LEFT ADRIFT

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.