Book review: Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, by Evan Barker

If I could graphically put up 5 stars here, I would.

Learned my lesson from last time and took an actual photo of the book. I preordered this one back in November of last year.

When I first heard the story of Evan Barker, I was fascinated: a person who was high up in the Democrat hierarchy got fed up and voted for her mortal enemy Donald Trump? It was a story I knew I had to read, so once I found out about Left Behind (I became a subscriber to her Substack last September) I quickly preordered it, something I alluded to in a MER at the time.

Much like a baby, it was about nine months of gestation before the book hit my hands. Of course, I then already knew some of the backstory about why Evan became a Democrat operative in the first place: she grew up in a Midwestern single-parent working-class family and spent her formative years afraid her chronic illness would financially devastate them - thus, her big issue has always been health care, and understandably Obamacare seemed like an ideal solution for her situation. Toss in the heavy union influence she had from her relatives, and it was natural she would grow up a Democrat.

I’m going to elaborate more on that journey in a bit, but I think it’s worth saying that, unlike most other books I’ve read over the years, Left Behind was a book I read about a chapter at a time each day. I really didn’t intentionally get into a slow reveal like that, but after a day or two of absorbing her tome I decided to stay with it in that manner, realizing that such a treatment gave me to both savor the story and time to think about how it evolved, since her and I shared the same overall general lived experience (particularly the scamdemic and how the government reacted) over the course of the last ten years. For example, the names you would expect to see from a progressive and that I always saw in the political media are heavily dropped in Nothing Left, with the most prominent being Bernie Sanders and AOC.

Barker’s slow drift from progressive Democrat to fiercely independent didn’t come from any major change on her end, though. Instead, much of it was like that illustrated by the famous graphic we associate with Elon Musk and his political “evolution.”

Unlike Musk, though, Barker asserts that, despite her vote for Trump, she’s not a Republican. There are many issues she disagrees with them on, and near the end of the book, after roundly chastising the Democrat establishment and excesses of the progressive movement, Evan gets into her suggestions on how the GOP could solidify its recent hold on the working class. (On some I agree but on others I think she’s not reading the situation correctly.) But what she found wrong with the Democrats illustrates perfectly why she joined millions of Americans who left their respective parties and are pining for a populist third way based on either their support for Sanders on the progressive side or those who make up the remnant of the TEA Party, a significant portion of Trump’s MAGA base. Hers was simply a more dramatic tale because she previously worked in the belly of the beast as a prolific fundraiser for progressive causes.

Simply put, the specter of identity politics which now defines the progressive movement is what drove her away, along with a healthy dose of the elitism she found at the upper reaches of the Democrat Party. As someone who grew up in modest means, she couldn’t relate to the rich “silver spoon” kids who were now spouting the same DSA platitudes you’d associate with Zohran Mamdani or Abdul el-Sayed, and they really didn’t want to deal with her either.

Put another way, Nothing Left is the story of disillusionment that many of us who have been politically active at one time in our lives share. I could see in Evan’s story a lot of the same investment I made in the TEA Party movement, believing that would finally be the impetus toward the sort of Constitutional limited government I desired. Similarly, Barker jumped onboard the progressive movement when health care was its signature issue, but instead of the single-payer system or Medicare for All that progressives favored, Americans got Obamacare and the worst of both worlds as insurance costs increased despite the fact everyone had to be covered, including those with pre-existing conditions like hers. The only ones who made out like bandits were the big insurance companies.

However, there is one aspect of Barker’s story that could help explain why she eventually walked out of the 2024 DNC convention in disgust: she was now married and had a family. As she notes:

After everything I’d seen, I was disillusioned, and I was grateful to no longer work eighty hours a week for thankless politicians. I gave up my “girl boss” life of managing a team of fundraisers. Instead, I got to live a dream I never knew I had. I stayed home with my son every day.

In a nutshell, she was now in a position to be something of a “trad wife” and was enjoying every moment of it. Obviously, she’s not simply a mother, since she’s sharing her talent at relating her lived experiences with the rest of us through Nothing Left as well as her Substack, which would never be confused with that of a “trad wife” giving out parenting pointers. For all I know, Barker and her husband may be parents in the same manner Indivisible’s Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg are also raising two children while working in the political world.

This isn’t the evolution one would expect from a progressive, which is why I enjoyed the book so much. Evan Barker struck me as a relatable person anyone could have a conversation with and that makes her story a fish-out-of-water tale worth reading.

If I were to make a suggestion: bring the book tour to Delaware so I can say hello. Despite our positions on the political spectrum, I think we may have more in common than one would think.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there.