Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy

by Daniel Soyer

"A fixture on the New York political scene from 1944 until 2002, the Liberal Party was the longest-lived of New York's small parties that play an important role in the state's politics. This examination of the Liberal Party's history answers questions concerning post-World War II anti-Communist liberalism, the role of the labor movement in liberal and reform politics, the nature of reform and machine politics on the local level, the intersection of ethnicity and politics, the place of patronage in New York politics, the difficulties of balancing idealist and pragmatic approaches to politics, and New York City mayoral politics from La Guardia to Giuliani"--

Genres: Politics, History

Unknown Binding

Published December 1, 2021

Reviews

[Shaun Richman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well researched and exceptionally well written book. An institutional history of one of the weirder political organizations to ever achieve a degree of political power in New York. It was neither liberal nor a party, but it maintained an outsized stranglehold on New York's machine politics for decades. It's a credit to Soyer that as much as he clearly admires the party's aims and origin and seeks to burnish its reputation as a standard-bearer for post-war, post-Communist social democratic political organizing that his narrative is honest enough that this writer–at least–comes away convinced that the Liberal Party was always a divisive element in the labor movement and a self-interested patronage machine that set the cause of genuinely progressive politics back by several decades.

[Sarah Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel Soyer's encyclopedic study of the Liberal Party is filled with provocative lessons and disturbing warnings: Third parties should not become more powerful than the grassroots community movements from which they evolve, or croneyism and petty competitions between bosses take priority over people's lives. Fighting for social programs and funding basic needs as pragmatic reforms inevitably lead to questioning larger structures, and these contradictions divide coalitions between classes. And most importantly, racism repeatedly defeats limited rubrics of social progress. This is a crucial contribution to the history of New York City, coming at the perfect time.