A 2021 Pew Research Center report, “Beyond Red v. Blue,” found that voters it described as members of the “Progressive Left” accounted for only 6% of the national electorate and 12% of the Democratic Party coalition. As the “most politically engaged segment” of the party, however, progressive leftists were disproportionately powerful in shaping Democratic policies and rhetoric. The nature and extent of their influence is the subject of two new books, The Rebels by Joshua Green and The Squad by Ryan Grim.

Green, Bloomberg Businessweek’s national correspondent, chronicled the rise of the populist Right, culminating in the election of Donald Trump, in Devil’s Bargain (2017). The Rebels views its left-wing equivalent as a return to the New Deal economic populism rooted in the labor movement, and a repudiation of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s neoliberalism. Green’s villains are Wall Street heavyweights like Robert Rubin, Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, and Timothy Geithner, the New York Federal Reserve president who played a central role in the effort to keep the 2008 financial panic from triggering a depression.

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“As they arrived at the power positions of the Democratic Party,” Green writes, such financiers “changed what it stood for, moving away from