Nine authors, including the two editors, have constructed a collective narrative of the transformation, over the past 50 years, of the American national government and the politics that created and sustained that transformation. The narrative, framed in introductory and concluding essays by the editors, is constructed of three essays in each of three parts: the shifting political landscape (Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, and Andrea Campbell), the rise of conservatism (Julian Zelizer, Mark Smith, and Steven Teles), and the new American polity (Suzanne Mettler, Noland McCarty, and Jacob Hacker and Pierson). While complete concordance cannot be expected, with some exceptions the collection presents a fairly consistent story: 1) the rapid expansion of public spending and regulatory programs from the 1950s through the early 1980s; 2) the emergence of a vigorous conservative movement and electoral mobilization; and 3) the creation of organizational and institutional changes, often by liberal Democrats, that were then appropriated and used by their conservative Republican opponents to construct the current regime. All of the contributions are consistent with the editors' intentions: to take a long view stressing substance, ideology, and goals over both “snapshots” and abstraction, and to connect substantive changes to the institutional locations of those changes and their implementation.

Given this framework, the narrative must subordinate the importance of particular events (e.g., 9/11, the oil shock, and inflation in the Carter years), discount exogenous trends (e.g., Mexican immigration, the collapse of communism, economic globalization, and the rise of China), and eschew comparisons with parallel transformations in other advanced industrial states (e.g., Great Britain, Japan, Germany). While the narrative explores the changing nature and organization of advocacy and interest groups, participation rates and partisan shifts among voting blocs, and the rise of conservatism, the policy focus is almost exclusively on federal taxation, social programs and spending, and regulation/deregulation. This core narrative is one of betrayal, false consciousness, and declension—from an era that began with “social programs and labor regulations that promoted economic security and educational opportunity across broad segments of the population” supported by and responsive to “average Americans” (pp. 13–14), and ends with conservatives “seizing power” (p. 105) to conduct “attacks against the state” (p. 113) guided by “an anti-government public philosophy” (p. 218) that rewards the rich and (with the exception of old people) demoralizes and punishes the poor.

How and why did all of this happen? With the exception of presidential races, the prevailing liberal establishment controlled almost all election-resistant centers of national power: Congress, courts, universities, foundations, national media, and the bureaucracy—Teles rightly calls it “liberal entrenchment” (p. 161). An overriding but somewhat indirect answer is provided by Pierson: given the rapid expansion of government in the 1960s and 1970s, “since as early as 1980 politicians have operated largely as bill collectors for previous promises” (p. 37). Beneficiaries of this bounty—mostly Democratic Party voters—received the benefits immediately, but the full bill would not appear until much later. As Smith clearly notes, the Democratic Party—except for calling for deficit reduction and tax increases—had no creditable answers to the economic insecurities that followed, thereby losing their standing on economic policy to the Republican Party, which had a whole series of well-crafted responses. Many of the other contributors, however, do not explore this deep weakness in the Democratic Party and its (lack of) ideas, but seem content to express both bewilderment and anger that what they presume to be the natural liberal order of things had been overturned: Words such as “unintended consequences,” “ironic,” and “surprising,” are paired with hints of elitist conspiracy.

At its worst, this collection is evidence that political science in this vein is largely an ideological expression of nostalgic liberal entrenchment. At its best, it suggests some new and rarely used paths for political science to follow. The chapters by Smith and Teles are especially good in showing how the Republican Party and its intellectual allies crafted coherent institutional and ideological structures that articulated ideas of public good, setting national policy priorities addressed to felt needs and problems. Neither the Democratic Party nor political science had any clear alternatives to offer. In short, as Theodore Lowi (1969) presciently pointed out, so far as ideas of public good are concerned, it was “the end of liberalism.” Only in the concluding essay (when Lowi finally makes an appearance) do the editors suggest that the Democrats lack “ideational infrastructure” (p. 290).

This suggests two paths to pursue in constructing a more convincing narrative of American political development over the past half century. The first is to explore more deeply how and why the Republican Party was able to build the powerful and successful institution that it did: how and why, against long odds, it built a popular base, attracted young activists with energy and talent, and recruited a new generation of political leaders capable of political, institutional, and ideological innovation. The chapters by Smith and Teles might be supplemented by John Gerring (Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996, 1998) on long-standing interparty differences toward central state authority, and by Daniel Galvin (Presidential Party Building in the United States, forthcoming) on deep differences between the two parties as polities. Both studies seem to confirm that the Democratic Party lacks a clear ideological core and that its success as a party rests less on creating national authority than on using government to capture and reward its various coalitional members. David Plotke (Building a New Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s, 1996) confirms this understanding in showing that the Democratic Party played only a peripheral role in creating and sustaining the New Deal regime.

The second suggestion is that students of American politics must take more seriously the difference between big government and strong state. Many of the contributions, especially those by Zelizer and Mettler, not only confuse the two but also assume that expanding the former enhances the latter. The United States constructed the biggest-spending welfare/pension bureaucracy in the late nineteenth-century world—but not a national state capable of governing the emerging industrial society. Perhaps New Deal and, later, “interest group” liberalism was a replay of that same story.