1. From Speaking My Mind found at the Reagan Foundation website: http://www.reaganfoundation.org/tgcdetail.aspx?p=TG0923RRS&lm=reagan&args_a=cms&args_b=1&argsb=N&tx=1736.
2. According to James C. Humes’s The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, page 182.
3. According to a Vanity Fair/CBS News poll conducted in 2011.
4. From Reagan’s speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention.
5. Truman never attended “regular” college. He did, however, attend two years of law school—but he never graduated.
6. From Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
7. Amitai Etzioni’s January 8, 2015, piece in the Atlantic was titled “The Left’s Unpopular Populism.”
8. The crux of Etzioni’s piece is that “populism becomes much less popular—once Leftist themes join the mix.”
9. This was a May 9, 2006, article in National Review titled “Pick Up Your Own Crap.”
10. From a 2004 interview with the author on FrontPageMagazine.com.
11. While it is unclear whether Rousseau specifically influenced Paine, he profoundly influenced the thinking of the French Revolution’s leaders—most famously, Robespierre.
12. Years later, to the consternation of Burkean conservatives who understood the historical context and worldview implications, Ronald Reagan would quote this line. It should, however, be noted that the unique experience of American democracy—the entire experience of the New World, and later, the Wild West—imbued in Americans a greater sense of reinvention. European conservatives would be shocked by Reagan’s citation of Paine.
13. Yuval Levin responded to my inquiry, e-mailing this to me on May 18, 2015.
14. The French Revolution directly inspired Communism. For example, Marx and Engels studied the revolutionary French journalist and agitator François-Noël Babeuf, going so far as to acknowledge him in the Communist Manifesto.
15. Craig Shirley and Donald Devine in the Washington Post, April 4, 2010.
16. Ironically, largely first spearheaded by such disenchanted Democrats as former Democratic presidential nominees Al Smith and John W. Davis.
17. Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, Milton Friedman, et al.
18. In his book The Maker of a Movement, Lee Edwards notes that William F. Buckley, a devout Catholic, “adamantly opposed Communism all his life not just because it was a tyranny, but also because it was a heresy.”
19. Like, Chambers, Edmund Burke had similar fears, evidenced by the fact that he asked for an unmarked grave.
20. From Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, page 487.
21. Traditionalists such as the University of Chicago English professor Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences in 1948, and other conservatives like Berkeley sociologist Robert Nisbet’s (The Quest for Community) made great strides.
22. In recent years, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has argued that the Muslim world needs a Pope. One could probably make the same argument about the conservative movement. (Or, at least, a commissioner.)
23. The John Birch Society was named after the man thought to be the first casualty of the Cold War.
24. Penned by the equally brilliant conservative wunderkind M. Stanton Evans.
25. Actually, Morton Blackwell made this point in a handwritten note on an early version of this manuscript he was helping to fact-check.
26. Early in his career, Will served as National Review’s book editor.
27. The line was authored for Goldwater by Dr. Harry V. Jaffa.
28. It was also widely—and perhaps quite correctly—interpreted as Goldwater’s defense of the indefensible John Birch Society.
29. Disclosure: I serve on the board of trustees of the Blackwell Family Trust.
30. In the preface of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination.
31. I worked there for four years.
32. From an August 17, 2015, e-mail with Reagan biographer Craig Shirley.
33. From Deroy Murdoch’s National Review article, “Egghead Reagan,” published June 15, 2004.
34. A decade later, Reagan’s political team would attempt to do the exact opposite—persuade insiders and donors that Reagan was sophisticated enough to be president. The solution was to bring on respected Beltway strategist John Sears. As Michael Deaver told journalist and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, “We had a western inferiority complex.” The attempt failed miserably.
35. George P. Schultz in the foreword of “Reagan In His Own Hand.”
36. From the “Conversations with [Bill] Kristol” podcast, April 13, 2015.
37. Ibid, May 25, 2015.
38. This story, retold in Nofziger’s memoir Nofziger, wasn’t meant to make Reagan look bad. Nofziger, a rumpled old journalist turned operative, was a loyal aide. But the point is that Reagan and his image-makers downplayed the Hollywood aspect to Reagan, and played up his folksier image. Both were authentic parts of the man.
39. Via Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
40. Peggy Noonan’s June 7, 2004, Wall Street Journal column was titled “Thanks from a Grateful Country.”
41. Ironically, this paved the way for Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. He got the job because he was supposedly squeaky clean. But while I was writing this book, Hastert was indicted for attempting to conceal he was paying hush money to cover up alleged sexual misconduct.
42. Christine O’Donnell’s speech took place at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit.
43. Because the line “In Birmingham they love the governor…” is followed by “boo-hoo-hoo,” there is an argument that this line was meant to be sarcastic—that Birmingham really didn’t love Gov. George Wallace. That doesn’t seem to comport with a line later in the song about “where the skies are so blue and the governor’s true.” Regardless of where the band stood on Wallace, the line “Watergate does not bother me” suggests they were generally pushing back at the liberalism of the day.
44. According to NPR’s Ron Elving.
45. It was Virginia senator George Allen who famously said “macaca.” But that’s another story.
46. Some may date that to 1964, but LBJ still bested Goldwater six Southern states to five. Goldwater only looks so strong in Dixie because of LBJ walloping him 38–1 elsewhere.
47. Goldwater had voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, but opposed the 1964 bill based on Constitutional concerns over two provisions. Additionally, a larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
48. It’s worth noting that Democrats made a big shift toward civil rights in 1948, adopting a civil rights plank in the platform and Truman’s desegregation order, dividing the party and sparking Strom Thurmond’s National States Right Democrat (“Dixiecrat”) bid.
49. It’ll be interesting to see how people fleeing liberal states like California for Texas will impact Texas’s political landscape. One imagines that, eventually, they will reach a tipping point where the increased population produces negative consequences.
50. Southern politicians are still punching above their weight. Some, like former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint and Texas senator Ted Cruz are bona fide fiscal conservatives, but still embody many of the cultural stereotypes associated with Southern pols, including a penchant for lost causes.
51. There is a debate as to whether the Lone Star State should qualify as Southern or Western.
52. Troy’s actually understating the case. “W” and his adviser Karl Rove actually engaged in prodigiously reading “contests” during their White House years.
53. Bush, of course, lost the popular vote in 2000.
54. Steven Conn was being interviewed on the “New Books in History” podcast by Peter Aigner.
55. Wired magazine columnist Matt Ridley delivered a TED Talk titled “When Ideas Have Sex.” During a later TED Talk, author Steven Johnson referenced Ridley, noting that cities are places “where ideas could have sex.”
56. Secular humanists might well ponder how their increasing self-righteous jeremiads against the sins of Christians reads like the infamous (and unheard) prayer of the Pharisee: “O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterer…”
57. Morton Blackwell e-mailed me this on January 9, 2015.
58. From a May 14, 2013, article by Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today titled “Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: An Interview with Gregory Thornbury.”
59. The Scopes case remains interesting on numerous levels, being as it was a purposely choreographed test case to challenge the validity of Tennessee’s law—and also to provide publicity for the small town which hosted the trial. It was all very much “reality TV”—minus television.
60. When it comes to evolution, Bryan comes across looking poorly today. Score one for the intellectuals, right? Maybe. But it’s also worth noting that while Bryan opposed teaching biological evolution, he was also vehemently opposed to social Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest” philosophy that was embraced by an alarming number of intellectuals of the day. This pernicious philosophy led to eugenics and helped inspire some of the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Bryan deserves credit for standing against this at the time—even if he (and his intellectual adversaries) wrongly conflated Darwin’s theory of evolution with social Darwinism.
61. George W. Bush nominated his friend and adviser Harriet Miers, an evangelical, in 2005, but withdrew her nomination after conservatives voiced strong opposition.
62. From a July 18, 2012, interview with National Review’s Kathryn Lopez.
63. From page 130 of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
64. History is messy. Reagan was incredibly smart, but downplayed his intelligence. Both Bushes had Ivy League credentials, though George W. Bush downplayed them. George H. W. Bush, with his preppy image, certainly didn’t fit the populist profile—and his inability to play the populist card probably contributed to his reelection loss to Bill Clinton. Though Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, his “aw shucks” demeanor and his Arkansas “Bubba” upbringing prepared him to play both sides of the elitist-populist card like a Hot Springs, Arkansas, casino dealer.
65. A notable exception was Indiana’s former governor Mitch Daniels, but even he ostentatiously tooled around the state on a motorcycle.
66. This is an interesting reversal of traditional party roles. Traditional Republicans have opted for the “next in line” candidate: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, G. H. W. Bush, Dole, McCain, Romney; while Democrats have more often flopped down for outright novelty: Stephenson (at least the first time), JFK, McGovern, Carter, the saxophone-playing Bill Clinton, Obama.
67. In the twentieth century, Republicans elected three candidates who had never previously run for a single office: William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower. The first two proved to be unmitigated political disasters.
68. Hoffstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, page 160.
69. Ibid, page 159.
70. From page 170 of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
71. In 1947, Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, prematurely delivered a daughter named Christine, who died nine hours after birth. As such, Reagan technically fathered four children (and adopted another).
72. Of course, in 2012, Krohn was then a seventeen-year-old, parroting what he had heard for a short time.
73. “A recollection of D-Day,” written by Craig Shirley in the Washington Times on June 6, 2013.
74. From page 21 of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
75. In Joseph J. Ellis’s Founding Brothers, he suggests that Jefferson’s “version of the story” (page 48) was “essentially true” (page 50). Essentially, there were other conversations taking place at the same time, and Jefferson’s account “vastly oversimplifies the history that was happening at that propitious moment” (page 51).
76. Richardson may have also foreseen the messy passage of Obamacare, when in 1978 he wrote a little book too honestly entitled, What Makes You Think We Read the Bills?
77. Okay, Eric Hoffer didn’t actually say this! What he actually said in his 1967 book The Temper of Our Time was, “Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” Having said that, this pithier, bastardized misquote has been cited so many times that I’ve chosen to recycle it here—with this note of explanation.
78. My wife previously consulted for Mr. Cuccinelli, though not on his gubernatorial campaign.
79. In the past, I voluntarily appeared in a few of their “TroopAThon” webcasts, which were ostensibly online telethons to raise money and awareness for the troops.
80. In fairness, both sides do this. Unlike conservatives, the Left has plenty of A-list celebrities, so they don’t have to go scraping the bottom of the barrel for them—unless you count Clay Aiken, who did run for Congress as a Democrat recently. On the other hand, liberals have been known to lionize dictators, cop killers, and domestic terrorists, so there’s that.
81. In fairness, conservatives were partly reacting to what they deemed as unfair media favoritism toward Martin. Martin was seventeen when the incident occurred, but as Poynter noted, “The dominant photo of Martin shows him thirteen or fourteen years old.” Meanwhile, “[t]he most common photo of Zimmerman is a 2005 police mugshot.”
82. This is from a July 28, 2015, PolitiFact story titled “Donald Trump wrongly says the number of illegal immigrants is 30 million or higher” by Amy Sherman.
83. From a USA Today story in March of 2014, noting the thirty-fifth anniversary of cameras in the House of Representatives.
84. From the “Conversations with [Bill] Kristol” podcast, which aired on June 30, 2014.
85. From David Drucker’s Washington Examiner column, “Mick Mulvaney: Republicans Need to Appeal to Hispanics,” on May 9, 2015.
86. From Philip Klein’s November 6, 2012, column in the Washington Examiner titled “Romney Wins White Vote by Same Margin as Reagan Did in 1980 Landslide.”
87. Via the University of Connecticut’s Roper Center, this based on exit polling conducted by CBS News and the New York Times, with a “[s]ample of 15,201 voters as they left voting booths on Election Day, November 4, 1980.”
88. The Cook Political Report’s “Mapping the 2016 Electorate: Demographics Don’t Guarantee a Democratic White House,” published by David Wasserman on June 19, 2015.
89. Whit Ayres’s Wall Street Journal column, “A Daunting Demographic Challenge for the GOP in 2016,” March 4, 2015.
90. According to the survey by the Asian American Justice Center, Asian & Pacific Islander American Vote and the National Asian American Survey.
91. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center report titled “The Rise of Asian Americans.”
92. Via Dan Balz’s February 28, 2015, Washington Post column titled “For 2016, Candidates Count, But Don’t Ignore Fundamentals.” Balz’s statistics were culled from a study produced by the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, called “States of Change.”
93. Via ABC News’ “Put a Ring on It: Obama Wins Women, but Not the Married Kind,” published April 3, 2012, by Matt Negrin.
94. The “States of Change” study produced by the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, published February 24, 2015.
95. Tampa Bay Times PunditFact: “Republican presidential nominee hasn’t won over women since 1988, says progressive pundit,” August 21, 2015.
96. “25 Interesting Facts about the 2012 Elections,” written by Jennifer Duffy in The Cook Political Report on December 20, 2012.
97. According to James Gimpel, a University of Maryland political scientist, cited in the Reuters article: “In US Cities, Republicans Are Looking for a Few Good Losers for 2016.”
98. “The GOP Is Dying Off. Literally,” published by Daniel J. McGraw in Politico magazine on May 17, 2015.
99. Reince Preibus’s comments came at a breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor on November 7, 2014.
100. Ben Domenech’s column “Are Republicans for Freedom or White Identity Politics?” at The Federalist, August 21, 2015.
101. From Reason.com’s “Millennials Tell Us What Their Political Ideology Means to Them,” by Emily Ekins on July 16, 2014. Findings are based on the Reason-Rupe public opinion poll of millennials conducted in February of 2014.
102. A Washington Post column “Donald Trump and the Anger of Conservatives,” written by Ruth Marcus, July 21, 2015.
103. From Ronald Brownstein’s February 11, 2015, piece in National Journal, titled: “The States That Will Pick the President: the Reach States.” This was based on historical data and future projections by the States of Change project.
104. According to the Houston Chronicle’s Kevin Diaz, whose column “Texas Latino Vote Splits” was published November 4, 2014.
105. Fred Barnes’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Avoiding the Trump Trap on Immigration,” from July 20, 2015.
106. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. uses the thermostat-versus-thermometer analogy in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
107. Or might we say the supposed gap? Consider that Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham were not merely religious. They were all priests.
108. This was the “fireside chat” that took place during the New Canaan Society’s 2012 Washington Weekend.
109. From a 2012 discussion I had with Baylor professor Barry Hankins. Just as the death of antebellum statesmen and compromisers like Webster, Clay, and Calhoun directly preceded the Civil War, the 1921 deaths of three prominent theologians who were open to evolution—B. B. Warfield, George Frederick Wright, and A. H. Strong—seem to have ushered in the culture war over evolution. For example, in David N. Livingstone and Mark A. Noll’s “B. B. Warfield (1851–1921): A Biblical Inerrantist as Evolutionist” it is noted that “Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary, the theologian who more than any other defined modern biblical inerrancy, was throughout his life open to the possibility of evolution and at some points an advocate of the theory.” http://www.jstor.org/stable/236917?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.
110. Science vs. faith? Again, it was the Belgian priest, Father Georges Lemaître, who developed that “big bang” theory.
111. It might be noted that Kunstler resides in Saratoga Springs, New York, a quite workable example of the New Urbanism—and, perhaps surprisingly, a city governed quite often by Republicans.
112. This is based on a dissertation by social geographer Erika Sandow at Umeå University.
113. This is from the Scandinavian Journal of Economics 110(2), 339–366, 2008. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9442.2008.00542.x. “Stress that Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.”
114. From Conn Carroll’s Washington Examiner column titled “DeMint vs. Rubio: The Heritage Foundation goes all in against amnesty.”
115. Note: I have attended and spoken at several Club for Growth meetings in Palm Beach, Florida, as a guest of the Club.
116. From an April 14, 2015, interview with ChristianPost.com.
117. I have attended two such meetings in Miami.