The post-war American right has been led by a Boomer intellectual elite in thrall to laissez-faire dogmatism. A new, aggressively populist generation of conservatives will have to recapture the heart of the common man.

In August 1945, an apocalyptic weapon turned two Japanese cities and 200,000 of their inhabitants to dust in a display of force so awesome it brought the world’s deadliest war to a screeching halt. Germany had surrendered three months earlier; now Japan, long wearied, was utterly subjugated. The detonation of the atom bombs marked a transition every bit as dramatic as the end of the reign of the dinosaurs, or the onset of an ice age: this time, a movement from the age of man to the age of the machine.

If 1945 marks the moment man’s mastery of nature slipped beyond his control, it also marks the dawn of a new age for America. All the powers of the world had been brought to their knees. The whole continent of Europe was a ruin. China and Russia, the two great civilizations of the East, had both suffered death tolls many times as high as any other nation. The physical infrastructure, the prime-age workforce, and the national spirit of all but one developed country across the globe were utterly devastated.

America was not just the moral hero of humanity’s darkest hour. She was not just the watchful guardian of a new international order. She was, at the end of 1945, humanity’s first true superpower: an economic dynamo whose potential, surrounded by vanquished enemies and friends, knew no bounds.