The general political polarization and specific rise of hard-line ideological views have, in the authors' opinion, created such social division that the nation's federal system as a whole finds itself essentially unable to govern.

[2] Mann and Ornstein specifically criticize the rightward shift of the Republican Party, highlighting the use of administrative and parliamentary tricks as a means of avoiding clear votes on certain issues.

The authors describe the party as "an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

[5][6] The Economist gave the book a mostly favorable review, saying that Mann and Ornstein had "devoted a good deal of thought to ways the system can be rescued and improved, to their great credit."

[2] The Hill journalist Juan Williams described the book as insightful and praised the authors, writing that the work "fillets the traditional media for perpetuating a principle of false equivalence in its coverage of the two parties,...masking the GOP's unalloyed march toward the fringes of the right wing.