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.”
That answer no longer obtains, he writes. Not in the United States, where the Democrats now seem to represent “an alliance of the enlightened and the oppressed,” having ceded big chunks of the working class to the right. Not in Israel, where the long-dominant Labor Party no longer even exists, having been so electorally decimated over the years that it was recently forced to merge with a small left-wing party just to survive. Not in the U.K., where Labour’s recent electoral success has been built largely on the failures of Corbyn-ism and the party’s Tory rivals. And not in South Africa, where the African National Congress remains in power but is clearly on the decline and clearly bereft of any animating vision other than power for its own sake.
The obvious temptation, for left-wing and liberal writers looking to explain why their parties have lost support among workers, is to find someone nefarious to blame. The party politicians sold out to big money. Activists sacrificed class politics on the altar of identity politics. Corporations and rich conservatives devised and funded a long and ultimately successful war of ideas and power against activist government and organized labor. Etc.
There are elements of truth in each of these stories, but Shenk wisely resists the temptation to accept the implicit premise of all of them, which is that working people naturally belong to the left, and that only the intervention of bad actors prevents this natural alignment. Instead, he makes the case that a more structural shift is taking place. The left has struggled to hold on to working people because, among other reasons, “working people” has lost a great deal of coherence and gravitational pull as a political identity.
It’s here that the contrast between Greenberg and Schoen is at its most illuminating. Shenk admires Greenberg, whom he sees as a man of both principle and pragmatism. Schoen, on the other hand, is all pragmatism, no principle. Greenberg believes deeply in the power of the state to make life better for its people. Schoen believes deeply in whatever it takes for his clients to win (or for his firm to win clients). And yet, for all their differences, the actual advice they end up giving to the candidates for whom they work always functions within a very constrained field of play.
The left has struggled to hold on to working people because, among other reasons, “working people” has lost a great deal of coherence and gravitational pull as a political identity.
Both men, for instance, worked for Bill Clinton: Greenberg on his first presidential campaign, and Schoen as part of the “triangulation” team that Dick Morris brought to the White House after the Democrats’ drubbing in the 1994 midterms. And though one can discern differences between early and later Clinton that correspond to Greenberg’s and Schoen’s tendencies, they are differences of degree rather than kind.
Clinton was never a New Deal–style liberal or a social democrat; he was a centrist Democratic Leadership Council guy in his soul. More importantly, it’s not as if there was a deep bench of left-wing candidates ready to lead the party to victory were Clinton to lose. As Shenk points out, “There were no major liberals in the [1992] race, and the other candidates were sprinting even farther to the right.”
Even in 2024, when the vibe is more populist than it was in 1992, Greenberg and Schoen are still working roughly the same landscape. Greenberg’s recent advice to the Harris campaign is Clintonian: fight inflation, strengthen the border, tax billionaires, cut taxes on the middle class, expand targeted tax credits, and so on—different goodies for different constituencies. Schoen, who seems mostly to work for right-wing media as their in-house “moderate Democrat,” is still advising the party to tack to the center. A grand vision for the revivification of left-wing class politics remains nowhere in sight.
You could blame this milquetoast turn on the party (or its consultants). You could blame the Republicans’ southern strategy, which so effectively shattered the New Deal coalition. But you can’t blame those factors for the marginalization of social-democratic politics elsewhere. Across vast stretches of the world, the left isn’t speaking to people as it once did. Class identity still matters, but it matters much less, and it competes and combines with racial, regional, religious, and educational identities in complex and unstable ways.
A strength of Left Adrift is that it leads one gradually and persuasively to that conclusion. A weakness of the book is that its explanations for why the world has changed in this fashion are extremely fragmented. You get a good sense of why the British left is not what it once was, and separately why the South African left is running on fumes, but there’s no clear sense of what larger story is connecting those individual stories together.
Although the Democrats have a decent chance of winning in November, the left is indeed adrift. I just don’t know why.
Daniel Oppenheimer is the author of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century and Far from Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art
