The emotional center of this book lies in its epilogue. Here the style of writing changes, it slows down and becomes less analytical and more impressionistic. The epilogue sketches a relationship that finishes the argument, although the relationship lies outside the book’s chronological scope: this was the admiration for Chambers felt by Ronald Reagan, who knew passages of Witness by heart and spoke frequently of Chambers’s influence upon his thinking, both before and after becoming president.The connection between Chambers and Reagan is not causal; there was no direct political influence (Chambers died in 1961); rather, the connection is intellectual and rhetorical, an angle of vision and a vocabulary that Chambers framed in his writing and Reagan eagerly assimilated, when piecing together his own notions of anti-communism and conservatism.This concordance between intellectual and presidential history is mirrored in a singular event, with which The Conservative Turn concludes. In 1962, John F. Kennedy invited Lionel Trilling and his wife to the White House. There they enjoyed an evening of Kennedy-esque glamour, a celebration of liberal anti-communism, with tribute paid to the gifts artists and intellectuals (like Trilling) had given to politicians.Put side by side, Kennedy’s acknowledgment of Trilling and Reagan’s of Chambers are meant to imply the staggered nature of their influence, the sense in which Trilling was someone whose time had come in 1962 and Chambers someone, though he was no longer alive, whose time would come in 1980. What distinguishes 1962 from 1980, for my book and for historical epoch it describes, is the ascendancy of the conservative movement, via the electoral successes of the Republican Party.I think of my book as an anti-polemic, and it may be important, in this respect, that the book was begun shortly after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, researched in the early years of the W. Bush presidency and finished before the election of Barack Obama.A popular paradigm for explaining American politics, in these years, was the red-blue electoral map of the United States, blue designating the urban coastal areas that tended Democrat and red the rural heartland that voted Republican. This paradigm corresponds directly to The Conservative Turn, as Trilling is an obvious forerunner to the blue constituency and Chambers an honorary red American, even if he owned a different kind of red in the 1930s.My aspiration was to be neither red nor blue in the conceptualization and writing of my book, to grant history an authority that does not derive from political passion and – remaining within this simplistic color scheme – to suggest that there is no red without blue and no blue without red. It is the rotating double helix of red and blue that deserves historical study, not the illusion that red and blue run on parallel, unchanging tracks or the more seductive illusion, common enough on both sides of the political spectrum, that the history of red and blue can, or should, be written as the history of good and evil.The significance of The Conservative Turn, beyond what readers may gain from its argument, is three-fold. It relates to contemporary America, to current divides between liberal and conservative, to current images of populist and elite, to current battles over the need for religion and the need for secularism and to current discussions of American power in the international arena. Its subject is not ancient history. To invert this first point somewhat, history’s salience betrays an extraordinary longevity of association: Trilling and Chambers were recognizably themselves in the 1920s; the Columbia curriculum and milieu of the early 1920s left a lasting imprint (their reverence for great books, for example, and their ambition to write great books that would influence the American polity); their relatively brief encounter with communism, in the 1930s, would echo all the way through the Cold War, from the McCarthy period, to Kennedy’s Camelot, to the rise of the neoconservative movement., Trilling and Chambers illustrate the complexity of political change and the degree to which political change is enmeshed in culture and ideas. Their movement from communism to anti-communism involved party politics and political philosophy, strategic considerations and ethical dilemmas, newspapers and novels. An alteration in the Soviet Politbureau could affect their views on political economy; a European novel or poem could inform their attitude toward party politics in America. This was the politics of intellectuals in the grand twentieth-century manner.When Trilling and Chambers transformed from communists into anti-communist they had to rethink everything. The books for which they are famous – Witness for Chambers and The Liberal Imagination for Trilling – are eloquent, vibrant documents that chronicle this rethinking and make it accessible to later generations.