"This book began as a political history of the 60s and 70s, with a particular focus on why Americans have let our nation decline in almost every measurable way since then, and sometimes even cheered on those who engineered that decline. I wanted to tell it the way I saw it growing up, watching many of my working-class Irish relatives forsake the Democrats, a party they saw as forsaking them. But my family's story, and that of the Democratic Party, turned out to be more complicated"--