Gary Gerstle, a historian at the University of Cambridge and author of major books on twentieth-century American liberalism, offers the leading synthesis of how 'neoliberalism' became the governing ideology of the United States from the late 1970s to the 2010s, and why it has now collapsed. He proposes the concept of a 'political order' to describe a configuration of ideas, institutions, electoral coalitions, and policy assumptions powerful enough to set the terms even for the opposing party. The New Deal order, in his account, ran from Roosevelt to Carter and committed both parties to active government, mass unions, and Keynesian demand management. The neoliberal order ran from Reagan to Obama and committed both parties to deregulation, free trade, globalization, low taxes on capital, and a particular vision of personal freedom. Gerstle is precise about its constituent parts: Reagan-era policy victories, the embrace of NAFTA and welfare reform under Clinton, the bipartisan response to the 2008 financial crisis. He argues that the order shattered between 2016 and 2020 under the combined assault of Trumpism, Bernie Sanders' insurgency, the pandemic, and the racial reckoning of 2020. The book is widely cited as the indispensable account of the era and a roadmap for understanding what kind of political order, if any, is now being built.