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Series Foreword Change is perennial within the American system of politics and government: the electoral calendar, the ebb and flow of presidential administrations, shifts along generational lines, and long-term patterns of partisan realignment—to name a few of the rhythms and cycles to be found in the political sphere. And so, one year’s innovative thinking can become the next year’s conventional wisdom, and then the following year’s stale orthodoxy. This book series, New Trends and Ideas in American Politics, focuses on the most important new currents that are shaping, and are shaped by, U.S. politics and government. The early 21st century is a particularly important time to focus on a proactive approach to the participatory processes, governmental institu- tions, socioeconomic forces, and global contexts that determine the con- duct of politics and the creation of public policy in the United States. The long demographic dominance of the Baby Boom generation has begun to recede as the Boomers age, even as society becomes ever more open and diverse along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. From the waning of the worship of “the market,” to the disasters of the Bush era, to the unprecedented presidential election of 2008, to The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and on to the steady emergence of a more multipolar and ever-less-certain global context, Americans are faced with new challenges that demand not simply new policies and pro- cedures but entirely new paradigms. At the same time, emerging vistas in biotechnology and information technology promise to reshape human society, the global ecological system, and even humankind itself. New Trends and Ideas in American Politics casts a wide net, with volumes in the series unified mostly by novel, sometimes even counterintuitive,