American democracy revolves around two central visions: equality and unity. When Americans have pursued these ideals in moderation and balance, they have flourished. But because equality and unity exist as ideals, they can be striven for but never achieved completely. Further, they can be abused by zealous followers. In the years after World Ward II, the governing elite of the time an elite of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and traditionalist men let the unity ideal corrode into McCarthyism. In the 1950s, a reformist elite sprang up to check the abuses of the anti-subversives, and with the...