The year is 2012. David Reynolds is a college sophomore whose Thanksgiving weekend assignment is to conduct several interviews with his parents, in order to understand how they and their generation managed to reconstruct the American political system in the sixteen short years between 1996 and 2012.

He uses as his starting point the New Declaration of Independence of the Fourth of July, 2000, and explores first how it came about and then how its commitments were steadily achieved in the following years through sustained middle-class mobilization, electronic communication, a series of practical and populist constitutional changes, and a prosperity-restoring, middle class-oriented economic nationalist policy program.

In his final paper (excerpted in the epilogue), David marvels at the dedication and resourcefulness of his parents and their peers, and speculates about what his world would be like if they had failed to take up the challenge to reconstruct their country and restore the future for themselves and their children.

But the fictional theme is only about a quarter of the content here. The rest is data-grounded analysis of the major problems of the United States today and the Third World future they will bring about without fundamental change in our political party and representative systems.

Dolbeare and Hubbell follow up this grim portrait with a provocative and credible vision of how a determined middle class could assert popular control over the big money, selfish politicians, and special interests that now dominate the American political system.

The middle class is seen as systematically victimized by bipartisan public policy for the past thirty years which in turn has been enabled by its own passivity, acceptance of scapegoating diversions, and "false patriotism" - refusal to look critically at traditional American beliefs and practices and selectively modernize them to fit changing needs and conditions.

The heart of the book is the vision of a reconstructed system, and the specific measures to accomplish it. Dolbeare and Hubbell assert that almost all Americans realize that we have serious problems - disappearing jobs, deteriorating public services, and particularly a dramatic and rapidly growing gap between the rich and everybody else - and a political structure that cannot or will not address them.

But nobody seems to offer solutions that are at once practical and capable of solving the problems at their origins: a combination of the structure of political power in the country and its thoughtless or hopeless acceptance by the bulk of its citizens.