In this trenchant survey of the last three decades, the historian Dan Carter focuses on the evolution of race as an issue in presidential politics. Drawing on his broad knowledge of recent political history, he traces the "counterrevolutionary" response to the civil rights movement since George Wallace's emergence on the national scene in 1963 and detects a gradual confluence of racial and economic conservatism in the coalition that reshaped American politics from the 1970s through the mid-1990s.

According to Carter, economic and social conservatives have denied any link between what neoconservatives have called the "new majoritarianism" and the politics of race, and Republicans have eschewed acknowledging Wallace as an influence, much less as a model.

But the fundamental differences between the coarse public rhetoric of the Alabama governor and the smoother arguments of the new conservatism, Carter maintains, have been more a matter of style than of substance: in Richard Nixon's subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial, avuncular attacks on affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers, the Wallace music played on.

The new rhetoric may lack Wallace's visceral edge, Carter asserts, but it reflects the same callous political exploitation - now professionally packaged and test-marketed - of the raw wounds of racial division in our country.