Abstract

The Democrats, uprooted from their ancestral ties since 1968, have now been wandering in the desert for twenty years. Lost, beset by identity crises, they have been unable to locate a new moral address. Bob Kutner's The Life of the Party brings a message of hope to this lost tribe. He tells them that you can go home again, home to that mix of social democracy and economic populism that made the New Deal the envy of depression-era Europe.

Kutner, probably America's most respected liberal journalist, argues that for all their differences on social and foreign policy issues, what unites potential Democrats is a shared sense of economic grievance.