For more than a decade the air has been filled with assertions that American conservatism is in terminal disarray—exhausted, fractured, and no longer capable of governing. The spectacular populist insurgency of 2015–16 appears to many observers to mark the demise of an intellectual and political establishment that has outlived its time.

Is this true? Before we can properly assess conservatism’s present predicament, we first need to understand how the present came to be. I propose to do this through the lens of the intellectual history of American conservatism after the Second World War, when the conservative community as we know it took form.

Perhaps the most important fact to assimilate about modern American conservatism is that it is not, and has never been, monolithic. It is a coalition—a coalition built on ideas—with many points of origin and diverse tendencies that are not always easy to reconcile.

In 1945, at the close of World War II, no articulate, coordinated conservative intellectual force existed in the United States. There were, at most, scattered voices of protest, some of them profoundly pessimistic about the future of their country and convinced that they were an isolated Nockian Remnant on the wrong side of history. History, in fact, seemed to be what the Left was making. The Left—liberals, socialists, even Communists—appeared to be in complete control of the twentieth century.

Modern American conservatism is not, and has never been, monolithic.

In the beginning, in the aftermath