Historians have sought to explain the nation's profound political realignment from the 1960s to the 2000s, five decades that witnessed the fracturing of liberalism and the rise of the conservative right. Self argues that the separate threads of that realignment-- from civil rights to women's rights, from abortion wars to gay marriage-- all ran through the politicized American family. This establishment of new rights and the visibility of alternative families provoked, beginning in the 1970s, a furious conservative backlash. Self provides a passionate explanation of our current political situation and how we arrived in it, allowing us to think anew about the last fifty years of American politics.