It used to be said that you could tell a lot about a leftist’s politics by asking them when they thought the Soviet Union went bad. Anarchists and social democrats said 1917, Trotskyists 1928, Maoists 1956, and if you were in the Communist Party (CP), the answer was never.

There’s a similar dynamic at work in left narratives about the Democratic Party. Did it go bad with Bill Clinton and the Third Way in the 1990s? Or with Carter’s embrace of austerity? Or, as some more conspiratorially inclined parts of the left have argued, when JFK was assassinated? Or has the party never been anything more than “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party”? Where you draw the line says a good deal about your politics.

John Nichols’s new book, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, draws the line very early indeed, with the removal of Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket in 1944. The book is written explicitly as an intervention into current debates over the future of the party, and its argument that for most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was degenerating, is reflective of the radicalism of one pole of that debate.