“The number one rule of political fundraising,” Evan Barker writes in the first line of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, “is to never, ever, under any circumstances, speak about it publicly.” Then she spends 288 pages talking about it, and it’s a wonderful thing that she does.

Barker’s insider account of her time deep in the bowels of the Democratic Party often reads like The Jungle of Democratic fundraising: Upton Sinclair showed readers how the sausage got made, and Barker shows how the candidates do. By the end, it’s clear that the Democrats are a glorified fundraising organization with an electoral department attached, one that absorbs idealism, monetizes it, and then disciplines anyone who threatens its arrangements, often with the cynical deployment of identity politics.

Some of the book’s most compelling sections are autobiography. At times, it’s like Hillbilly Elegy but one that wears a blue lanyard. Like J. D. Vance, Barker is a striver from the hollowed-out middle of the country. In her case, that’s Missouri, where her mother and grandmother live on Social Security checks and the towns feel, as she puts it, “stripped for parts and left behind.” At seventeen, she was cutting class to intern for Barack Obama in Kansas City, running phone banks for volunteers three times her age.