THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S LIBERAL IMAGINATION.

• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Cooper, Matthew

I was seventeen when I showed up at Columbia University in the fall of 1980. One of my first assignments for the campus radio station was to cover election night. It was a bit like the Martin Scorsese movie After Hours, a dark comedy in which a normal guy encounters ever-weirder moments during an all-nighter in New York City. My version involved a party at the 21 Club where cheering Hasidic Jews, who seemed out of place in that famed old-money, WASPy restaurant, were dancing en masse celebrating Ronald Reagan's election. Later I wound up at a party for Alfonse D'Amato, the newly elected Republican senator from New York, who had knocked off the liberal incumbent Republican, Jacob Javits, in the GOP primary. Cheers went up from the ballroom each time another liberal icon, like George McGovern or Frank Church, went down.

If you were a liberal that night, you had to be deeply shaken. It was clear that Reagan hadn't won purely because of his communication skills. Something wasn't working with American liberalism.

In my effort to understand what that something was over the ensuing years, I found myself turning often to the...