“The point of politics is policy,” Ezra Klein explained in the happier days of spring 2014. The statement could be a credo for the Beltway’s wonk class—the congressional staffers, anonymous bureaucrats, and think-tank fellows whose careers rest on the belief that all the histrionics of campaigning and the hyperventilating of cable news are just a freak show that distracts from the real work of governing. Spin might sustain a political movement for an election, but eventually voters will want to see results, and the technocrats will have their day.

Underpinning this argument is the conviction that, as Barack Obama put it, the government has a responsibility to “get stuff done.” From that simple premise follow the many issues that consume political debate today: foreign policy, economic policy, immigration, health care, education, environmental policy, and on and on. However disparate the subjects under consideration, once they have been elevated to the realm of policy, a set of assumptions clicks into place. A policy is a commitment to use government power to achieve a specific goal. Policy needs policymakers, trusted experts with the discretion to carry out the tasks they have been assigned. The policymaker’s work is never done: foreign affairs, the economy, and all the rest are issues to be managed, not problems that can be resolved once and for all. Think of Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve, constantly monitoring the economy’s performance to ensure that it is growing at a sustainable rate.

At its best, the arrangement Obama described promises to bring democratic accountability to the rule of experts. Politicians set the goals, technocrats figure out how to achieve them, and on Election Day voters decide whether the two have delivered on their promises. This way of thinking is so entrenched that it’s all but impossible to imagine an alternative. Of course the point of politics is policy. What else could it be?

Except it hasn’t always been this way. The notion that a government’s chief obligation is getting stuff done is a fairly recent arrival on the historical scene. Not until the twentieth century did it attain the commonsensical status it enjoys today. As Antonin Scalia observed with characteristic snark, the Constitution “contains no whatever-it-takes-to-solve-a-national-problem power.” Policy arose in fits and starts over centuries, and the legacy of that jagged evolution is still with us. Today, policymaking has taken over a government that is nonetheless bound by the Constitution; politicians promise to swoop in and fix whatever has gone wrong, while working in a system that is designed to curb the impulse to intervene. That tension has helped bring us to our current impasse, where Americans ask more than ever from a government they increasingly distrust.

Understanding how we arrived at this juncture is the task that political scientists Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek have set for themselves in The Policy State. Completed at the onset of the Trump administration, it is a slender volume that draws upon their decades of research on the making and remaking of American political institutions. The book is also a sterling example of political science at its best: analytically rigorous, historically informed, and targeted at questions of undeniable contemporary significance. In the measured tones of senior academics, Orren and Skowronek uncover a transformation that revolutionized American politics and now threatens to tear it apart.