Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics

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 use big data and sophisticated mathematical models to turn electioneering into a science.

Meanwhile, a permanent class of political consultants has emerged, replacing the party hacks of yesteryear 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.

The characters who will lead us into this history are Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen. They were two of the leading political consultants in their time. And 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 has made.