In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill provides us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken program at the heart of our society. He displays us how, during the last half hundred years, America’s primary values-meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, as well as democracy itself-have in some way managed to power its decrease into dysfunction. They have isolated our best and brightest, whose positions at the top have never been more secure or more remote control.

The effect has about Tailspin: INDIVIDUALS and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It been an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and an incredible number of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness. By examining the people and makes behind the rise of big-money lobbying, legal and financial executive, the demise of private-sector unions, and a hamstrung bureaucracy, Brill answers the issue on everyone’s mind: How did we end up this way? Finally, he introduces us to the people working quietly and effectively to correct the damages. At once a medical diagnosis of our nationwide ills, a history of their development, and a prescription for any brighter potential, Tailspin is a work of riveting journalism-and a pleasant antidote to political despair.