WE WANT TO BEGIN with a deep thanks to all the intrepid scholars and journalists whose investigations are essential for a work of real-time social science like this. As the endnotes attest, we could not have written this book without their varied and valued efforts.
We are also grateful to the many brilliant colleagues who generously shared their time and insights. Dan Ziblatt has greatly shaped our thinking about the role of inequality in transforming the Republican Party, and Paul feels fortunate he was his office mate in Paris at “MaxPo” (the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies). Dan and his coauthor Steven Levitsky also graciously vetted the book with a group of their students when Jacob was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Jacob thanks the other Radcliffe fellows for their friendship and feedback; the executive director of the program, Meredith Quinn, for her splendid leadership; the social science director Daniel Carpenter, for his influence on both of our thinking; and Humza Jilani and Meena Venkataramanan for their able research support. He also notes with sadness the passing of the prior director, Judy Vichniac, a beautiful person who headed Harvard’s Social Studies program when he was an undergraduate.
Many other colleagues helped us with this book when it was still a work in progress, including Daniel Goldhagen, Dan Galvin, Ruth Collier, Jake Grumbach, Alex Hertel-Fernandez, Peter Hall, Rob Mickey, Eric Schickler, Steve Teles (who deserves credit for the “Bond villain” reference in the introduction), Chloe Thurston, and Kathy Thelen. At an idyllic workshop in Italy organized by the Social Science Research Council and German Research Foundation, we were fortunate to discuss our ideas with Marius Busemeyer, Nick Carnes, Lea Elsasser, Peter Enns, Jane Gingrich, Silja Haüsermann, Staffan Kumlin, Frank Nullmeier, Jonas Pontusson, Philipp Rehm, Kay Schlozman, Laura Seelkopf, Jale Tosun, Jessica Trounstine, Margaret Weir, and Jonathan Wolff. At the 2019 meeting of the American Political Science Association, we gained additional insights from Robert Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Megan Ming Francis, Leah Wright Rigueur, Theda Skocpol, and Rick Valelly. Theda has had a special impact on our ideas, and we want to thank her for illuminating the path we follow.
Jacob also received great feedback from presentations at Northwestern University and Trinity College, and Paul from presentations at Columbia University, Cornell University, and the New America Foundation. Paul is especially thankful for many discussions of this work with the wonderful members of the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and owes a particular debt to Peter Gourevitch, Peter Hall, Michele Lamont, and Anne Wilson. Finally, we are grateful to Tom Mann for his close reading of the book, for our many (surprisingly enjoyable) conversations about the (highly disturbing) state of American politics, and for his remarkable joint books with Norm Ornstein and E. J. Dionne.
At Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), three stellar research assistants helped us (and saved us from many errors): Jack Greenberg, Benjamin Waldman, and Sam Zacher. Jacob also thanks ISPS’s terrific staff, especially Pamela Lamonaca.
Our agent, Sydelle Kramer, showed herself once again to be a master of her craft. We could not have moved forward without her support, encouragement, and advice. Sydelle helped connect us with Norton and the amazing team at Liveright, headed by Bob Weil. Our editor, Dan Gerstle, was an author’s dream: passionate, supportive, hard-working, and thoughtful. So too, our publicity team: Peter Miller and Cordelia Calvert. We are also grateful to Haley Bracken, Rebecca Homiski, William Avery Hudson, Gina Iaquinta, Amy Medeiros, and Anna Oler. We feel honored our book bears the Liveright imprint.
Above all, we feel grateful for the love of our families. We know that many authors don’t have the great good fortune of having siblings who will offer extremely astute feedback on their work, as Paul’s brothers Mike and Kit do. We also know that authors writing a book on a short timeline aren’t always fun to be with. For not just putting up with us but showing far more understanding than is the norm for teenagers, we want to thank our children: Ava and Owen (Jacob) and Sidra and Seth (Paul).
Our greatest debt, however, is to the two women who, notwithstanding the associated demands and stresses, have wholeheartedly supported our collaborations from the beginning, Oona and Tracey. We have dedicated books to them before, but we can never do so often enough, or show the true depth of our gratitude—much less the full measure of our love.