What's Left: The Future for Progressives after a 50-year Decline

Over the last fifty years, Democratic presidents have come and gone, but the Progressive Left has lost its way, leaving a vacuum that has filled by the far Right, the center Right, and the corporate Right. This decline began when the Left, constantly fearful of its own shadow, sold out its values and the people who shared those values.

In What’s Left?, renowned psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen explains how this happened, and how—by the time Reagan ran for president—the Left was already floundering without a story to counter Reagan’s vigorous conservatism. He shows how right-wing thought and language overwhelmed politics in America, so that once commonplace ideas about the social contract became all but unmentionable. At the same time, because of an inability to articulate its moral worldview, the Left abandoned core issues like protecting the rights of women, progressive taxation, and environmental justice.

Westen shows where the Progressive impulse remains alive and vibrant—in the hearts of the middle class and those who aspire to it—and offers a way for the Left to regain its fire even when its leaders, including Clinton and Obama, have all but doused their own.