To look at the partisan polarization that paralyzes Washington today is to see what first took shape with the presidential election of 1968. This book explains why. Urban riots and the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the politics of outrage and race--all pointed to a reordering of party coalitions, of groups and regions, a hardening and widening of an ideological divide--and to the historical importance of the 1968 election as a watershed event.

Resilient America captures this extraordinary time in all its drama--
the...