My book is about the rise and fall of the New Politics movement and its struggle to reform the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a network of actors from the civil rights, student, antiwar, and feminist movements, along with many reform-oriented public officeholders and labor leaders, New Politics reformers sought to overcome the limits of the New Deal’s coalition with southern conservatives and cold warriors by transforming the party’s representative institutions and democratizing its internal decision-making processes. Reformers demanded greater transparency in party rules and procedures, greater access for meaningful citizen participation in the selection of the party’s presidential nominee, and stronger mechanisms of officeholder accountability to hold Democrats to the party platform. Counter-reformers, however, successfully subverted reformers’ party-building initiatives by mobilizing party stakeholders against the reforms they claimed resulted in the disastrous presidential candidacy of George McGovern. The course of this intraparty conflict reshaped the identity of the Democratic Party and paved the way for the retreat of the party from postwar liberalism.