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

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

And there was a general consensus among elites, it wasn’t just Reagan, that you had to break down the welfare state in order to maintain the profitability and competitiveness of American capital.

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.

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

The fifth began with Ronald Reagan and will end with someone whose name we don’t know yet, but he or she will likely be elected president in 2028.