These essays, written over a thirty-year period, are my account of how
American politics, and the world in which America’s political system operates,
have changed. These changes have been fundamental. The American government
does not make decisions today the way it made them in the 1950s
or during the New Deal era in the 1930s. Familiar institutions have been
weakened or destroyed, replaced by a commitment to ideas and ideologies
the consequences of which we do not fully understand.