Timothy Shenk’s new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, tries to weave together two stories and sometimes succeeds. One is about the rival careers of two of the major center-left political advisers of the past half-century, Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen, each of whom has peddled his consultative wares not just in the U.S. but across the world, from the U.K. to South Africa, to Israel, to Ukraine. The other story, more relevant to the state of play in this election year, is about the long, slow separation of left-wing parties from the working-class constituencies that once gave them not just their regular majorities but their core identities.
“Even though each country’s experience is distinctive, a common thread runs through this larger history,” writes Shenk, the author of Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy and a senior editor at Dissent. “No matter the time or place, the most important question in politics is always the same: whose side are you on? Like other parties on the left around the world, Democrats used to have a simple answer. They were defenders of working people. The choice was clear, and voters sorted themselves accordingly.”
