Conservatives with at least a basic grasp of the history of our movement know that the victory of 1980—when the former governor of California was first elected president, launching the Reagan Revolution—began in an unlikely place: the ashes of defeat. And not just any defeat, but a decidedly crushing one: the election of 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson.
Yet ISI-schooled conservatives can trace the triumph of the 1980s even further back. At least a decade earlier, in fact—to 1953, when three highly influential books were published: Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet’s Quest for Community, and Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind.
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