Michael Kazin, a Georgetown historian who has written on American populism and the American left, traces the Democratic Party from its founding under Andrew Jackson through the Biden administration. Kazin examines how a party that began by championing white men's democracy against moneyed elites transformed over nearly two centuries into a coalition of racial minorities, educated professionals, and unionized workers. The book explores the ideological debates and coalition shifts that produced this transformation: how Democrats accommodated and then abandoned the slaveholding South, how they built and then lost the New Deal coalition, how they became the party of civil rights and faced the resulting backlash. Kazin pays particular attention to how Democrats have navigated tensions between their reform ambitions and the compromises necessary to win elections, between their working-class base and their educated activists, between economic and cultural liberalism. He examines individual leaders from Jackson to FDR to the Clintons to Obama, assessing how their choices shaped the party's trajectory. The book offers neither celebration nor critique but rather a clear-eyed assessment of how a political party actually operates over time. Readers will gain understanding of how contemporary Democratic politics emerged from nearly two centuries of conflict, coalition-building, and transformation.