Left Adrift

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 centre-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. However, 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.