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Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare argues that the radical transformation of American culture that took place in the 1960s brought today's underclass-overwhelmingly urban, dismayingly minority-into existence. Lifestyle experimentation among the white middle class produced often catastrophic changes in attitudes toward marriage and parenting, the work ethic and dependency in those at the bottom of the social ladder and closed down their exits to the middle class. Texas Governor George W. Bush's presidential campaign recently highlighted the continuing importance of The Dream and the Nightmare when Bush strategist Karl Rove cited this book as a road map to the governor's philosophy of "compassionate conservatism.

"To read Magnet is to realize that the conservative critique of contemporary America is the more-- indeed the only-- radical critique just now.”
– George F. Will

“The book of the decade…the most insightful analysis of what has gone wrong in America during the past thirty years I’ve seen.”
– Mona Charen, syndicated columnist

“It is rare for a single short book to case such penetrating light on the world in which we live that it instantly becomes an indispensable guide to the outstanding question of the day…The Dream and the Nightmare is a work of this extraordinary kind.”
– Hilton Kramer, The New Criterion

Myron Magnet

Myron Magnet (born 1944) was the editor of City Journal from 1994 through 2007 and is now the magazine's Editor-at-Large.

Myron Magnet graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1962. He holds bachelor's degrees from both Columbia University (1966) and the University of Cambridge, as well an M.A. from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught at Columbia University and at Middlebury College.

He served as editor of City Journal from 1994 to 2007, and he still serves as its editor-at-large. He has also served as a member of the Board of Editors at Fortune Magazine, a publication for which he also wrote numerous articles after joining its staff in 1980, in addition to publishing essays or op-eds in Commentary, The Washington Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among other publications.

He is the author of several books, and is well known for writing The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, which President George W. Bush has cited as a book that had a profound influence on his approach to public policy. The central premise of the book is that the dramatic cultural transformation that the United States experienced during the 1960s unintentionally created a vast underclass whose societal maladies we are still being forced to address.

In November, 2008, President Bush awarded Magnet the National Humanities Medal "for scholarship and visionary influence in renewing our national culture of compassion. He has combined literary and cultural history with a profound understanding of contemporary urban life to examine new ways of relieving poverty and renewing civic institutions."