The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Struggle for a New American Politics

Progressives battle to wrench the Democratic Party away from neoliberalism and back toward left populism in this searching study. Bloomberg journalist Green (Devil’s Bargain) pegs the 2008 financial crash as the watershed that mobilized formidable progressive politicians who ended the rightward drift of the party. He starts with the rise of Elizabeth Warren, who, as chair of a panel overseeing bailout funds and then as senator from Massachusetts, channeled Americans’ anger at the Obama administration’s bank-friendly policies and proposed such populist measures as lowering student-loan interest rates, expanding Social Security, and rejecting free-trade deals. In 2016, Vermont’s socialist senator Bernie Sanders stole Warren’s thunder, Green argues, with his antibillionaire invective and proposals for Medicare for All, free college, and paid family leave, and brought leftist protest movements into mainstream politics through his presidential campaign. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Sanders campaign volunteer, brought youthful identity politics to the Democratic progressive wing with her 2018 primary upset of New York congressman Joe Crowley. As background, Green shrewdly analyzes the pendulum swings in the post-Watergate Democratic Party—a chapter on Tony Coelho, a Democratic congressman and mega-fund-raiser who pivoted the Party toward Wall Street donors in the 1980s, is especially illuminating—and evocatively conveys his subjects’ charisma. The result is a revealing history of an epochal shift in American politics. (Jan.)