Dahlia Scheindlin’s The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promises Unfulfilled (Boston: De Gruyter, 2023) landed on my doorstep at just the right time. I can’t imagine a better starting point for American readers—like, for instance, me—looking for a guide through the notoriously complex landscape of Israeli politics. The book pairs beautifully with the ongoing series The Elections in Israel, which has been putting campaigns under the microscope for more than fifty years. That Scheindlin got her start in politics working for Stan Greenberg feels somehow appropriate. My GW colleague Shira Robinson’s interpretation of Israel’s founding, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), shaped how I understood everything that came after. There are worse ways to think about Israel’s political transformation than to spend time with the lives of the two figures who loom over the country’s history. For the founding generation, that’s David Ben-Gurion, on which see Tom Segev, A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). In the last generation, it’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Although that story is not yet complete, see Anshel Pfeffer, Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu (London: Hurst, 2018). Arie Krampf’s The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism: The State, Continuity and Change (New York: Routledge, 2018) and Shaul Magid’s Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021) highlight two important stops on the road from Ben-Gurion to Bibi. For a defense of liberal Zionism that reckons with the distance between promise and reality, see Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013). David Shipler’s reporting during his stint as Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times from 1979 to 1984 captured history in the making at a turning point for Israel. His book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (New York: Times Books, 1986), is even better. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020), helps explain why the effort to isolate the occupation of Palestine from Israeli politics was doomed to fail, while Gal Ariely’s Israel’s Regime Untangled: Between Democracy and Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) addresses a hot-button subject with rigor.

  If apartheid looms over Israel’s future, its legacy is unavoidable in discussions of South Africa. Roger Southall is an unfailingly balanced guide to the country’s past and present. Three works of his were especially useful for this book: Liberation Movements in Power Party & State in Southern Africa (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2013); The New Black Middle Class in South Africa (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2016); and Whites and Democracy in South Africa (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2022). J. Bleck and N. van de Walle, Electoral Politics in Africa Since 1990: Continuity in Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), provide helpful comparative background on South Africa’s experience since liberation. Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly shift the focus to popular movements growing out of discontent with electoral politics in Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (London: Zed Books, 2015). That R. W. Johnson, one of the most prolific critics of the ANC, also happens to have been Schoen’s mentor at Oxford is yet another of the coincidences that piled up in my research. His most significant work on the subject—South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid (New York: Overlook Press, 2009)—is marred by a weakness for rumor-mongering that occasionally veers into the fantastical. (If Robert Mugabe was indeed warned ahead of time about 9/11, as Johnson claims, I haven’t been able to find independent verification of it.) But the book has also been, in crucial respects, tragically prescient. André Odendaal, The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), ably chronicles the spirit of the early ANC. The ambitions of the party’s first years in power come through clearly in Thabo Mbeki’s Africa: The Time Has Come: Selected Speeches (Tafelberg: Cape Town, 1998). For a moving account of how the dreams that accompanied liberation have gone unfulfilled, written by an American with an international audience in mind, see Eve Fairbanks, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022). Despite Fairbanks’s often melancholy tone, her assessment of South Africa is ultimately hopeful. So is Evan Liberman’s vigorously argued Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022). Combined, the two provide a valuable counterweight to the fatalism that runs through much commentary on South Africa today.

  But did any of the political strategizing in this book matter? Critics of the consultant class say that today’s political-industrial complex rests on a hodgepodge of myths and superstitions, with no discernible impact on the outcome of elections, and they have an impressive body of scholarship to back up the argument. My favorite is Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), the best summary of the case against an even semi-rational voter, and a blistering takedown of what the authors call the folk theory of democracy. Bartels takes the same zest for mythbusting to the crisis of democracy literature in Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). It’s a compelling argument, but I’m still inclined toward a more generous view. In recent years, Anthony Fowler has been a forceful defender of this interpretation. See, for instance, “Partisan Intoxication or Policy Voting?” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 15, no. 2 (2020), 141–179, and Anthony Fowler, Seth Hill, Jeffrey Lewis, Chris Tausanovitch, Lynn Vavreck, and Christopher Warshaw, “Moderates,” American Political Science Review 117, no. 2 (2023), 643–660. But if I had to pick just one case for the defense, it would be V. O. Key Jr.’s The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). Almost sixty years after its publication, it’s still one of the wisest books ever written on American politics. Check it out.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This little book needed a lot of friends along the way. It began with a request from Mason Williams, Lily Geismer, and Brent Cebul to write a chapter on “Topic TBD” for an edited volume on liberalism since the 1960s. With their help, I landed on a question—how did Bill Clinton become president, anyway?—that I thought could be answered with a few weeks of work. Talking with Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen persuaded me that there was much more to the story. Although both men are more than capable of speaking for themselves, my understanding of their work is far deeper because they agreed to speak with me. Fast-forward a couple months and a brief chapter on the politics of Clintonism had turned into a monster draft, and I still felt like there was more to say. That’s when Nick Lemann and Jimmy So gave this book a home at Columbia Global Reports. Over the next two years, they pushed me to reach for big arguments grounded in characters and backed up by hard facts. Other publishers, take note: this is how the job is done.

  At GW, Eric Arnesen told me this was a risk worth taking, and two department chairs—first Daniel Schwartz, then Denver Brunsman—provided essential backup. Students in my undergraduate seminar “How to Win Elections” stuck with me for an entire semester as I took them through a guided tour of modern political history as seen through the eyes of Greenberg and Schoen. Alexis Doe, Jennifer Ham, Samir Iqbal, and Jed Sutton deserve extra credit for staying around with me for multiple courses where the questions in this book were never far from my mind.

  Those same questions have a way of coming up in my work as an editor at Dissent. It’s a privilege to be part of a magazine that has earned its place in the history of the left. But it’s even better to spend my semi-free time talking—and talking, and talking, and talking—about politics with Natasha Lewis, Nick Serpe, and Mark Levinson.

  My former Dissent coeditor, Michael Kazin, read the manuscript in full and provided characteristically brilliant comments. So did, late in the game, Daniel Schlozman and my GW colleague James Hershberg. Peter Mandler, Shira Robinson, and Roger Southall gave me the benefit of their expertise as I moved into British, Israeli, and South African history, shaping my interpretation on matters big and small while saving me from some truly howling screwups along the way. Leigh Grossman then gave the resulting manuscript the rigorous copy editing it needed.

  Finally, there’s my family, who had nothing to do with the writing of this book, except for being the reason I want to do anything at all. That I’m able to get anything done with three small children at home depends on enormous amounts of help. Doraikannu and Leelavathi Regunathan have racked up more than their fair share of emergency childcare hours. They have been joined in grandparenting duty by my mom, Meg Hawco, who taught me close to everything that matters. Most of the rest I learned alongside Renu Regunathan-Shenk, who built a life with me, and makes it worth living. But one lesson I’ve picked up from our kids—Nikhil, Adi, and Easha—is the beauty in recognizing how little we know. For making me a parent, and everything that’s come after, this book belongs to Nikhil.

  NOTES

  A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

  14 “Liberalism was a dirty word to us”: Anshel Pfeffer, “The Strange Death and Curious Rebirth of the Israeli Left,” Jewish Quarterly 246 (2021), 25.

  15 “Roosevelt did not carry out the socialist platform”: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 3: The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 562.

  INTRODUCTION

  16 erosion of class-based voting is real: For a summary of class divides in the Democratic coalition, see Sam Zacher, “Polarization of the Rich: The New Democratic Allegiance of Affluent Americans and the Politics of Redistribution,” Perspectives on Politics (2023), 1–19. On how these shifts have played out (or not) elsewhere in the world, see Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty, eds., Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948–2020 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

  17 are divided by levels of education: Calculations for the graph are based on analysis of data from American National Election Studies, available at www.electionstudies.org.

  18 retained their firm base of support with voters who hadn’t graduated from high school: Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, 1948–2020” in Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948–2020, eds., Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty, 113.

  19 “beautiful health care”: “Trump Promises ‘Brand New Beautiful Health Care,’ Offers No Details,” NBC News, October 22, 2020, available at www.youtube.com.

  21 the last Democratic nominee to do better in West Virginia: Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, vol. 1, 6th ed. (Washington, DC, 2010), 798.

  22 how the left’s coalition has evolved in France: “Vote for Left-Wing Parties (SFIO/PS, PCF, Radicals, Greens, Other Left) by Education Level, France,” World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database, available at https://wpid.world.

  22 a lot like what has occurred in Italy: “Vote for Left-Wing Parties (PSU/PSDI/PCI/PD/PDS/Green/ Other Left) and M5S by Education Level, Italy,” World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database, available at https://wpid.world.

  23 Denmark, which is often called a bastion of social democracy: “Vote for Left-Wing parties (Social Democratic / Socialist / Social-Liberal / Communist / Green) by Education Level, Denmark,” World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database, available at https://wpid.world.

  24 as different as Brazil, India, and the Philippines: The case of Brazil is especially interesting. By the 1990s, support for its chief left party was skewed toward the most educated voters. That dynamic reversed after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president in 2002, giving a sharp economic polarization to the Brazilian electorate. When Lula ran for a third term against Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, he was still able to count on solid support from the poor, but his support fell in many of the states with the highest levels of poverty. Lula compensated for this weakness by improving on his performance in wealthier parts of the country, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. For more, see Wendy Hunter and Timothy Power, “Lula’s Second Act,”Journal of Democracy 34, no. 1 (2023), 126–140.

  24 it only made sense that class warfare would lose its bite: Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

  25 not usually the most important: Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), nicely illuminates key factors behind the rise and fall of the New Deal’s version of class politics. But placing the United States in a global context reveals that among wealthy countries the American experience of class dealignment was not all that exceptional.

  25 economic inequality began its upward climb not long after: See, for example, Florian Hoffmann, David Lee, and Thomas Lemieux, “Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, no. 4 (2020), 70–76.

  26 some of the states with the highest income gaps in the country are also the most reliably blue: “The Unequal States of America: Income Inequality in the United States,” Economic Policy Institute, available at https://www.epi.org/multimedia/unequal-states-of-america/.

  28 quick and easy path toward becoming a caricature of yourself: For how a snapshot of the profession right before Donald Trump’s election would deliver another blow to its reputation, see Molly Ball, “There’s Nothing Better Than a Scared, Rich Candidate,” Atlantic, October 2016, 56–63.

  28 “then you can tell me we don’t need political consultants anymore”: Ball, “Nothing Better,” 61.

  28 when I read their first books: Stanley Greenberg, Politics and Poverty: Modernization and Response in Five Poor Neighborhoods (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), and Douglas Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977).

  29 These ideas went on to shape campaigns: The importance of those ideas comes through clearly in each of their memoirs: Douglas Schoen, The Power of the Vote: Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators, and Promoting Democracy Around the World (New York: William Morrow, 2007), and Stanley Greenberg, Dispatches from the War Room: In the Trenches with Five Extraordinary Leaders (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009).

  31 “Ponderous” was the term his ex-friend: Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 24.

  CHAPTER ONE

  34 “is that voters are not fools”: V. O. Key Jr., The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 7. On Key’s biography, see William Harvard, “V. O. Key, Jr.: A Brief Profile,” South Atlantic Urban Studies 3 (1979), 279–288.

  36 “I was very much in a racial culture”: “Stanley Greenberg oral history interview,”January 27, 2005, Miller Center, available at www.millercenter.org.

  36 “I didn’t know any Republicans”: “Stanley Greenberg oral history,”January 27, 2005.

  37 revolutions also required cultural change and deft political strategizing: An enormous body of scholarship has grown up around Gramsci. For the basics, see Roger Simon, Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2015). In this vast literature, Stuart Hall’s writings are in a class by themselves, and make for a fascinating contrast with Greenberg. See, for example, Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). And for an insightful discussion of a topic with special relevance for Greenberg, see Dylan Riley, “Hegemony, Democracy, and Passive Revolution in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks,” California Italian Studies 2 (2011).

  37 a giant in the field of urban politics with safely Democratic loyalties: Wilson deserves more attention from historians, but for the key points in his biography see John DiIulio Jr., “James Q. Wilson,” PS: Political Science and Politics 45, no. 3 (2012), 559–561.

  38 between “radical political man”and “liberal political man”: Greenberg, Politics and Poverty, 2–3.

  38 “We coded and counted the responses of the poor”: Greenberg, Politics and Poverty, ix.

 

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