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Historian Timothy Shenk joins us for a conversation about his new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, a timely look at political strategy on the liberal-left as the New Deal Consensus cracked up in the late 1960s and 1970s through Bill Clinton's presidency and beyond. He tells the story of how Democrats responded to class dealignment through the careers of two consultants, Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen—a story that, following these two men, also takes us to the UK, Israel, and South Africa. We discuss what happened to the New Deal coalition, arguments about how to appeal to working class voters drifting right, the limits—and necessity—of polling and even focus groups, why Bill Clinton's role in the rise of neoliberalism is more complicated than you might believe, lessons for the American left from their being crushed in Israel, and what all this might mean for 2024.
Sources:
Timothy Shenk, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics(2024)
Douglas E. Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites(1977)
Stanley B. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development(1980)
"Explaining McCarthy," TIME, April 18, 1969
Listen again:
"Realignments (w/ Timothy Shenk)," Know Your Enemy, Feb 27, 2023
one way in which this book doesn't fit in with the sort of standard account of sort of how the left not quite lost the working class but sort of struggles of the left with the working class is that there's often a presumption that would say that sort of class politics inherently superior and maybe even sort of the natural way that electoral coalitions should divide and I would very much like to see this bottom up working class oriented democratic coalition exist but I see those class divided that have nots on one side versus they haves on the other that is much more the exception than the rule not just in American political history but across much of the world today especially the wealthy world so Israel that is the story of how basically over the last 50 years in Israeli politics the far right has become the reasonable right the old right has become the new center the old center has become the new left and the old left has dropped off a cliff essentially cease to exist in one sense it's like the most precipitous and total defeat of the left like there was a period of gridlock and then like total dissolution you know it happened gradually and then quickly and that's even more striking when you realize how dominant the labor party was in Israel for the first 30 years more or less of that country's existence it's 1977 when the right wins electoral power for the first time but they did it with a electoral coalition that was rooted in Mizrahi also known as Sephardic Jews but there's a sense among Mizrahi Jews who are disproportionately in blue color working class did they were condescended to that they were left out of this Ashkenazi dominated labor coalition and it's in the 1970s for the first time that Likud is able to translate that into a governing majority and then it's in 1981 where they really they confirmed that 1977 wasn't an aberration that a new and potent mode of working class right-wing politics had arrived in Israel and you could say that the story of Israeli politics isn't so much about the collapse of class politics or class divisions but as class politics for the right and it is a reminder at the least that we cannot count on class politics alone to save us and that it's a reminder of what a worst-case scenario looks like you
Matt and Sam talk to historian Timothy Shenk about his new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.
