The following passage caught my eye, as I scanned Duke grad Lee Edwards‘ 1999 book, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (Free Press).
He’s describing the fusionism that aimed to unite traditional conservatives and libertarians:
The core fundamental was “the freedom of the person, the central and primary end of political society.” The state had only three limited functions: national defense, the preservation of domestic order, and the administration of justice between citizens. The “achievement of virtue” was not a political question: indeed, it was not even the state’s business. Freedom, [National Review‘s Frank] Meyer argued, was the indispensable condition for the pursuit of virtue. Freedom was the ultimate political end; virtue was the ultimate end of man as man.
Students of North Carolina political history might also appreciate this later passage, describing Ronald Reagan’s attempts to rebound from primary losses to President Ford in 1976:
Reagan’s campaign chairman, Senator Paul Laxalt, left the gloomy Washington headquarters and flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, expecting to find the candidate as despondent as his strategists. Instead, Laxalt found a determined, combative Reagan with “his back up because of all the demands that he get out” and “campaigning better than I ever saw him campaign before.”
Reagan abandoned John Sears’ “nice guy” strategy and, stung by Ford’s personal attacks on him as extremist and misinformed, went after the president hard. He focused on gut issues like the Panama Canal, detente, and deficit spending. With the guidance of Senator Jesse Helms and his astute campaign aide, Tom Ellis, Reagan campaigned twelve full days in North Carolina.
Conservative analyst M. Stanton Evans has described the March 23 primary in the Tarheel [sic] state as “the second most important primary in modern conservative politics,” the first being the epic Goldwater-Rockefeller California primary in 1964. If Reagan had failed in North Carolina, it would have been his sixth straight primary loss. In all likelihood, he would have been forced to withdraw from the race and head home to California and political obscurity.
Instead, Reagan won North Carolina by a solid 52 percent to 46 percent and took a majority of the delegates. He achieved a political resurrection largely of his own making and posed the most serious challenge to an incumbent Republican president since Theodore Roosevelt had taken on William Howard Taft sixty-four years earlier.
One other footnote on this book: it references JLF’s own Dr. Michael Sanera, quoting a report he co-edited.
