The book not only outlines events and developments but argues that the tensions and stresses between different ideas, interests and institutions were pivotal in structuring the character of political outcomes. Thus, within the US, the forms of policy pursued by Republicans and their efforts to block President Obama's agenda were for the most part shaped by the tensions between the Tea Party movement and established Republican Party elites. In Britain, the stresses between the Cameron government's civic conservatism and more traditionalist Conservative interests opened the way for populist challenges and enabled the United Kingdom Independence Party to gain much more of a political foothold. At the same time, they opened a way for the Conservative leadership to reframe its commitment to fiscal retrenchment and austerity.

When the Conservatives took office in 2010, the public expenditure cuts were portrayed as a necessary response to earlier overspending. Increasingly, however, retrenchment was represented as a way of securing a permanently 'leaner' state. The book assesses the character of the shift in thinking as well as the viability of efforts to shrink the state and the parallel attempts in the US to cut federal government spending through mechanisms such as the budget sequester. It suggests that although the right may succeed in reducing the size and scale of state social provision, the state is likely to reassert itself in the longer-term.