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

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 Lizzie Garrett, who had fled the grinding poverty of Hell's Kitchen for unheated hovels farther up the Hudson and, after nearly starving there, too, had found salvation in public jobs. Not 30 years later, though, the Garretts' bright young grandson. Tim Carey, was tracked at the bottom of his high school in Ossining and steered toward boiler repair, simply because he came from the wrong side of the tracks.

He was drafted into the Vietnam War and wound up protecting the Pentagon from anti-war demonstrators. And he discovered later that all the local boys killed in the war came from his town, not the more affluent Croton-on-Hudson. Not only had "his" Vietnam been a Democrats' war; the protesters who assailed him for having fought it were the children of liberal Democrats who attacked the "father-son" unions, family norms, and religious beliefs of his parents. Attending the State University of New York after getting out of the Army, Carey defied condescending guidance counselors to earn high grades while working a night-shift job, and in 1969 found other students who shared his disdain for snobbish whites and rioting blacks.

Carey volunteered in Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. Seven years later, after long conversations with conservative zealot and gubernatorial hopeful Lew Lehrman, whose driver he'd become, Carey had an epiphany upon hearing the candidate say in a speech, "Our economic crisis has become a moral crisis." As Freedman tells it, the sentence crystallized what Carey had been thinking under Lehrman's tutelage in the car. Suddenly, "It decoded his own life. He was playing by the rules in a society that had changed them. Couldn't he have screamed as loudly as any black about the bigotry of Ossining? Hadn't he dreaded the war as much as those college kids taunting him at the Pentagon?... He was still "Timmy Two-Cent,' expecting pennies on the bottle, a fair reward for a fair effort. Welfare and affirmative action and the overlaying income taxes of county, state, and nation denied it to him. Lehrman's fusion of social conservatism and economic liberty promised its restoration." In 1994, Carey, by then a high-level election strategist, was vital to George Pataki's defeat of Mario Cuomo.

Carey and the other grandchildren of Freedman's families know that their forebears could never have bequeathed them even a glimmer of hope without the New Deal. Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich know it, too, which is why both have invoked FDR and professed, hypocritically, to want to redeem the best of his squandered legacy. But it has been squandered by its own Democratic legatees, as others have shown (I'm mentioned in this book's voluminous acknowledgements but had no direct role in its creation) and as Freedman shows in moving detail. Now, Republicans are squandering their edge, too--at least in the view of another of Freedman's subjects, who also becomes a GOP operative but then drops out of politics entirely.

Freedman's subjects bear a resemblance to Michael Lind's "national liberals" or "radical centrists"--the decent, wage-earning, often white-ethnic workers who feel squeezed by both the top and the bottom and find little voice or representation in any current party or movement. A broader assessment of how this abyss opened in our politics is beyond the scope of Freedman's book, but he has put the abyss front and center. Any serious political discussion must reckon with what he surveys.

Occasionally, Freedman dwells a bit too long on stories that don't bear the freight of the book's message--for example, his tale of one of the grandchildren's roles in an obscure state senator's re-election campaign in Queens. Sometimes, the book's shifting back and forth among the various family sagas makes you want to take a note or two to keep track of who's who.

But all the accounts are beautifully rendered and nicely paced; this is a book worth making time for, especially if you're all too busy practicing, thinking, or writing about Beltway politics--in which case you've been doing without a book like this for far too long.