Eight years later came Bernie Sanders, whose nomination, Wilentz insisted, did not “bode well either for Sanders or the party.” And then, disastrously, there was Donald Trump. First came Barack Obama, whom Wilentz depicted as a virtuoso manipulator who traded the support of the party’s white working class for minority voters and liberal elites. With the 2008 presidential election under way, rumors swirled that Wilentz was poised to follow Schlesinger’s example yet again, this time as the court historian for Hillary Clinton’s upcoming administration. Three years later, he followed it up with The Age of Reagan, a survey of American political history from 1974 to 2008 that not so implicitly set the stage for a coming liberal era after Reagan’s.
In 2005, he published The Rise of American Democracy, a 1,000-page opus on the emergence of popular government in the United States, from the Declaration of Independence to the Civil War. Outside academic circles, he was well known for his regular contributions to the Leon Wieseltier–run “back of the book” at The New Republic, where he opined on subjects ranging from the influence of postmodern theory (bad) to the popularity of David McCullough (also bad) in essays thrown down like lightning bolts from Mount Princeton. Like Schlesinger, he’d begun his career as a specialist in early American political history, then moved on to writing about the entire scope of the nation’s past.
Over the following decade, Wilentz cemented his place as Schlesinger’s intellectual heir.
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