Reagan’s “conservatism” thus amounted to taking the foot off the gas of government growth, not slamming on the brakes — let alone throwing it into reverse. The administration also proudly championed immigration and free trade. It did so both as a spur to economic growth and as an expression of its commitment to openness and moral universalism. Reagan genuinely believed all human beings long for liberty — and that, once freed from the yoke of tyranny, they would choose to embrace democratic self-government and modestly regulated free-market capitalism as the best of all possible political and economic arrangements.

That made Reagan a liberal. Not a progressive, of course, and also not someone who explicitly embraced the significant changes to American life wrought by the counterculture of the 60s. Instead, Reagan championed bourgeois norms and restraints. (In his personal life, as the first divorced and remarried president in American history, the story was more complicated.) It’s also true that he welcomed into his electoral coalition the nascent religious right and even more extreme reactionary dissenters from mainstream politics and culture. But these groups were very much junior partners in that coalition. What dominated was an idealistic liberalism of the center-right.

This remained true, with some variation, through the Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations, even as elements within the party — especially in Congress after Republicans took control of the House in 1994 — began to express more strident views. But an intense grassroots craving for a more culturally populist and combative style of politics only really began to transform the party in an undeniably antiliberal direction once the Reaganite liberal John McCain tapped Sarah Palin, the little-known governor of Alaska, as his running mate in 2008.