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Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s
A revelatory look at modern liberalism’s historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.
Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, widening liberalism’s impact but narrowing its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of “professional-class liberalism” and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals’ egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional-class liberals’ power.
The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism’s place in contemporary American life.
Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, widening liberalism’s impact but narrowing its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of “professional-class liberalism” and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals’ egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional-class liberals’ power.
The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism’s place in contemporary American life.
404 pages, Paperback
Published February 11, 2025
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January 11, 2026
There’s been a lot of anger directed at the modern Democratic Party in recent years from its left flank, focused on perceived failures in governance and electoral mobilization, as well as at its limited imagination for the role and capability of government. The party of the New Deal, organized labor, and social democracy is gone, replaced by the party of austerity, “median voters”, and neoliberalism.
This volume is a collection of 15 essays analyzing what happened over the past 60 years to get us here. We see how liberalism’s vision of rights holders expanded to include women, people of color, and queer folks, while the scope of rights themselves narrowed; federal antipoverty programs, housing assistance, and employment guarantees being done away with (to the extent they existed at all). I think the book’s format works well for this purpose, as each chapter maintains a clear focus, and each contributor is writing within their area of expertise, while the sum total comes together to tell a complex political story.
The tone of the book isn’t sympathetic, exactly, but it is an earnest attempt to understand this latest iteration of liberalism. The 70s and 80s were a very difficult time, and modern Democrats took away lessons from what they saw as the failures of government intervention and a conservative shift in the electorate. They thought that perhaps a smarter, more streamlined government, one run by subject matter experts and delegating resources to the private sector, could succeed where the lumbering bureaucracy of a previous age had failed. They were also put off by the increasing radicalism of the New Left, which seemed like an electoral liability and soured them on mass politics.
In a way this book comes a bit late. Professional class liberals hit their zenith during the Obama administration, after which their brand of politics has really struggled to handle the right-wing populism that’s cropped up in wealthy democracies around the world in recent years. Advances in technology, particularly AI, also seem to be threatening the underlying class (“salaried knowledge workers”) which has come to dominate Democratic politics. Speaking of class, I should note that while the book’s title and introduction reference Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s 1977 essay “The Professional Managerial Class”, this is mostly a history of people and ideas, not of a class per se.
But academic publishing isn’t a short process, and I can’t hold it against the authors. They’ve given us an important history of modern liberals and neoliberalism, with plenty of insight into why so many people are dissatisfied with our current political moment. It’s also a great jumping-off point to explore the contributors’ other work! If you like nerdy works on politics, this is a great book to have on your shelf.
This volume is a collection of 15 essays analyzing what happened over the past 60 years to get us here. We see how liberalism’s vision of rights holders expanded to include women, people of color, and queer folks, while the scope of rights themselves narrowed; federal antipoverty programs, housing assistance, and employment guarantees being done away with (to the extent they existed at all). I think the book’s format works well for this purpose, as each chapter maintains a clear focus, and each contributor is writing within their area of expertise, while the sum total comes together to tell a complex political story.
The tone of the book isn’t sympathetic, exactly, but it is an earnest attempt to understand this latest iteration of liberalism. The 70s and 80s were a very difficult time, and modern Democrats took away lessons from what they saw as the failures of government intervention and a conservative shift in the electorate. They thought that perhaps a smarter, more streamlined government, one run by subject matter experts and delegating resources to the private sector, could succeed where the lumbering bureaucracy of a previous age had failed. They were also put off by the increasing radicalism of the New Left, which seemed like an electoral liability and soured them on mass politics.
In a way this book comes a bit late. Professional class liberals hit their zenith during the Obama administration, after which their brand of politics has really struggled to handle the right-wing populism that’s cropped up in wealthy democracies around the world in recent years. Advances in technology, particularly AI, also seem to be threatening the underlying class (“salaried knowledge workers”) which has come to dominate Democratic politics. Speaking of class, I should note that while the book’s title and introduction reference Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s 1977 essay “The Professional Managerial Class”, this is mostly a history of people and ideas, not of a class per se.
But academic publishing isn’t a short process, and I can’t hold it against the authors. They’ve given us an important history of modern liberals and neoliberalism, with plenty of insight into why so many people are dissatisfied with our current political moment. It’s also a great jumping-off point to explore the contributors’ other work! If you like nerdy works on politics, this is a great book to have on your shelf.
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