The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics by Timothy Shenk

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics by Timothy Shenk Amazon.com 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.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, since that makes it official, welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate it. As always, gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official. Welcome to the show.

We certainly appreciate it. As always, for 16 years and 2,000 episodes, we've been bringing you the most smartest minds, the CEOs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the White House presidential advisors, some of the most brilliant minds that come with you and share their stories, their journeys, their things they've learned, and basically you can figure out how to live your life better.

And if you don't, then that's on you. Anyway, go listen to the show again, damn it, if you didn't get it the first time. He's the author of the latest book. Timothy Shank joins us on the show with us. It comes out October 8th, 2024. Left Adrift, What Happened to Liberal Politics? We'll be talking to him about what the hell happened during it. I don't know what that means, but we'll find out.

Timothy Shank is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. I've heard of that guy. I heard he's pretty good. George Washington guy. I don't know. Might have been a lot. Yeah, at his moments. Definitely.

Yeah, yeah. He's up there. He's a senior editor at Dissonant Magazine. He's written for the New York Times, The Nation, New Republic, and Jacobin, among other publications. He's also been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. There's a lot of Washington going on here. And he's received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New America Foundation. And he lives outside of Washington, D.C. Look at that. It's like a stack. Welcome to the show. How are you, Timothy? Great, great. Thanks for having me, Chris.

We're just going to call this The Washington Show. So give us the dot coms. Where can people find you on the internet? Tim underscore Shank at X slash Twitter. And that's about it. There you go. So give us a 30,000 hour view of what's in your new book, Left Adrift. Yeah. So the big picture question the book is trying to think through is how the left changed from a political movement that 60 years ago was dominated mostly by unions to one that's today dominated by universities. You know, college professors like me 60 years ago, not an automatic given that we'd be Democrats all the way. Today, there's a sort of hegemonic blue America cultural elite. How did that transformation take place?

What are the consequences? And what does it mean for our politics going forward? So just the big structural question, that's one on the top of my mind. For me as a moderate Democrat, I'm kind of like Bill Maher, where we used to be liberal, and they move the goalposts, at least that's our opinion. So you wrote the book on it and did the research. Is that really what happened? They moved the goalposts on us or that wokeness took over? It's definitely the changing of sort of cultural standards and expectations. That's part of the story. I mean, it's just a fact that cultural attitudes have moved significantly to the left in the

last 30 years. So it's not surprising that both parties would have to change an accommodation to it. But really, the fundamental transformation, I think, gets going a lot earlier. And it's clear by the 1960s, which is kind of the last days of what historians call sort of the New Deal order or the New Deal coalition, which is a really unusual moment in American history, when the Republicans and Democrats are divided along economic lines, as opposed to how you fall in the culture war. And that's not how American politics has been since the 60s, where those cultural issues reemerge with full force. It's also not what American politics was like beforehand. And an important point that the book makes is that

the sort of division of parties into the haves and the have-nots, that's really not common, even in sort of outside the United States, that most of the world most of the time politics is divided into all sorts of different coalitions all sorts of different tribes and if you think that it's good for the left to have a firm economic foundation that's something you have to work really hard to turn into a reality yeah there's a lot that people don't realize what happened with Johnson when he basically what was the line he said? He says, I think I just ran the- Signed away the South for the generation. And this is after he signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The thing is though, that he signs that 1964 Civil Rights Act, as the name indicates, in 1964. What happened later that same year? Johnson won one of the biggest elections in American history, just stomped Barry Goldwater across the United States, including almost all the South. It wasn't until four years later in 68 that that sort of New Deal coalition really crumbles. So one starting point of the argument is, you know, there are a lot of liberals who would say, I mean, the story about Democrats losing ground with working class voters, it's really white working class voters. And really, that just means white racists. That is the story of racial backlash. That's the first and last word in that sentence. And I think that sort of the story of American politics and the response of the Civil Rights Revolution, that's definitely part of the explanation, but far, far, far from the whole thing. And so was what I guess basically Nixon played into that with this great Southern strategy.

I forget who the proponents of that were in the Nixon administration. Yeah. The thing about the Southern strategy though, is I actually think it's kind of misnamed because the smarter Nixon advisors realized that if Republicans got the South, but lost everything else, they're still going to lose. Really.

It was more of a Northern strategy, which meant like isolate Democrats in the Northeast and take the rest of the country for yourself, turn Democrats into the party of Harlem and Harvard, essentially, and make Republicans into the voice of this forgotten middle, which is about 60% of the country, which is neither the people at the very top nor the bottom. That was always the goal of the Republican strategy. And starting in 68, when Nixon squeaks into the White House, he only gets around 43% of the vote, but that's because George

Wallace is running on a third party ticket. And only gets around 43% of the vote, but that's because George Wallace is running on a third-party ticket. And if you combine that Wallace and Nixon vote, that's 57%. And that's the basis for what will be the silent majority that brings Nixon back into office in 72 in a landslide that was almost as big as LBJ's just eight years earlier. Yeah. I mean, it was quite amazing considering what was going. He hadn't shut down Vietnam yet, like you promised, and it was it was quite amazing considering you know what was going he

hadn't shut down vietnam yet like you promised and it was pretty crazy so that that's when you you think that the liberalness of the of the liberal politics and and how it moved away and when you speak of liberal politics are you speaking about the left or specifically are you talking about you know liberalism in and of itself i'm pretty loosey-goosey there, partly because this is a book that tries to go... So the big question is this transformation of the left over the last 60 years. But the way I get into the story is by looking at how

these two political consultants who are really, really influential, their names are Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen. They're not exactly household names, but their partners are, or at least closer to it. So Stan Greenberg was in business forever with James Carville. Schoen was in business forever with Mark Penn, who Greenberg and Carville are sort of two of the major influences on Clinton, Bill Clinton's 1992 White House campaign. And they're replaced in 96 by Penn and Schoen. And Penn will go on to be a major figure in the Clinton White House in second term, Hillary Clinton's chief advisor on her 2008 presidential campaign,

among others. And what makes those two characters especially interesting for the story? A few things. One, they were young enough to see that New Deal coalition coming apart in real time. Two, even if they weren't exactly the brains of the operation in their respective businesses, they were the two guys with PhDs. And they worked out in sort of academic theories and approach to politics before they tested it out as campaign strategists. And they had this deeply, deeply opposed view of how Democrats should go about winning elections when they could no longer count on steady support from working class voters. Greenberg thought it would be possible to bring back that working class coalition if Democrats ran these sort of strong economic populist campaigns while moderating on the culture war. Whereas Schoen said, nope, there's no way of bringing back FDR politics and Ronald Reagan's America.

You just have to go to the center across the board in a country that basically wants to vote for Republicans. They each have opportunities to test this out with Clinton in the 90s. And then the really interesting twist for me is that by the 90s, if you're a fancy consultant running a winning presidential campaign, the day after the election, your phone is ringing off the hook with calls from around the world, from people saying, do for me in my country what you just did in the United States. So in that case, it sort of leads me to these stories about Tony Blair in the UK,

Nelson Mandela in South Africa, lots of, there's an entire chapter on Israeli politics, which mirrors and differs from American politics in really fascinating ways. The point is that it let me tell what I think is a different story

about how the left got here. Even if we have a sort of big picture, people know that unions to university story there's a how story in here that's really really different wow it's interesting how this how this whole plays out do you get into was newt gingrich also a thing that caused more toxicity in your politics do you get into that in the book gingrich is sort of like a symptom of a problem more than a problem it's more than sort of the fundamental problem he's such a weirdo kind of like an idiosyncratic thinker in lots of ways like I can he's a sort of awkward place where he doesn't have that sort of

farsighted vision that Nixon and his big strategists like Kevin Phillips and 60s do where he sees how you could build a majority and he's for conservatives and he's also not sort of a Trump or Steve Bannon figure who's able to put into practice majority and he's for conservatives and he's also not sort of a trump or steve bannon figure who's able to put into practice in 2016 he's more of just a guy who's sort of like right place right time he was pushing along the trends he does contribute in an important way to consolidating the republican grip on the south but he's also just concerned with this weird stuff is like your tech futuristic utopianism and ultimately i think more of a sort of a bridge figure than a key change agent himself in the book do you give a way for us to get back from being

adrift this is i'm on the left i've like been involved with dissent magazine forever which is the longest running democratic socialist journal in the united states i'm proud of that and what it is to be on the left sometimes i think of it as it's like you go to a restaurant with a suspiciously large number of items on the menu. You know, if you go to a place that's serving like tacos, sushi, and pizza, you're going to wonder what the hell's going on in the kitchen. And I think that the left, we have a lot of worthy causes, but there's no agreement on what should come first. And the problem is that when you try to do everything, you end up doing nothing. And for me, I think that the way for the left to unadrift itself, or you can think of it, anchor itself, is to anchor itself back in democracy, which is taking

a hard look at what the people we want to speak for are working ordinary people who are just trying to lead a decent life. What do they need in order to do that? And that means that sort of educated progressives and you know i am a symptom of the problem but that if we are as empathetic and thoughtful and caring and all the rest as we say that we need to get out of our heads realize that we can be part of a democratic coalition we can be on the bus we just don't get to drive the bus there's not enough of us to justify it and i think that morally it's just weird for people to want to put in there who say they're speaking want to speak or want to defend the values and interests of ordinary people to step in with their

own elite preferences that always seems to have been the issue with the democrats is the infighting and the infighting actually sabotages us where you know the the republicans usually up until recently will always you know be a monolith they'll vote as a monolith you know ir the Republicans usually up until recently will always, you know, be a monolith. They'll vote as a monolith, you know, irregardless of their disagreements, they all tend to stick together. And was that a true perception, do you think? I think there's a degree to which the grass is always greener on the other side so that it's easy to, Republicans assume that Democrats are a lot more united than they are. You know, if you talk to conservatives, there can be this sort of portrait of a sort of united blue American machine that marches in lockstep. And we know that's not true. But I also think it's fair to say that Republicans,

until fairly recently, have just been a much more homogenous coalition than Democrats have. When you are trying to hold together, I mean, the peak insanity for Democrats is in the heyday of that FDR New Deal moment, when in 1936, FDR carries Harlem for the first time in the history of the National Democratic Party, at the same time that he wins South Carolina by I think, literally 99% to 1%, which means the dude is winning votes from black communists and literal unreconstructed KKK white supremacists. Like now that is a truly crazy coalition to hold together. And it's not a surprised that it fell apart eventually. But I think that for a long, long time now, Democrats have been more of a coalition of groups than anything else. And that's made it hard to come up with that unifying principle that really could hold a party together. socialism, communism, Hamas, you know, the loss thing is just mentally challenging to see.

I mean, I, I, I play, I'm a moderate Democrat. I, and I didn't used to be a moderate. I thought I was a liberal for a long time, but like I said, the woke folks move the goal posts to the far outside. And then you see what's going on in colleges. I mean, it's, it's crazy with what's going on in colleges, You know, between

you can't, even as a comedian, you can't go there and tell jokes. It seems like the woke crowd has just seized all of it. And woke originally was a great thing for movement for black people, but it's been completely hijacked and taken over by the far left

and some of the stuff they're doing is just crazy, man. I see people getting yelled down at woke colleges and stuff. And I'm just like, and I'm a moderate Democrat. I mean, I'm just sitting there just going, what the hell? But I've kind of started to really feel like it's the middle of this country that holds shit together when it comes down to it. I don't know.

I agree. I will say it's sort of in defense of my students. So I know, like, I've seen sort agree i will say it's sort of in defense of my students so i know like i've seen sort of like the same stories about sort of nightmares on college campus and maybe i'd have a different perspective on this if i was teaching at columbia or someplace like that but my students are great honestly they are and i've taught classes on american conservatism i've taught classes where we read like everyone from tawny c coatsisi Coates to Tucker Carlson. And I give them sort of real, real conservative literature. Next semester, I'm teaching a class with a friend of mine who is maybe the only openly

conservative professor at GW. And it's on sort of left and right, why we fight, what we fight about, and how to have these conversations productively. So I'm not going to deny that there are sort of disasters and sort of various embarrassing displays at lots of universities. But my own students, every time I've had to walk through sort of like a thorny, complicated or potentially volatile like hot button issue, they've been great. And they've been my class on conservatism was the only problem with it was that too many people wanted to take it. And when they did, they weren't there just to say i don't like donald trump they were there to understand why people

on the american think the way that they do feel the way they do what the history of the movement is so it might be a case where yeah sort of the activist types on both sides naturally they get the most attention but i think there is a large normie contingent that just wants to learn i will say too it might be as a gw specific thing because there are a lot of people there who even though the default setting is democrat they want to get jobs on capitol hill or in politics in some way so they're sort of forced to recognize the existence of republicans in a way that if you're off at a liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere maybe it's a different environment but as someone who really cares about these issues and cares enough to want to teach a class with a conservative on how to argue about this stuff, I've been,

it just hasn't been my experience in any way. Oh, the Georgia Washington University. Yeah. The, you know, it's interesting to me how that gives me faith in the future because we need more people in the middle. We need more people. I look at things the same way, what you talked about. I've found that by sitting in the middle. We need more people. I look at things the same way what you talked about. I found that by sitting in the middle as a Democrat, I can look at the other side now and I can say, okay, here's what they're trying to do. Here's what they want.

Here's what they're trying to achieve. And obviously, they're not going about it in a way that would work for everybody. So how do we find solutions? How do we get back to that Tip O'Neill? How do we find solutions? How do we get back to that Tip O'Neill? How do we find solutions? You know, and, and, okay, so you want, you know, you want to ban abortion. We obviously can't all agree on that. So how do we meet in the middle on some of these things?

And I think more and more, we need to have those discussions. Of course, a lot of things are going to come down the election here in, in, in the approach of the 2024 election which is less than 30 days away that's going to probably really shape politics and in it's going to shape politics let's put it that way but you know i think more people need to sit down and have those conversations of how can we meet in the middle instead of just beating each other over the head with clubs of you know we do this and you do that and all that sort of good stuff. I think if more Americans had talked that way.

I was listening to someone on Sam Harris' recent episode who talks about some of this data. And, you know, if we could, if we, when we become a nation that gets along and sees us all as Americans. So I'll do this thing where whenever I want to, somebody wants to talk politics and I feel like that we can kind of have a conversation. They're one of those people,

the, I'll lay a foundation or boundary for it. And I'll go, okay, we'll have this conversation, but we're going to have this conversation that it's not about parties. It's about, we're all Americans here at the table.

So we're all Americans. Fuck the parties. Now let's talk about politics. And so anytime somebody starts going with the Republican or the Democrat run, we go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're all Americans here. We're all on the same team. Remember? So let's figure out our differences.

Excuse me. I'm still fighting over COVID. Sorry about that. Three weeks later, I'm still fighting over COVID. Oh, sorry about that. Three weeks later, I'm still fighting it. And I think, and that creates a different dynamic of a conversation if we set those boundaries. And that's what we used to have. And the person I was listening to on Sam Harris's podcast, you know, said basically, you know, when we get divided, that's a foundation for an authoritarian to take over. Because, you know, he separates everybody from everybody and then he runs the show because we all can't get along

so kind of interesting thought there totally and i mean there was a moment in american politics we know just as we talk about the new deal order the new deal coalition historians talk about the liberal consensus of the 1950s where it seemed as if or the distance between the parties really had narrowed in significant ways. And of course, one reason why is that a lot of issues that are really divisive now weren't on the table back in the 1950s. Abortion isn't something that's being debated. Civil rights is being aggressively kept to the side by both parties who don't see an interest in taking it head on. So I think part of the story of the sort of breakdown of that mid-century consensus is just

naturally as sort of people who had been forced out of that earlier conversation, like African Americans in the South who are completely disfranchised, like it makes sense that the debate's going to have to change. But I also think that both Democrats and Republicans like to tell, especially elite Democrats and Republicans, like to tell themselves that polarization is inevitable so that they don't have to think about the ways that they're contributing to it. Because it becomes an excuse or an alibi. It's, oh, if the other side is just so inherently unreasonable that they're never going to compromise, then why even bother compromising? And I think that misses a really basic fact about American politics, which is that there are just a lot of people like you, Chris, out there. And I think of them in some ways as, tell me if this is a good or fair description for you,

but kind of like burn it down moderates, where you sort of like really have a sense that the game is rigged against ordinary people, and that the system isn't fair. But that doesn't mean that either Ted Cruz or Elizabeth Warren has 100% solution for doing it. And a lot of people fall into this ground, I think, where you have a kind of progressive leftist center view on economics, like maybe not for Medicare for all, but you do think that ordinary people deserve to have a government that's got their back. At the same time that you might have more sort of centrist or even conservative views on a lot of cultural issues, including stuff like immigration, which obviously has become such a flashpoint today. And I think that, especially

in democratic circles, there's a desire to pretend that this group doesn't exist, or that there's no way to win them over, when it's just a fact that they were a core part of the New Deal coalition back when Democrats were able to forge a reliable national majority. And if Democrats want to be able to push through all the big structural reforms that they believe in, or if they want to win by a large enough number that you force Republicans to take a second look at the election denialism and all the rest, then there's no way to do it without getting those burn it down moderates back into the party in a significant way. Wow. Yeah. I mean, the people that want to burn it down are crazy, man. I mean, burn the whole government down and start over.

Are those the people you're referring to? It's not even that bit. It's not even, so burn down is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's sort of anti-establishment or like anti-system. And this is where it's sort of like the both parties, the people running them are kind of full of shit. They have their own interests that they're responding to. They don't really care about the ordinary American.

And I think there's, I mean, one reason why that disillusionment is so pervasive is that one of the stories I tell, this guy, Stan Greenberg, he's, again, this Carvel adjacent Clinton consultant. And the funny thing about him is that he was, so he's been a political strategist for a long time, but before that he was an academic. And he used to mix sort of academic research with work for mainstream political democrats he worked for bobby kennedy in the 1960s for instance but at the same time that he was working for the kennedy campaign he's also immersing himself in this big radical lefty

reading list like figures like antonio gromsky who's this italian marxist were really really big influences on the young stan greenberg and greenberg just has this sort of profound commitment to the idea that the only way for working people to get a fair shot is to have a party, a majority party that's built on this bottom-up coalition that's committed above all else to defending their values and their interests. And he really, really believes that Democrats can be that party, but he spends so much of his career, he says, and this is not just in the United States, but around the world. He'll advise a candidate like Bill Clinton, convince him when the election is on the line to run as this economic populist, cultural moderate. But then once the election is over, the economic populism stuff gets really hard to deliver on because the people with money don't

like it. The cultural victories are easier to make progress on. And there's something that your sort of hardcore parson base gets really excited about so if you're one of these burn it down moderates who the entire first campaign has been built around appealing to you to saying economic populism yes and cultural moderation yes you end up getting the opposite of what you've been promised and it happens again and again and again and of course you're going to be frustrated after when it happens long enough because you're being betrayed each time and and so hopefully i mean hopefully there's a way to fix all this stuff or get back i mean maybe we have to hit rock bottom and we haven't hit rock bottom yet i mean just the fact that the donald donald trump for all

of his things i mean just recently came out that out that he's been talking to Putin with classified documents in his basement seven different times. I think Gil, who has got a new book out, I think it's called War. Oh, Woodward, right? Bob Woodward? We're trying to get him on the show. Bob always does such great reporting and all this stuff has

come out. You're just like, how is this the thing? But, I i mean welcome to 2024 in the state of politics and you know i mean yeah he could still win it's not a guarantee but it's very much a possibility and we have to deal with that yeah i mean we had 250 years it was a good run this is i'm optimistic enough and so when you write a book like this yeah i actually am like weirdly um and maybe probably it's because, I come from a politically divided family. Like, my mom, who I love more than anything in the world, like, I used to call her a Fox News Republican,

but she broke up with them after what they did to Tucker. Like, still hasn't forgiven them. So she's, yeah, she's a macro-conservative. I'm proud of it. And she comes in basically every weekend to help take care of her grandkids. And so I think there's, you know, that tendency just to assume that the world is over if the other side gets power. You know, I saw January 6. And honestly, just to admit, I didn't think that something that bad would actually happen under Trump. So I never want to underestimate that

sort of how dark things could get. But it's worth remembering, too, that I mean, the system did survive, we made it through, I don't think that the end of democracy is guaranteed if Trump wins. Worst case scenario, so they're possible, but I don't think they're guaranteed. Still, I think that if Democrats take this stuff seriously, as I think they should, then they should realize that the crisis of democracy that we're talking about all the time, partly it's just a product of Democrats not being able to win elections with the numbers they need consistently to have a lasting national majority. And they need to come up with a strategy for doing that. And that involves understanding the country that you have, the voters who you have to appeal to,

rather than just pretending that a problem doesn't exist. Yeah. Don't ignore it. If you're Hillary, go to Wisconsin for hell's sakes. So as young people read the book, what do you hope they come away with? So part of it is a sense that a lot of the easy stories that we have, especially if you're a liberal progressive, and honestly, when you're writing a book like this, at least it's easy for me to assume that I'm writing for people who are somewhere on the center or the left. And a starting point is that some of the stories that we have in our heads about how we got here are just nowhere close to sufficient to explain what's going on.

So that sort of backlash to civil rights story, that that is a part of it, but it's not the whole thing. There's also a sort of more economic lefty version of the story that says it's about the collapse of unions, which really gets underway in the 70s, and this democratic betrayal of the working class. And if only the party had stuck to its ideological guns and nominated someone like Jesse Jackson in 1984, that we wouldn't be here. And one thing that, one reason why I ended up writing this book is that when I took a look at the Greenberg and Schoen debate in particular,

so it kind of, again, Carvel-Penn debate as well, what I saw was that it kind of has an echo of this neoliberals versus the Jesse Jackson rainbow coalition story, but both sides were a lot more complicated. And it's worth paying attention to them because those were the people who actually won elections for Bill Clinton in 92 and 96. And the thing with Greenberg is that he believed that you could get that kind of rainbow coalition together, but partly because he goes to Michigan, talks to like union voters and sees,

oh, there's no way these people are going to vote for someone like Jesse Jackson to get the job done. Partly, yeah, they're like racism is a factor, but it's also because they just have serious substantive disagreements with a lot of his proposals that they are. If you're, if you have a good union job in Michigan in the 1980s, you feel like you are a productive member of society who's being taken advantage of by folks at the top and the bottom, right? That you're the one who's paying taxes and the rich people are so rich that they escape with that scot-free and the poor people are so poor that they get welfare. And you feel like you've got, you're carrying society on back and no one is recognizing you. And Greenberg doesn't want to say that that's completely right, but he wants to say that

Democrats have no chance of winning those voters if your response to that is just, you're a racist, go to hell. And that they can be brought into a progressive coalition as they had been in the New Deal years if you have the right strategy for doing it. So in a sense, a Jesse Jackson ends, but not through Jesse Jackson means. That was, in Greenberg's account, sort of the only realistic way to get that working class coalition back together. And on the other side for Penn and Schoen, they want these sort of affluent college educated suburbanites that people like Gary Hart are saying are the future of the Democratic Party. And that when Hart and others are, they called neoliberals at the time and still today, that those neoliberals are eager in the 70s to say, yeah, the new deal is done. There's no going back. Let's go to this post industrial society. It's young, it's engaged's engaged it's educated and all the rest and

penn and shown will say yeah yeah we want college folks to vote for us too but just look at the numbers there's no way the democrats can get a national majority unless they get lots of working people who didn't go to college to vote for them too and just as greenberg says i sympathize with those sort of jesse jackson ends but, but his method is a dead end. So Penn and Schoen are saying, yeah, yeah, college folks, that's great. But we have to recognize the country that we're living in and build a majority that takes working class people really, really seriously. So just as for someone on the left like me, Greenberg almost gives you hope that there were some people making this argument along the way. It wasn't a complete betrayal consciously from the outset. So looking at Penn and Schoen,

it made me realize that the other side had a lot much more sort of compelling interpretation than I and a lot of I think my millennial lefty Bernie friends had given them credit for. You gotta love it. You gotta love it. Give us your dot coms as we go out so people can find out more from you on the interwebs. dot coms as we go out so people can find out more from you on the interwebs yeah so just check me out at twitter tim underscore shank all you need thank you for tuning in thanks to tim for being here go to goodreads.com for it says chris foss linkedin.com for it says chris foss chris foss one the tick tock and all those crazy places on the internet order up where refined books are sold left Left Adrift, What Happened to Liberal Politics?

Out October 8th, 2024. Thanks, my friends, for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Tim.