????On this point, Frank riffs entertainingly on right-wing TV icon Glenn Beck. Besides detailing Beck's famous on-screen hysterics, Frank takes time to deconstruct Beck's fictional bestseller The Overton Window, in which a progressive PR flak falls for a conservative girl. The novel includes references to government-run internment camps that some conservatives feared the new Obama administration was constructing in 2009.

????In a non-fiction afterward, Beck tells readers that a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had actually proposed the idea. He neglects to mention that the FEMA director in question was a close friend of an advisor to Ronald Reagan, and that the emergency scheme was proposed as a way of dealing with antiwar protesters.

????Frank's strength as an author has been dissecting right-wing political tactics from a liberal perspective. In his 2004 best seller, What's the Matter with Kansas, he described how Republican strategists persuaded blue-collar Americans to vote against their own economic interests using social rallying cries like abortion and affirmation action.

????Frank's analysis of the Tea Party is less successful. He rails, with no clear point, about the moneyed interests at Tea Party rallies. He also overwhelms the reader with details of the movement's commercial efforts, citing a $125 box of Tea Party cigars and a $40 (plus shipping) flag covered with the coiled rattlesnake emblem. But why is it wrong for a political movement to raise money by selling promotional products?

????Frank's strident rhetoric can be wearying, and so can his blind spots. There's scant reference to the liberal reaction to the Tea Party's populism. He dates himself by ignoring the Occupy Wall Street movement and by writing obsessively about Glenn Beck, who stepped down from his Fox News post more than a year ago.

????In essence, Frank expected a new New Deal to emerge after the financial crisis and was unhappy when it failed to emerge. His book will delight other disappointed liberals. But it's also a road map for everyone who wonders, while watching the hodgepodge of Republican presidential candidates: How the heck did all this happen?