Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism

The Heritage Foundation
January 1, 2010
by George Nash

In the American election year of 2008, as Barack Obama glided unexpectedly toward the White House, a new political narrative took hold among the chattering classes: The conservative era, the Age of Reagan, was said to be ending. According to liberal writers like E. J. Dionne, the once-mighty conservative intellectual and political movement that had dominated the nation's debates since the late 1970s had fallen into moribundity and disarray.