Institutional survival can be a concern for any organization, but for long-standing and well-established institutions such as major political parties survival is usually taken for granted. When a party suffers crushing defeat in a national election, alarmist journalists may attract attention with head-lines suggesting its imminent demise, but not since the Civil War has the viability of the Democrats and Republicans been seriously in question. Therefore, the conditions under which a major party maintains itself has not been a focus of scholarship regarding American political parties.

Between 1968 and 1972, with political conflict in America unusually high, major changes were made in rules for consituting Democratic national conventions and selecting Democratic candidates. Basic issues about the practical meaning of democratic commitments were sharply contested, and debates about party organization proved vigorous and substantial. The reforms enacted aimed partly to enhance participation and restore public respect for political life. They did not escape criticism. In fact, critics of reform became the dominant voice in subsequent discussion of what happened to the Democratic party and to party politics in the United States more generally.

In the course of the debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, no one disputed that the people were sovereign, but how this sovereignty was to be embodied proved quite controversial. The post-Revolutionary generation faced the challenge of creating a republican form of government from an oppositional popular politics. Federalists responded by claiming for their Constitution, and for the national government it created, a monopoly on the legitimate representation of the people. They championed the official over the popular and invoked the idea of the nation to authorize this transfer of authority. It was a transfer that would not go unchallenged, and, as a result, the constitutional politics of the early republic repeatedly posed the question of whether popular sovereignty could survive the transformation of the demos into a nation.

Theodore Roosevelt established a new, and puzzling, form of public policy leadership during his presidency. In this respect, Roosevelt's presidency breaks with past presidential practice. So marked is this change that it is commonly identified as a foreshadowing of the “modern presidency,” implying a path of development from Roosevelt's leadership practice to the institutionalized presidency at midcentury.

There is perhaps no topic that has generated more sustained interest and controversy in the United States during the past three decades than the public policies called “entitlements.” From the Great Society innovations of the 1960s to the guaranteed income plan of the 1970s to the “health security” proposal of the early 1990s, debate over the issue of which U.S. citizens should be entitled to what kind of national-level benefits has been a constant in American political life. Though consensus has occasionally been reached, moments of accord have been fragile and fleeting. Late 1995 and early 1996 found both President William Clinton and a large, bipartisan majority of Congress targeting poor Americans and their benefits, advocating an “end to welfare as we know it.” Yet interbranch disagreement over the way that “welfare” reform should be implemented reached such heights that the annual U.S. budget development process broke down, resulting in repeated shutdowns of government agencies and the threat that, for the first time in the history of the American nation, the United States would default on its obligations to its creditors.

By the end of the 1940s, it was clear that New Deal liberalism had changed. Cabell Phillips, a journalist, wrote that the Fair Deal had abandoned a liberalism preoccupied with poverty and inequality and “focused on the creation and equitable distribution of abundance, which now loomed as an attainable reality.” Economic growth had become the talisman of liberal policies, both foreign and domestic. Fair Deal conservation policy, for example, abandoned the New Deal's emphasis on resource planning and redistribution of economic power and reshaped federal land, water, and grazing programs into tools of economic expansion. Similarly, postwar America put production and efficiency at the center of international debates over foreign exchange and foreign aid to war-torn Europe. The place of economic growth in postwar liberalism is often understood to reflect the conservative turn in American politics that followed the war with Harry Truman's presidency and the cold war's onset.

Alan Brinkley's The End of Reform deserves praise as a book that is well written and has something to say. There are some books about which only one of these is true and many about which neither is true.

I agree with Brinkley's conclusion and disagree with the path by which he arrives at it. Brinkley's conclusion is that the years from the recession of 1937–38 to the end of World War II in 1945 should be seen as a critical period in the development of American liberalism and, therefore, in American political development. It is during this period, Brinkley argues, that rights-based liberalism became dominant over other variants of liberal ideology. Brinkley's focus on the period from 1937 to 1945 represents a departure in New Deal historiography, which has traditionally focused either on the Hundred Days of 1933, which produced the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), among other “alphabet soup” agencies, or on the “Second New Deal” of 1935–36, during which the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) were passed.

The increase in writing by political historians and political scientists about the United States in the 1940s registers concerns about origins – after some major endings, notably of Democratic political predominance and the Cold War. That decade also saw the beginning of serious national efforts at reform in racial politics.

I wish, first, to thank Michael Brown, Kenneth Finegold, and David Plotke for their thoughtful and provocative responses to my book. Historians and political scientists, even those who work on similar issues, exchange views far too seldom. This discussion, therefore, offers an opportunity to consider not only reactions to my book, but also some of the connections (and differences) between our two disciplines.