Sublime

They challenged the widely accepted post–World War II consensus that an activist government was a force for public good.

Railroads were knitting that continent together; its gold and silver and iron ore was being hauled out of the earth in the West, its black gold was being pumped out of the earth in Pennsylvania and Texas—America was in the midst of a gigantic industrial expansion; by the end of the century, from a child among nations of the earth it had become a

Ortega held the process to be the driving force of history. The “reciprocal action between the masses and select minorities,” he wrote, “is the fundamental fact of every society and the agent of its evolution for good or evil.” Ortega’s masses we now call the public. By “select minorities” he meant the admirable few: elites who, at their best,

But the idea that government had the definite responsibility—a “social duty”—to use the resources of the state to prevent distress and to promote the general welfare was first suggested at that time.

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of eleven original members of the John Birch Society, the archconservative group best known for spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories about secret Communist plots to subvert America.

Years later Milton Friedman would recount a story about the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, held in 1947. The group was meant to bring together what Europeans would call liberal intellectuals and what Americans would describe as libertarians. As Friedman recalled, “We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should

he was their natural heir and the unintended consequence of the extraordinary political movement they had underwritten since the 1970s.