Sublime

Reagan was trying to make a point, that words are hollow, but deeds and values are deep.

Reagan cared more about the functions of self-government than his most ideological supporters. He knew how to persuade and when to compromise. But after he was gone, and the Soviet Union not long after him, Free America lost the narrative thread. Without Reagan’s smile and the Cold War’s clarity, its vision grew darker and more extreme. Its spirit

The oldest conflict in American politics is the one between individualism and centralism. Reagan changed the terms by inverting them: the descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, with their desire for independence, became sturdy car-company executives and investment bankers yearning to breathe free of big government. The heirs of Hamilton’s arist

Roosevelt and Reagan didn’t found their eras. The era was in crisis, and that crisis could not be solved in conventional ways. A break with the past was essential, and Roosevelt and Reagan presided over what was necessary.

The Reagan cycle solved the problem of capital shortage bequeathed to it by the Roosevelt cycle by shifting the tax structure. Reducing taxes on the upper, investor class freed up money for investment and also made taking the risk of investing more attractive.

Incumbents and courthouse ties stretched out through the next political generation a wholesale partisan realignment of Southern white voters, marked from the Goldwater-Johnson divide of 1964. By 1996, when Charles “Chip” Pickering succeeded Montgomery, Southern Republicans not only supplanted the “solid” Democrats of the segregation era but also su

These Christian foot soldiers of the revolution were not at all libertarians—they wanted morality brought into every corner of public life—but the narrative of Free America gave them a common enemy. Reagan attached their agenda to the program of the business class, but the Christians always brought up the rear and never achieved their goals, becaus