Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare illuminates how the radical transformation of American culture that began in the 1960s brought today's underclass -- overwhelmingly urban and minority -- into existence. Lifestyle experimentation among the white middle class sent a destructive message to those at the bottom of the social ladder, precipitating disastrous changes in attitudes toward work and family, law and civility, and thereby closing the routes upward.

Magnet contends that the way to lift the underclass out of poverty is to return to values honoring hard work, individual responsibility, freedom under the rule of law, the importance of community, and equal individual rights rather than group rights.

Magnet's analysis of social decay has been cited as an inspiration for the "compassionate conservative." President Bush read the book before his first campaign for governor in 1994, and, when he finally met Magnet in 1998, he acknowledged his debt to this work. Karl Rove, Bush’s principal political adviser, cites it as a road map to the governor’s philosophy of “compassionate conservatism.”

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