The chronicle is a distinct literary form.  Completed each weekend during the first year of the second Bush administration, these essays try to capture the passions and interests, the tensions and dynamics as well as the everyday experience of American democracy in roughly 2000 words.  Each chronicle takes up one theme that emerged during the week and examines it from diverse perspectives.  Sometimes history serves to clarify the issues; at others, changing social structures serve that purpose; or yet again the issue that has emerged may take its meaning only from the broader perspective of political thought.  While some themes recur at a distance from one another, and others follow directly on their predecessor, there is no attempt to rewrite the chronicles in order to achieve some historical or sociological unified narrative.  The chronicle is neither a work of social science, nor political history and still less engaged criticism.  It is a sort of barometer of the times, rising and falling with moods that it cannot predict in advance (even though the author is concerned to point to tendencies, contradictions, blockages that he suggests will gain in importance as events move forward).
Written during a year (November 2004- November 2005) in which much of the world sees the United States struggling with its own worst impulses—if not captured by a reactionary, fundamentalist cabal intent on creating a new and unilateralist empire—these chronicles are not (and given their nature, cannot be) overtly partisan.  The collected chronicles attempt, rather, to expand the notion of politics to concern the multi-facetted experience of a year in which both opposition and government had to seek new forms of legitimation to justify their political choices. In writing this episodic biography of a character named “American Democracy,” a complex personality whose inner being exists only in its distinct manifestations, it was necessary to reflect not only on the issues dominating the headlines but also the questions that lie behind them, as well as the anecdotes and incidents that can often serve to illuminate them.  This diversity is reflected in the Table of Contents, which follows the weekly chronology out of which the texts emerged rather than attempting to regroup the texts by theme or subject matter.