The Rise and Fall of Conservatism in Michigan
/Thirty years ago, almost to the day, I spoke at Hillsdale College, the bastion of conservative academic thought nestled in the woods and hills of southern Michigan. My speech took place one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, at what we can say with hindsight was the high noon of the conservative era in American history. As the English conservative William Wordsworth put it when he was a young and enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”
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