Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics
By Timothy Shenk
Columbia Global Reports, 264 pages, $18
In the middle of the 2016 presidential race, Chuck Schumer made the following case for optimism about Hillary Clinton’s prospects: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” After the Democratic nominee went on to lose three of those four states, Schumer’s remark came to be seen as emblematic of her campaign’s failings.
But the Democrats did, in fact, turn out affluent suburbanites in large numbers in 2020 and 2022, arguably providing some retrospective vindication for Schumer’s prognosis. Regardless of how the 2024 contest concludes, the most crucial question will once again be whether upscale suburban voters pull the lever for the party in sufficient numbers to compensate for waning support among traditional working-class constituencies.
The lesson of Timothy Shenk’s new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, is that this situation isn’t at all novel: The party’s simultaneous struggles with blue-collar voters and inroads with white-collar constituencies have long been perhaps the central fact of American politics. Much of the commentariat treated Donald Trump’s 2016 triumph in the GOP primaries and eventual surprise victory in the general election as seismic events that radically altered the coordinates of American politics, in part by attracting crucial segments of the working class away from the Democrats. But Shenk’s book suggests Trump’s win was more like a belated aftershock of an earthquake that occurred more than 50 years ago. Indeed, as he demonstrates, the standard takeaways of the ostensibly disruptive “populist moment” of the 2010s were already evident by the end of the 1960s.