced voters.

While the book offers an informative and entertaining read—and its international perspective is valuable—it neglects to fully explore some of the structural forces that drove this rightward shift: the increasingly omnipresent forms of mass media, the "consensus" economic and monetary policies that prioritized inflation control above all else, and the growing integration of the Third World into global supply chains. These mega-trends profoundly impacted both voter perceptions and material realities during this period, and their absence leaves the story somewhat incomplete.

The book joins a growing body of work examining 1990s politics and pairs well with John Ganz's "When the Clock Broke" and Nelson Lichtenstein's "A Fabulous Failure."

[MARC L'ESPERANCE · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suspected to like this book as I already was familiar with Timothy Shenk from his articles in Dissent, but this book I really enjoyed alot. When I read my first objective has always been to learn something new, or to reshape my thinking, and these regards this book for me did not disappoint. The theme of the book being to describe and explain the decline of the left in Western politics since the mid 70s to the present. The author had an interesting approach in tackling this endeavour, by covering 4 democracies: USA, England, Israel, & South Africa. I found this to be an unusual approach, but once you begin reading you understand the common thread, political consultants. Rather than take on economic power houses (the rich), center-left governments took on cultural issues because of these being easier causes to win. The result has been disillusionment from voters, especially the working class. The majority of people want their personal concerns addressed first: cost of living, housing, jobs, inequality, etc..

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deep dive on elections in recent decades in USA, UK, Israel, South Africa, exploring ups and downs of attempts to elect progressives based on economic vs. culture/identity issues. Helpful to see the international comparative context.

Less helpful in my reading to organize it all thru the connecting thread of contrasts between two political consultants: Stanley Greenberg and Doug Schoen. Neither sort of came to life for me enough in this brief read to care much about them personally, and the differences did not always land for me as convincing -- one is a bit more ideological and the other a bit more pragmatic, but both do a lot of polling and focus groups in order to advise left-wing candidates on how they might devise a message theme to help eke out a win, and sometimes (but not always) it works.

[Michael Linton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction of the book got me really excited to read this book. Then, I realized it was about three different countries of which I wasn't familiar with. I was hoping to understand as to why or how elections are more determined by education as opposed to class when generally, if someone is college-educated, they are more likely to be in a higher class. Perhaps the message was there and I just missed it. Nonetheless, it was still worth reading and contains a significant section for further reading.

Unfortunately this book was written before the results of the 2024 election.

I will probably end up reading this again.

[Rolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

The frame for this narrative is Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen, two political strategists who got their start in US politics (particularly the Clinton campaign and administration in the 90s), and then exported their model to Israel, the UK, South Africa, and Bolivia. It’s pretty bonkers the influence these two guys have had on world politics over the last several decades--and pretty depressing if you, like me, disagree with their neoliberal, corporate-friendly model of politics.

[Levon La Vida Loca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this in one gulp. Scratched my itch to understand dealignment of the working class and the left. I thought of the two main characters as consultants hired save a business from bankruptcy. With each cycle, scraping enough of a coalition to have a semblance of legitimacy but structural forces continue to bring it down.

[Polly Callahan]

recommended by The.Ink 12/31/2024 on Substack

review: https://globalreports.columbia.edu/bo...

[Rick Linde · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do yourself a favor: briefly skim most of this book and then carefully read the conclusion, which is quite illuminating.

[jennifer]

Very illuminating, if depressing.

[Jørgen Lien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audiobook

[Allie · Rating 4 out of 5]

an interesting take on the shift in liberal politics in the last few decades. Shenk focuses on the division between two political strategists (Greenberg v Schoen) and the decision to prioritize moderate suburban voters over the working class. it's not particularly new, but I appreciated the how-we-got-here context and comparison to similar shifts in the UK, Israel, and South Africa.