The Consultants Who Lost Democrats the Working Class

American politics, Timothy Shenk quips in his newest book, Left Adrift, “used to be simple: Republicans were for business, Democrats for labor.” But since the 1970s, class dealignment—the delinkage of voters and the political parties that claimed to represent their economic interests—has chipped away at that once-ironclad organizing principle. As the story goes, Lyndon Johnson upset the uneasy New Deal coalition with civil rights legislation; the decline of organized labor in the 1970s weakened key Democratic networks of working-class association; deindustrialization blasted a hole through remaining working-class Democratic strongholds; and the New Democrats, with their deference to the free market and willingness to be pulled to the right, delivered the twentieth-century Democratic Party its last rites. The 30 years since have been marked by Democratic helplessness and indifference as the party morphed into a home for the wealthy and highly educated, while the right loomed in the background, slowly making inroads among working-class voters Democrats once called their base.

The tale is so familiar as to have leapt from useful explanatory analysis to an article of faith. To the extent that there are agents in this story, the New Democrats are typically cast as the villains, and with good reason. Disastrous trade agreements, too-clever-by-half half-measures aimed at reducing inequality through the market, cynical abandonments of bedrock left-wing principles: These missteps accelerated the demise of class politics in the United States. The road to dealignment ran through Opportunity Zones.

This story is convenient, and mostly true, but it ignores a key historical reality: Dealignment occurred across the world, sparing few left-liberal parties. The degrees to which it affected parties in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and South Africa (the countries Shenk explores, but by no means the only ones) varied, but trends are common. Parties with which working-class political activism was once synonymous lost key voting blocs and with them their identities. Some were more willing to embrace this development than others, pivoting to chase new demographics to fill new coalitions, and the autopsies of each revealed unique pressures to each country. And yet Left Adrift is not so much a corrective to popular accounts of class dealignment across the world as it is an alternative history of how left parties came to embrace the set of market-friendly, triangulating policies, eventually known as the Third Way, that quickened the loss of working-class voters.

Shenk, a professor of history at George Washington University and contributing editor at Dissent, embarks on the suddenly well-trodden ground of the Democratic Party of the 1990s. John Ganz’s recent When the Clock Broke covers Bill Clinton’s campaign strategy and road to the White House, and Lily Geismer’s Left Behind analyzes the failure of Clinton and the New Democrats’ poverty policy. But the subjects of Shenk’s narrative aren’t the not-so-great men at the end of history. Rather, they are the insiders, standing behind those men, out of the spotlight: strategists Stan Greenberg and Douglas Schoen, “political Zeligs” who emerge, again and again, on the scene of left-liberal parties’ fabulous failures across the globe, hopping from ship to sinking ship over the past 30 years. But Greenberg and Schoen were no chameleons. They brought with them dueling ideas on how to reverse the losses wrought by dealignment. And through their rivalry, Shenk contends, we can understand the real story of dealignment, and how we might reverse it.

Shenk, whose last book, Realigners, told the story of political leaders who upended old political orders and created new majorities, describes Greenberg and Shoen’s relationship as a “feud … stoked by petty grievances and personal jealousies.” Although the two men often found themselves competing for the ear of the same politicians, there is little in the way of beef between the two strategists. But there is a definite rivalry of ideas: Greenberg, the economic populist intent on reconstructing the New Deal coalition, versus Schoen, the pragmatic pollster, convinced that, amid a national repudiation of liberal politics and a rightward shift, the only way to win was to beat Republicans to the spot. And though both were unsuccessful, they employed their ideas in service of the same goal: building the next, dealignment-proof, Democratic majority.

They make for compelling rivals. Greenberg, the son of middle-class Jewish parents heavily involved in the life of their synagogue, grew up in a mostly Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., before moving to the suburbs; Schoen grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a stronghold of the city’s Jewish gentry, before attending the tony Horace Mann School in Riverdale, where he met his future business partner, Mark Penn. Greenberg’s political consciousness was shaped by the Civil Rights Movement; Schoen cut his teeth as a member of the West Side Kids, a group of precocious city political operators who envisioned themselves as an “incubator for a new Tammany Hall.” Greenberg went to Miami University of Ohio and worked on RFK’s campaign; Schoen roomed with Penn at Harvard and got his big break on Ed Koch’s 1977 mayoral campaign, which saw Koch, a onetime Greenwich Village liberal, reinvent himself politically, channeling the anger of outer-borough white ethnics hostile to busing and housing integration all the way to Gracie Mansion. Both campaigns were formative, not just for the men’s strategic inclinations but also for their understandings of where the untapped power reserves of American politics lay.

Greenberg, determined to understand why the white working class had abandoned the Democratic Party, studied the “Reagan Democrats” of Macomb County, Michigan, and came away convinced that they were winnable yet, if only Democrats returned to the economic populism of the New Deal, while moderating on social issues. In the absence of appeals to the middle class, Greenberg explained, Republicans filled the void with a “fusion of race and taxes,” turning blue-collar Macomb County voters against the concept of an active, expansive federal government. The study caught the attention of the Democratic Leadership Council, that bastion of New Democratic centrism. It was an unlikely marriage, but it proved fruitful for Greenberg, who was enlisted by Bill Clinton as a strategist. Clinton, a generationally talented politician, ran Greenberg’s populist playbook with ease, campaigning on tax cuts for the middle class and tax hikes for the wealthy, national health care, and increased education spending. The initial results were promising: Clinton won the presidency, and The New York Times, Shenk notes, poetically concluded that the Greenberg-led campaign represented “the first time since Robert Kennedy’s Indiana primary campaign in 1968, that it is politically possible to bring poor blacks and blue-collar white voters together.” For Greenberg, it was proof that his vision was not only viable but potentially transformative.

But once in the White House, Greenberg fought an uphill battle to translate class politics into class-based policy. As president, Clinton, facing pushback from congressional Republicans and Cabinet members like Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, sacrificed the populist offerings that Greenberg had made the keystone of the campaign: Middle-class tax cuts and national health care were out; welfare reform and Nafta were in. All the while, Clinton remained “happy to pay” the price of cultural moderation Greenberg associated with tacking left on economics, with such disastrous results as the 1994 crime bill and 1996’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which won plaudits from the Chamber of Commerce. But with few economic wins for the middle class, Clinton’s rhetoric on welfare and crime appeared less as lamentable trade-offs for resurrecting working-class politics and more as proof of concept for Schoen’s theory that America had moved irreversibly to the right. When the administration’s approval rating plummeted and Republicans trounced Democrats in the 1994 midterms shortly after, it had become clear that there was a void at the heart of Clintonian politics as conceived by Greenberg.

Into it stepped Schoen and Penn, whom Clinton hired as pollsters. Greenberg was unceremoniously eased out of Clinton’s inner circle to make room for the computer-savvy Schoen and Penn; his weekly meetings with Clinton, Shenk notes, were dropped from the president’s schedule. With the president’s ear, Schoen and Penn advised the president to craft policy that would appeal to “soccer moms,” moderate voters who bristled at the GOP’s puritanical social policies, and Ross Perot voters, an ideologically jumbled mass of disaffected (mostly conservative) political free agents. Electorally, it was a reasonable strategy; Clinton had limped to victory in 1992, winning only a plurality of voters against unpopular incumbent George H.W. Bush and benefiting greatly from Perot’s nearly 19 percent vote share. Ideologically, it meant acquiescing to Schoen’s fatalistic view of the electorate, irretrievably trending right, forcing Democrats to demonstrate consensus on economic issues with Republicans and “pivot to local issues and personality differences.” If you pointed out that David Duke’s 1988 presidential campaign “was managed by a former commander in the American Nazi Party,” many white voters would “shrug it off,” Schoen and Penn told Louisiana Democratic Governor Edwin Edwards, facing a challenge by Duke and his barely rebranded right-populism. “Say that he was a tax cheat who lied about serving in the military, and they might start to pay attention.”

With Schoen and Penn calling the shots, Clinton won reelection in 1996 but couldn’t stop the downballot bleeding that began under Greenberg; Republicans won back the House and Senate. White-knuckled victories that nonetheless exposed cracks and failed in their bids to reverse dealignment would become a common outcome under Greenberg and Schoen. (In the United Kingdom, where both men took turns consulting for the Labour Party from 1994 under Tony Blair’s leadership and on into the twenty-first century, they oversaw what Shenk describes as the gradual loss of Labour strongholds, culminating in a string of Tory premierships.)

“The change we must make isn’t liberal or conservative. It’s both, and it’s different,” Clinton said in a speech, written by Greenberg, launching his campaign in 1992. Usually, a statement like this indicates a move to the right. In Clinton’s case, the line would prove to be a near-poetic encapsulation of the Third Way as both an incoherent ideology and a stalking horse, intentional or otherwise, for conservatism. By 2000, Clinton had absorbed the social moderation of Greenberg and the fiscal conservatism of Schoen, jettisoning the economic populism that held Greenberg’s hoped-for new Democratic majority together, and creating the blueprint for a global Third Way. The result was a liberal politics pugilistic enough to win power but emptied out of a transformative vision for the future. There would be no emergent majority, no New Deal Coalition redux or New Labour revival. Instead, there would be triangulation, half-loaves, and forestalled defeat: Labour’s democratic socialism would give way to “social-ism” and Blair’s toothless “One Britain” slogan. Clinton’s heir, Al Gore, under Greenberg’s guidance, would hemorrhage white working-class men and the non-college-educated in 2000, narrowly losing to George W. Bush.

Schoen and Penn’s strategy triumphed over Greenberg’s, but their one simple trick for winning elections faltered too. In Israel, advising Labor candidate Shimon Peres after the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, they suggested that Peres drop his predecessor’s pursuit of the peace process with the PLO and instead campaign on security and anti-terrorism; Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu beat him. Back in the United States, Penn and Schoen advised Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, where she improbably lost to Barack Obama’s insurgent hope-and-change campaign. In South Africa, Schoen’s campaign strategy for the white-dominated Democratic Party against the African National Congress included the barely concealed revanchist slogan “Fight Back.” The change that Bill Clinton, Blair, and Peres each made, with Schoen’s prodding, was certainly not “both” and “different.” It was plainly conservative, and voters tended to prefer the real thing to a liberal knock-off.

Shenk charges Schoen and Penn with “making politics smaller than it had to be.” To them, politics was an exercise in branding, an attitude Shenk skewers with anecdotes as risible as they are depressing. On their pivot to the private sector: “We were increasingly struck by the similarities between campaigns and corporate marketing.” On Israeli Labor candidate Ehud Barak, a Third Way apostle whom Schoen had met while the two were consulting for the diet company SlimFast: “For a former military man, he had an extraordinarily instinctive understanding of how to sell diet products.” Fiscal austerity was, in Schoen’s version of politics, not so different from meal replacement protein shakes: Both needed to, and could, be sold.

Drunk on adults-in-the-room realism, Schoen and Penn failed to recognize that politics creates new consensus as much as it responds to existing ones. There are rules to the game, constraints on electorates, but those rules can always be rewritten by savvy politicians and, yes, forward-thinking strategists. By heralding a new anti–New Deal consensus, Schoen and Penn imagined a politics that could manage the decline of class politics but never reverse it. A Labour member of Parliament neatly summed up this approach after Keir Starmer’s decisive victory in the 2024 U.K. general election: “The question is ‘what’s the point of a Labour government?’” The MP, and Shenk, might as well be asking about Schoen’s entire brand of politics, in all of its global forms.

While his account is altogether convincing, Shenk is sometimes at pains to draw connections between the declines of global liberal parties advised by Schoen and Greenberg. While all experienced some kind of class dealignment, it’s questionable how much electoral politics in Israel, where the occupation has divided politics, shares with postapartheid South Africa—where the demise of a system of racial and ethnic domination gave way to a wholly new set of political imperatives—or whether Labour’s successes in the late 1990s and 2000s, even with working-class losses, are in fact worth comparing to the much direr gutting of the Democratic Party base. Shenk is right that neither Greenberg’s nor Shoen and Penn’s “plans for remaking the Democrats, or any other party, came to fruition.… And the polarizers won.” But the polarization that has accompanied dealignment has not been symmetrical; there has been no left equivalent to the rise of far-right parties across the West. In a basic sense, this is proof of Shenk’s thesis, and confirmation of the strategists’ worst fears. But it’s hard not to get the sense that their politics—not just Schoen’s cynical triangulation but Greenberg’s condemnation of a Democratic politics aimed at the most oppressed members of society—helped grease the wheel for the illiberal right’s rise in the twenty-first century.

Greenberg and Schoen were ultimately cast aside, the former out of politics after his failure in South Africa and the latter reduced to guest spots on Fox News, where he dependably harangues Democrats for recklessly moving left. No durable new majority has emerged in their absence, and there’s little reason to think one will anytime soon. As dealignment continues apace—a recent New York Times/Siena poll shows Harris trailing Trump among non-college-educated white voters and virtually tied among voters with household incomes below $200,000—it seems that we’re stuck in the same interregnum as the one we found ourselves in in the early 1990s, when Greenberg and Schoen first plied their trades. The same questions about dealignment (and the same latent fears) cast a pall over American politics today, even if they take on different shapes. What was 2021’s intraparty debate over “popularism”—a concept popularized by pollster David Shor and centrist pundits like Matthew Yglesias—if not a rearticulation of the same conflict of the Clinton years?

Yet even as the white working class, the demographic to which Greenberg devoted his career, continues to vex national Democrats, triangulation may finally be losing its stranglehold on the party as its old guard is replaced by new leaders. Meanwhile, the central tension of the book (and of Democratic politics in the last 30 years)—which group of “ordinary people” should the Democrats’ economic program target?—remains unresolved. Shenk mostly elides it, slipping between “working” and “middle class,” and the party seems similarly satisfied with this ambiguity. At this year’s DNC, UAW President Shawn Fain delivered a stirring appeal to working-class politics, below a massive digital banner proclaiming the sanctity of a different relationship: “Strong middle class, strong America.”

Democrats, for what it’s worth, have taken to heart some of Greenberg’s advice: The Harris-Walz campaign’s theme of “freedom” and “weird” messaging closely echoes Greenberg’s 1991 diagnosis in The American Prospect that, “with Republicans programmed to nominate socially conservative presidential candidates who meet all the litmus tests on abortion, pornography, and prayer, Democrats are the libertarians.” And Greenberg, still writing in The American Prospect, appears satisfied with the effort. But championing a “politics of joy” while co-opting conservative messaging on crime and immigration in an effort to moderate is unlikely to build a new majority, let alone provide an alternative to the culture-war resentment peddled by the right. Democrats must offer material improvements to the lives of working-class Americans, not just ironic camouflage trucker hats. Left Adrift is not a road map to a new majority. But it is a cautionary tale.