Ferenc Laczó reviews Timothy Shenk, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, Columbia Global Reports, 2024
Left Adrift is a short, propulsively written book that tackles large arguments. The research that ultimately led to its publication began with a rather narrow question: How did Bill Clinton become president, anyway? Timothy Shenk grounds his learned and often entertaining response in intriguing characters who sought to explain the breakdown of the old Democratic majority forged via the New Deal – and to plan the next one. He contextualizes these efforts broadly, drawing on a host of ‘hard facts.’ The resulting book offers a series of original, insightful vignettes and engaging reflections on the battle over the future of the Democratic coalition in the U.S. and comparable parties across the globe. Through these vignettes and reflections, Shenk aims to grasp nothing less than the transformation of the center-left over the last half-century – what he calls “the decisive political story of our time” (p. 20).
Left Adrift begins with a familiar diagnosis: as educated professionals found a home on the left across much of the world, left-of-center parties began to lean left on cultural issues but right on economic ones.
This produced political coalitions in which, as Shenk memorably puts it, “the virtues of diversity are obvious but solidarity is harder to come by” (p. 20).
As the author argues regarding the U.S., to which the first half of the book is devoted, Democrats first lost members at the lower end of society (a process that began before the 1970s) and then made increasing gains at the top.
The shape of the Democratic electorate thus changed from a downward-sloping line into a fishhook; their coalition essentially became an alliance between professionals and the poor. This kind of change has taken particularly powerful forms in Europe too. It has also been observable in otherwise diverse countries such as Brazil, India, and the Philippines, Shenk notes. While referencing a broad global trend, the book rejects all forms of historical or social determinism and emphasizes the overwhelming importance of political choice.
Which differences get politicized is always up for grabs, Shenk argues; neoliberalism, he suggests, was never just a policy agenda but also amounted to a political strategy worth exploring.
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The empirical core of Left Adrift examines this transformation by focusing on political consultants who became highly influential in the U.S. and later in other countries: Stanley Greenberg and Douglas Schoen, along with Schoen’s long-time partner, Mark Penn. While Greenberg and Schoen were remarkably similar in several key respects, they also represented alternative visions—and were fierce rivals. Born in the decade after WWII, both Greenberg and Schoen were Ivy League-educated white men at a time when political science was shifting towards an empirical focus. Both began as academics studying dealignment and eventually transitioned into political consultants, blending public service with corporate interests. They both relied on polls and focus groups, testing their rival theories in political campaigns.
As Shenk emphasizes, Greenberg and Schoen were focused on winning elections, not pleasing grassroots activists. In fact, they viewed liberal activists as one of their key adversaries. They believed that the right message could win elections – and do much more than that. As the author skillfully notes, they saw themselves as voices of the people, “in part because it paid well, but also because elites were out of touch, and democracy couldn’t survive unless the government represented public opinion” (p. 29).
Beyond noting these similarities, the book contrasts Greenberg’s and Schoen’s approaches, goals, and key activities.
Greenberg, a strategist and advocate of “class-forward liberalism,” viewed politics as inherently divisive and conflict-driven. He aimed to revive the FDR coalition by appealing to white ethnics, Southerners, men, and a broadly defined middle class.
His strategy, a soft populist one, sought to build a bottom-up multiracial majority that would tilt the balance of power toward working people. He acknowledged that, under constrained circumstances, class polarization might have to occur along racial lines.
In contrast, Schoen, more of a tactician (and, as Shenk suggests, not much more than a brand manager), sought unity and consensus.
Schoen accepted Reagan’s America and advised the Democrats to abandon class politics and the culture wars. He championed ideologically modest realism, believing that electoral majorities were not built by downscale voters but by appealing to the middle ground – the “unyoung, unpoor, and unblack” voters – while avoiding the appearance of being anti-young, anti-poor, or anti-black.
In short, Greenberg aimed for a political realignment, while Schoen sought to manage dealignment as effectively as possible. Symbolically, Greenberg conducted his famous focus group studies in Macomb County in 1984 with the support of the United Auto Workers, while Schoen’s research was funded by a major bank and undertaken in shopping malls.
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After developing their rival visions, both Greenberg and Schoen sought a messenger who would validate their theories by following their advice. Ironically, they both found Bill Clinton.
As Shenk shows, Greenberg shaped Clinton’s first, largely forgotten, and rather populistic campaign for president. By the time of Clinton’s 1996 re-election bid, however, Greenberg had been sidelined for being “too populist,” and Penn and Schoen guided Clinton’s neoliberal turn. Their goal was to find common ground in American society through a broad-based, moderate vision – one that would appeal to both the “white working class” and suburban “soccer moms.” However, Clinton shifted right on economic issues and left on cultural ones, predictably attracting the latter at the expense of the former. The Democrats soon became the preferred party for young people, racial and immigrant minorities, well-educated women, the most cosmopolitan and global regions, and increasingly, suburban America.
Despite Barack Obama’s temporary success in forging a new majority through remolding public opinion and increasing turnout, Left Adrift argues that the Democratic Party ended up with a broad, diverse tent but no stable majority. Ultimately, neither Greenberg nor Schoen managed to develop a reliable strategy to secure support from either blue-collar or white-collar voters, Shenk concludes this fascinating section.
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In the second half of Left Adrift, Timothy Shenk uses case studies from the UK (Labour), Israel (Labor), and South Africa (African National Congress) to show how Greenberg and Schoen had front-row seats to the global political revolution. Wherever they went, variations of their debate followed, he asserts somewhat vaguely.
In the UK, Tony Blair made a notable effort to expand the Labour coalition by appealing to both “the compassionate” and “the ambitious.” As Shenk shows, Blair temporarily succeeded in balancing these interests by winning back working-class voters who leaned right on social issues, while also making Labour attractive to “strivers.” This effort, much like Bill Clinton’s in the US, aimed to adapt the left’s historic values to an era where the debate between state planning and the free market had seemingly been settled in capitalism’s favor. Predictably, this led to Greenberg’s replacement once again – this time by Schoen’s partner, Mark Penn.
As in the US, a new political consensus eluded the left-of-center in the UK. Yet, New Labour’s ambition to transcend class politics soon inspired prominent imitators.
By abandoning austerity and cloaking himself in the national flag, Boris Johnson attempted something similar from the opposite, Tory, angle, Shenk notes in a remarkable passage. An open society was now often contrasted with an imagined golden age, with both the left and the right using this dichotomy, if in opposite ways.
This deepened the divide between two segments of the British elite, the credentialed meritocrats and the truly wealthy. The damaging consequences of this polarization were foreseeable, even if their extent was not, we might want to add.
In Israel, the debate over national identity was even fiercer, transforming both the left and the right. Once hegemonic for decades, the left in Israel confronted the complex challenge of saving democracy from a public it could no longer trust. As Shenk astutely observes, Ehud Barak, another of Greenberg’s global clients, “came away with less than nothing” (p. 159). Despite a leftward shift among affluent, educated Israelis, the Israeli Labor Party soon plummeted.
Meanwhile, the centrist Kadima Party, which had hired Schoen, also underperformed, signaling a massive rightward shift in Israel. The country increasingly chose to reassert its Jewish identity rather than pursue inclusivity and democracy. In a pattern familiar in other countries, lower-class voters shifted sharply to the right. A former bastion of “ethnic social democracy” soon turned into a poster child for reactionary populism.
At first glance, South Africa followed the opposite path. Here, the leftwing African National Congress (ANC) toppled the apartheid regime in the early 1990s and built a lasting majority. As Shenk shows, though perhaps too briefly, Greenberg advised Mandela as early as 1994, while Schoen later became involved, this time advising the white liberals of the Democratic Party. However, South Africa’s overall results have been disappointing.
While a new multiracial ruling class has emerged, the electorate remains racially and economically polarized. Worse still, South Africa faces a slow-rolling structural breakdown, with the ANC losing legitimacy and no viable alternatives in sight. Ironically, the leftwing movement that ended apartheid has lost support among those who have benefitted the most from its rule – predominantly Black voters from the upper and middle classes.
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Shenk’s narrative allows for variation in the international transformation of the left. What may unite these seemingly divergent stories is the author’s overarching perspective that culturally polarized electorates have not actually replaced the economic divisions of old; instead, there has been a shift in how both the left and right are defined. The most polarizing subjects now mix cultural and material concerns, he underlines. These are persuasive points, illuminating a fascinating chapter of transnational history, which Shenk narrates artfully.
Left Adrift is less convincing as a work of comparative history, partly because it does not adequately account for the differing party systems and socioeconomic transformations in the four countries studied. In this regard, Shenk’s perspective seems to mirror that of his main protagonists, who were more at home in U.S. politics than in the countries where they later also applied their expertise. As professional and entrepreneurial as Greenberg and Schoen were, it seems that they approached these foreign cases – much like Shenk himself – through assumptions developed primarily based on U.S. politics.
This in turn helps us draw an important, if somewhat banal, lesson about the implications of U.S. global hegemony: it may be easier to assimilate countries into a global political framework than to understand their intricacies in a truly comparative manner. The point deserves emphasis, as Greenberg’s and Schoen’s careers indeed illuminate key debates in U.S. center-left politics, but their finely drawn profiles and impressive careers offer less insight into political change in the UK, Israel, or South Africa. If transnational histories reveal cross-border influences, they also expose misunderstandings and unintended consequences – and the global impact of Greenberg, Schoen, and Penn hence warrants re-examination through a more contextualist and skeptical lens.
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It may be unsurprising then that Timothy Shenk returns to the U.S. in his conclusions.
He diagnoses here that Democratic voters are currently disproportionately white and well-educated, with social views to the left of the electorate, an inconsistent record on populist economics, and a tendency to view politics as a crusade against the forces of darkness. Such people, he rightly notes, are far from a majority but have an outsized voice – which is part of the reason why rightwing parties have ended up representing so many people who struggle.
After all, the main beneficiaries in a country that has become more progressive on social issues and more economically divided have been the small number of voters who lean to the right on economics and to the left on culture – whereas the “greatest losers” have been the much more sizable group that is economically progressive and socially conservative. In other words, what the book’s reflections ultimately show is that the relative share of public opinions, ironically enough, may not be so crucial to the remaking of multiparty democracies at all.
Shenk’s conclusions echo a familiar critique of the center-left’s transformation in recent decades. Even when center-left candidates gained popularity by running on broadly progressive platforms, they often shied away from challenging economic powerbrokers, instead opting for cultural battles they felt they had a better chance of winning—particularly in the U.S. The contemporary center left has thereby made politics smaller than it had to be, Shenk rightly complains, only to compound its shortsightedness by mistaking the anger of populists for ignorance.
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Left Adrift combines original research into contested political strategies and tactics, striking statistical evidence on sociopolitical transformations, and thoughtful reflections on democratic politics. Ultimately, it argues that the future of democracy is still closely tied to class politics, though class itself should be understood as a “fragile identity.”
Timothy Shenk suggests, in a quasi-Greenbergian fashion, that voters are rational and continue to seek candidates who will both promote their interests and honor their values. However, to make voters respond to “the call of class,” the volume of the culture wars must be turned down, he adds.
Without a coherent political vision paired with consistent ambition, a large and durable Democratic majority capable of achieving meaningful progressive reform – and forcing Republicans either to move back toward the center or face political irrelevance – will remain elusive.
Can today’s upscale left sustain the battle for economic fairness? The jury is still out, but the evidence is far from encouraging.
