"At a time when politics has become an almost ­minute-by-minute spectacle, political thinkers who try to discern a sweeping interpretive pattern in current events or to predict where those events may be heading are likely to find their work evaluated in terms dismayingly like those applied to candidates and strategists. One wrong guess, or an abrupt change in the political weather, can make even an illuminating political book seem as irrelevant as a bungled campaign. A good example is Ted Halstead and Michael Lind’s book The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics. Published in 2001, it argued that the nation was ready for “political transformations and realignments” as broad in scope as those created by the Civil War and the Great Depression. … if Halstead and Lind’s proposals were questionable, their analysis of the paralyzed condition of American governance was incisive and prescient, particularly their depiction of a substantial base of disenchanted voters who had become profoundly alienated from the “increasingly dogmatic two-party system,” both parties “captured by their extremes,” with the result that a growing slice of the electorate could not “find even a faction within a major party with which they can identify.”"