A revelatory look at modern liberalism’s historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society. 
 
Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, widening liberalism’s impact but narrowing its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of “professional-class liberalism” and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals’ egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional-class liberals’ power.

The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism’s place in contemporary American life.
 

Brent Cebul is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century and the coeditor of Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century. With Geraldo Cadava, N. D. B Connolly, and Lily Geismer, he is a coeditor of the new political history series America Reframed, published by the University of Chicago Press. Lily Geismer is professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality and Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, as well as the coeditor of Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century. With Geraldo Cadava, Brent Cebul, and N. D. B Connolly, she is coeditor of the new political history series America Reframed, published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

Introduction: Professional-Class Liberalism
Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer

Part I: Generational Change and Continuity
1. How Philanthropy Made and Unmade American Liberalism
Lila Corwin Berman
2. Managing Global Development: Robert Nathan and the Liberal Roots of the Contract State in US Foreign Policy
Stephen Macekura
3. Creating “Initiatory Democracy”: Ralph Nader, the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, and the Shaping of Liberalism in the 1970s
Sarah Milov and Reuel Schiller
4. “What Is a Populist Approach to This Crisis?”: ACORN’s Liberalism and the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis
Marisa Chappell
5. Survival Pending Corporate Sponsorship: The “Crisis” of the Black Family, Black State Skepticism, and the Evolution of Black Liberalism in the Post–Civil Rights Era
Danielle Wiggins
6. Queer Autonomy and the Afterlife of the Family Wage
B. Alex Beasley
7. Making the Liberal Media: Journalism’s Class Transformation since the 1960s
Dylan Gottlieb
8. Seeing Like a Strategist
Timothy Shenk

Part II: New Governance
9. The Preservation of Conditional Citizenship after the 1965 Voting Rights Act
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
10. Liberalism’s Last Rights: Disability Inclusion and the Rise of the Cost-Benefit State
Karen M. Tani
11. Computerizing a Covenant: Contract Liberalism and the Nationalization of Welfare Administration
Marc Aidinoff
12. Left in Limbo: The Fight for Temporary Protected Status and the Illiberal Effects of Liberal Policymaking
Adam Goodman
13. The Austerity Imperative: Democratic Deficit Hawks and the Crisis of Keynesianism
David Stein
14. The Professional-Class Presidency of Barack Obama
Nicole Hemmer
15. State Agency: Social History with and beyond Institutionalism
Gabriel Winant

Acknowledgments
Notes
List of Contributors
Index