Introduction

We live in an age when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a best seller, when The Zombie Survival Guide draws 617 customer reviews on Amazon, when we can celebrate the holidays with The Zombie Night Before Christmas, and, if all of this seems too low brow, when we can read Zombie: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates, one of our most high-brow authors. The early years of the twenty-first century are clearly “The Age of the Living Dead.” It is little wonder then that our politics now seem to be oriented around a political movement itself among the living dead. On both sides of the political spectrum, partisans are more and more orienting themselves around the Progressives, a political movement that had its good times on earth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but now, a century later, has crawled out of its grave to walk the earth and, it might appear, ravage (or whatever Zombies do) our politics. Those more or less on the left have increasingly come to call themselves Progressives, at least in part because the term “liberal” had became something of a political liability. It has now come to designate more specifically those on the further left segment of the Democratic Left. It has the advantage of eschewing the dreaded “L” word and of distinguishing those who carry this insignia into political battle from an older Left, which was Marxist or Marxist tinged.