Left Adrift, Timothy Shenk
Left Adrift, Timothy Shenk
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Left Adrift
What Happened to Liberal Politics

Author: Timothy Shenk

Narrator: Robert Petkoff

Unabridged: 6 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/08/2024

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

A rivalry that remade the political world as we know it today

Politics today doesn’t look much like it did fifty years ago. Electorates that were once divided by economics—with blue-collar workers supporting leftwing parties while the wealthy trended right—are now more likely to split along cultural lines. Campaigns have gone high-tech, hoping to turn electioneering into a science. Meanwhile, a permanent class of political consultants has emerged, with teams of pollsters, message gurus, and field operatives. Taken together, all this amounts to a silent revolution that has transformed politics across much of the globe.

Left Adrift provides a new perspective on this transformation by following the lives of two political strategists who watched it unfold firsthand. Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen were Zeligs of the international center-left, with an eerie talent for showing up at just the right moment to see history being made. But they could not stand each other. The mutual disdain was, partly, a result of professional jealousy, of decades spent nursing private grievances while competing for the same clients. But it grew out of a deeper conflict, a clash of political visions that raised fundamental questions about democracy itself. Left Adrift is about that battle—and the world it made.

* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of graphs, charts, and suggested readings.

About The Author

Timothy Shenk is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. A senior editor at Dissent magazine, he has written for the New York Times, the Nation, the New Republic, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New America Foundation. He lives outside Washington, D.C.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lucas on October 18, 2024

We need more fun Poli-sci books! For a book covering changing party coalitions and political consultants, I was shocked by how engaging the book was. Shenk tells an aggressively readable story of the hidden realignment of U.S. politics since the fall of the New Deal Order. Much has been written about......more

Goodreads review by Michael on January 06, 2025

I guess I should've taken the title more at face value; this felt heavy on the "how we got here" and light on the "what should we do next". I generally like the books that Columbia Global Reports turn out, but this one felt like a bit of a miss for me. Just felt like an overall pessimistic argument t......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on January 09, 2025

"Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics" by Timothy Shenk is a thought-provoking exploration of the disjointed trajectory of left-wing politics in countries like the United States, U.K., Israel, and South Africa. Shenk takes us on a journey to uncover the strains within the global left, high......more

Goodreads review by Jay on December 19, 2024

The current state of the political Left in America can be a gloomy thing to read about these days. This book takes you on a journey across the globe to help understand the political forces at play for the global left wing parties and what they're up against or what brought them down. It's a fascinat......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on October 13, 2024

This is a concise and interesting historical work that's highly relevant to the present political moment, as well as pretty much all of post-Cold War politics. Shenk takes a historical approach to the question of why liberal/left parties are fading or struggling in the West, looking at the US, Brita......more