New Year’s Day is a good time to take a long look backward with a cautious eye toward possible futures. My guide here is Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende’s 2012 book The Lost Majority, whose bold thesis was unduly neglected by political scientists spinning tales of a permanent New Deal Democratic majority.

Trende’s thesis instead was that Democrats’ big 1930s majorities were not enduring. Their 1940s presidential victories owed more to former President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartimes and former President Harry Truman’s Cold War leadership than to big-government domestic policies, which no Congress elected between 1938 and 1958 supported.