Democratic Dilemmas after the New Deal Consensus (w/ Timothy Shenk)
Added 2024-10-11 22:03:43 +0000 UTCHistorian 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
Comments
For months now when I hear a podcast episode I almost always have another podcast episode that comes to mind as being in conversation with it maybe this speaks to the outsized role that podcasts play in my internal world: I probably need to get out more. This one takes me way back to this broadcast of a speech by Ian Haney López https://archives.kpfa.org/data/20200211-Tue1200.mp3
Jonathan Dudley
2025-02-14 11:35:54 +0000 UTCit's telling that this episode recorded before trump's victory has been clarifying for me in a way no election post-mortem (short of gabe's and osita's of course) quite seems to grasp. these are long standing issues w a complicated history and yall do a great job of breaking it down, as always. shenk's a fantastic interview too
Jack Wolfe
2024-11-15 15:36:55 +0000 UTCOn Shenk’s point at the end about failure of Biden’s agenda to win mass support: how can that be squared with his larger argument that voters are not dummies? Why do they need the immediate benefit if they can see their interest beyond the very short term? And besides, were not efforts like the child tax credit and the stimulus payments precisely that kind of immediate benefit that Shenk sees as necessary?
Nicholas Haggerty
2024-10-29 23:02:52 +0000 UTCIf dems were talking about lofty ideals and progressive goals… they would just lose in this election. The electorate isn’t there. Maybe this is pessimistic, but a majority of Americans hold views on immigration and foreign policy that are just downright immoral, maybe even evil. A lot of people dems need to win hold those views. You can’t just alienate them. I really think ‘the Bernie candidate of our dreams’ wouldn’t stand a chance with this electorate. We’d get massacred.
Wesley M
2024-10-17 14:38:18 +0000 UTCSometimes I think the electoral college is missing from these conversations. Why is democratic rhetoric and policy in America sometimes so just outright bad? Because every presidential election is decided by 50,000 persuadable idiots in a handful of swing states. I think it’s actually a good thing that they TRY to persuade and win with their rhetoric, but I wish their policies were better.
Wesley M
2024-10-17 14:29:27 +0000 UTCAlso - (sorry) is it even clear what is/isn’t cultural as imagined by voters? That was Charles Murray’s whole brain dead idea as I understand it- “welfare is for non-whites, who are underserving and this we should cut it”
Ap
2024-10-17 03:18:34 +0000 UTCLove the pod!! But, maybe in the minority here - but the author’s moving to the center on cultural issues may help you win elections” sounds like something already baked into the minds of people already? Like current dems running to the right on trans issues/immigration or even Palestine (is that a cultural issue too?) right now. Seems like a high cost to maintain/get power when you “must” throw someone under the bus. How do we get to decide whether say, a new pro-union bill is worth a giant border wall? If the answer is “equivocate on the cultural issues, don’t really build the wall” then aren’t you dooming the plan from the beginning? That’s why ppl don’t trust pols in the first place. Doesn’t seem like an easy call to make - I understand the calculus - but seems kinda glib.
Ap
2024-10-17 03:08:22 +0000 UTCThis show is turning into “know your friends.” There hasn’t been a deep dive on a 20th century crank in like a year.
Alex Rochon
2024-10-17 02:42:44 +0000 UTCWhile it's certainly true that the social base of center-left paries has changed, it's also true that the social and occupational structures of countries like the US have changed quite a bit at the same time. The political scientists Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm published a really useful paper in 2019 that, among other things, demonstrates the changes in the occupational composition of the white electorate from the 1960s through the 2010s. They find that during that time, the proportion of people in the blue and lower white collar occupational group was cut nearly in half (from around 42-43% of the white electorate to around 22%), while people in the "capital accumulators" and "sociocultural (semi) professionals" groups grew from around 10% in 1960 to about 20% and 25%, respectively. Of course, those shifts weren't the result of some force of nature, either - they were, at least in part, the result of political and policy choices that undermined manufacturing employment in particular. And, of course, this was precisely the segment of the workforce and electorate where mass private sector unionization was concentrated. But whatever the reasons for these changes in occupational/employment composition, reasons that center-left parties themselves bear at least some of the responsibility for, at this point it's just a fact that there are lots and lots of voters, far more than there were in the past, working in professional, managerial, and technical occupations, and far fewer working in routine blue and white collar occupations. Goran Therborn says that “politics is never reducible to sociology, but the latter may give useful hints of the limitations and potentials of the former.” Considering the political sociology of the electorate, it's no wonder that center-left parties have had trouble cobbling together electoral majorities, much less building a new hegemonic project. There is no one segment of the electorate that constitutes anything like a majority, or even a clear plurality, today, and at this point I'm not sure if any one school of analysis or electoral strategy has a really satisfying answer. Loved the episode, really looking forward to reading the book now. Thanks!
Chris Maisano
2024-10-16 16:20:16 +0000 UTCWe've seen much the same thing here in Canada, I think, with Maxime Bernier and the far-right People's Party, who received a shocking amount of media attention hyping up the possibility that they could steal a significant number of seats from the Conservatives in the last federal election by outflanking them to the right ... despite the fact that they were going into the election with zero seats in parliament, and ultimately won zero seats - not even in Bernier's own riding. But wouldn't you know it, the Conservatives have explicitly moved farther right since that election anyway, despite not actually *being* outflanked to the right, and the current consensus in the media is that they've basically already won the next election, despite the fact that it hasn't even been called yet. I may be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that far-right politics have gained *that* much traction with the Canadian public in such a short time since the explicitly far-right party was utterly shut out; the Conservatives likely will win, since Trudeau's personal popularity has plummeted, but I still think the party's core support will come from people who just want lower taxes and don't want to be bothered with the rest of it, as usual. But the media will likely cover that victory as a sign that Canadians as a whole are moving further right, because that's the narrative they've already committed to.
Peter Aidan Byrne
2024-10-15 21:45:25 +0000 UTCThis episode was so much more interesting than I thought it was going to be. I immediately placed holds on Left Adrift and Realigners
Tim Combes
2024-10-14 19:09:47 +0000 UTCReally appreciated this episode, found it extremely helpful in clarifying some of my own confusion and, at times, bewilderment with American liberal/left coalitional politics.
Ben Harloe
2024-10-14 18:37:59 +0000 UTCSouth African listener here. Nice to feature a bit! What adds an interesting angle is the ANC's recent loss of its outright majority, and their resultant coalition government with (in a South African context) right of center parties. Together with the recent rise of more populist parties, some left of the ANC, some arguably right, but all at least in part fueled by discontent with the lack of progress under the ANC in the democratic era.
MP Fourie-Viljoen
2024-10-14 06:46:09 +0000 UTCvery glad to see the start of some serious historical considerations of Clinton and his economics in particular & excited to read this book. this is my own dissertation-in-progress speaking, but his governorship in Arkansas was in many ways prototypically (or typically) neoliberal in a way that i think often gets lost. so yes, he was concerned about working class voters in AR, but the ways he won in Arkansas weren’t by courting them with economic populism; he was very concerned about maintaining close relationships with the state’s major industries (Walmart, Tyson)
Olivia Paschal
2024-10-12 21:20:43 +0000 UTCFascinating discussion as always, can anyone in the community recommend a good biography of Adlai Stevenson? Thanks!
Frank Wofford
2024-10-12 20:44:16 +0000 UTCFor anyone wishing to learn more about wtf happened to South Africa, two books: 1) South Africa Pushed to the Limit by Hein Marais; 2) Precarious Liberation by Franco Brarchiesi.
Tyler Paziuk
2024-10-12 17:09:47 +0000 UTCI’m somewhat disappointed that this treats the left and right in some kind of political vacuum outside of a media ecosystem that, across all of these countries, is capitalist. Capitalist media has an incentive to give space and air to the far right and culture war because it is a replacement argument for class politics. Capitalist media has zero incentive to platform class based politics. With Corbyn and Sanders we saw this - a capitalist media ecosystem that was rabidly bias against them. If you have the expansion of capitalist run media during Reagan and Thatcher eras in the UK and US, and the relaxing of regulations on their output - capitalist / centrist / neoliberal thought can become “mainstreamed” so much easier - and capitalists can choose who the up and comer is going to be. As a Brit I see this now with Reform UK - Farage has always been a creation of the media, given a platform well beyond his political salience, because capitalist would always prefer the far right to win then the moderate left.
Matthew Maddock
2024-10-12 14:27:01 +0000 UTC
