The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond.

• Author: Sleeper, Jim

How I wish The Inheritance had been read by the author of every new book that has predicted an implosion of conservatism and a rebirth of some kind of progressivism. In closegrained reportage that sometimes achieves a novel's intimacy with its subjects, former New York Times reporter Samuel Freedman has traced the political evolutions of three white-ethnic families through three generations, from immigrants' ardent support of the New Deal through their grandchildren's active politicking for conservatives such as Lew Lehrman and George Pataki.

Freedman shows that these apostasies had less to do with any conservative conspiracy than with liberalism's abandonment of a class-sensitive politics in favor of one that redefined "need" in terms of countercultural, racial, gender, and other grievances and rights. The second and third generations--a plumber, a custodian, a department store manager, a gravedigger, and a state university student--watch as such policies divert resources, moral legitimacy, and political energy from a Democratic Party that once would have been worthy of their support.

But Freedman's stories don't begin or end there, and little in them should hearten conservatives or even old-style liberals who think they can win by rolling the clock back to 1964 or 1935. His subjects aren't selfless civic saints, and this is no morality play for either party to take on the road. Yes, liberals have dug their own graves by casting as "privileged" and "bigoted" the working-class whites who, in Freedman's nuanced telling, still nurse lingering immigrant injuries, Vietnam War sacrifices, and the myriad insecurities of a hardwon and closely guarded upward mobility. But now these people find themselves swimming in Republican corruption, ham-handedness, and racial hypocrisy that recall the New York Democratic machines their parents fled because the bosses suffocated independence and tolerance.

Is there a liberal Democrat younger than 40 who can feel in his or her bones how hard the lives of those white Polish, Irish, and Italian immigrants were in the pre-New Deal 1920s--how close they came to starvation on the streets, how humiliated they felt under the lash of a contemptuous yet "respectable" middle class that refused even to see what they endured? To feel it is to appreciate the depth of their loyalty to the Democrats--and how deep would be their progeny's sense of betrayal.

In Freedman's account, for example, the New Deal saved Edward and...