I began working on this book when Ronald Reagan's second term was well underway. In debates about the meaning of his victories, many discerned an enduring Democratic majority underneath the sharp national shift to the right. If such a view now seems slightly ridiculous, it was reasonable at the time, and it reflected the long and deep influence of the Democratic political order in the United States.

I was critical of the political direction of the Reagan administrations and sought to understand why he could inflict stunning defeats on candidates whose positions were continuous with the main Democratic commitments of previous decades. That interest led me back to the 1930s, to the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the establishment of an expanded administrative and regulatory state. My project started as an inquiry into origins, and became a larger task of trying to understand the entire course of the Democratic regime. From the 1930s my interests continued forward, through the long phase of Democratic national domination that ended with spectacular crashes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The present book is a result of that project, and includes a general argument about how political orders are built and decline. The other main part of my project, to be published separately, examines the turbulent final decade of the Democratic order.