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.