The Conservative Turn began, alas, as a dissertation, which is one reason why it’s based on archival research. I had entered graduate school with an interest in the Russian Revolution and its resonance in American intellectual life. Gradually, I came to feel that one side of the story had already been written, and this was the record of American enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment, from 1917 through to the 1940s. Furthermore, this enthusiasm died out over time, and there is little formal connection between pro-Soviet sentiment and American politics, only the sectarian history of marginal far-left parties. And so I turned to the other side of the story, to the bottomless subject of American anti-communism. Not only was this an impulse that cut across American society – from Catholics to Jews, from rich to poor – it was one that helped to create a conservative movement.The conservative movement would grow into a crucial strand of modern American politics, first with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and then, emphatically, with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Anti-communism had stimulated a certain kind of conservatism in America, receptive to religion, laissez-faire in economic orientation and populist in spirit: the patron saint of this movement was Ronald Reagan. My widest-angle lens was set on this movement, which is attracting ever more scholarly attention but is still an under-studied phenomenon (especially by comparison with the American Left).Additionally, American conservatism or modern American conservatism is less self-evident in definition and structure than American liberalism, which flows from the American Revolution, continuing through the nineteenth century and, with some modifications, into the twenty-first. Defining conservatism is itself a difficult task. What is American conservatism? And what is modern American conservatism? I have not exhausted these questions with my book, and I doubt that they will soon be exhausted by other scholars.I settled on Trilling and Chambers because they imposed a human element on a subject that can quickly devolve into abstraction and because they lived through similar historical phases, without thinking the same thoughts or arriving at the same conclusions. I prefer the history of choice to the history of inevitability. I therefore devoted much attention to Trilling’s political choices, his chosen liberalism, and to Chambers’s chosen conservatism. Several welcome ironies emerged: Trilling the liberal was at home with the anti-communist status quo of the 1950s, with the age of Eisenhower, and largely horrified by the radical Sixties, while Chambers the conservative believed that conservatism and modern America could never be decently combined, that the more modern America would become, the more a pious traditional agrarian conservatism would fade away. It was as if, for him, the only adequate culture would have to be a counter-culture. Chambers enjoyed Allen Ginsberg’s poetry – Ginsberg having been a rebellious student of Trilling’s – and Chambers anticipated the Sixties counter-culture by “dropping out” and living with his family on a farm in Maryland, an early refugee from the melancholy of modern, suburban, hi-tech America. Trilling gladly lived his adult life in Manhattan, very much a New York intellectual.If the main abstraction in The Conservative Turn is conservatism, the immediate experience of Trilling and Chambers was a struggle with such abstractions, personal, political and intellectual. Their history – and the intellectual history of their period – is the history of this struggle.In addition, Chambers is a necessary figure for understanding twentieth-century U.S. history and not because his personal story is at all representative. As a communist, he was a spy for the Soviet Union; as an anti-communist, he participated in a high-profile court case, which came to be known as the Hiss case, a battle of words between Chambers and Alger Hiss, a mid-level Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s.Chambers matters for his role in this case, and the case matters for its role in American history. The case fostered the precipitous rise of Richard Nixon, who championed Chambers and pursued Hiss; it is a recognizable point on the evolution of the postwar Republican Party; and it is inseparable from the start of the domestic Cold War in America. For conservatives generally, the Hiss case acquired great meaning, suggesting a connection between sophisticated Democrats, like Hiss, and treason—and a parallel connection between salt-of-the-earth common Americans and old-fashioned political virtue. Chambers would solidify the symbolic meaning of the Hiss case, for conservatives, in Witness, his 1952 bestseller, an early manifesto of the conservative movement.By pairing Chambers with Trilling, I have emphasized Chambers’s intellectual stature – The Conservative Turn’s most arresting claim. Trilling’s is an obviously relevant voice to mid-century America, one of the era’s archetypal intellectuals, easily recognizable as such at the time and since. Chambers has often been understood as a political curiosity or oddity, fascinating for the non-marginal weirdness of his story and for his battle-to-the-death with Hiss. For many, he was a calculating spinner of lies, a professional informer and the cipher of Richard Nixon and the FBI in their collective scheming to undo the American Left. In The Conservative Turn, I have placed Chambers in an altogether different context, in the history of ideas, where it is easy enough to mingle conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat, modern and anti-modern, New York urbanity and farm-bred agrarian romanticism.In The Conservative Turn, Chambers is neither hero nor villain; and the same is true for Trilling.