ABSTRACT
It has been just over a decade since Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange posed the question “What’s Left for the Left?” in their seminal article dealing with left-of-center partisan governments in the modern era.1 This book examines the role of ideas in helping us better understand partisan convergence in fiscal goals and strategies in the United States and Britain under Reagan Thatcher, Clinton, and Blair. Neoliberalism became the dominant paradigm in the fiscal policy discourse in both countries and has been embraced by moderates in the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States along with centrists in the Tory and Labour parties in Britain. In studying the influence of ideas on major shifts in fiscal policy over nearly two decades, we are able to provide a convincing account of a much more important, but elusive, phenomenon: the new left’s success in enacting strategies that were initially espoused by the new right more than a decade earlier.
