Lee Edwards was the foremost historian of the modern American conservative movement and also one of its most active participants. He was both present at creation and a careful keeper of the flame for a lifetime after the fact.
Edwards lived the trajectory of the conservative movement just as he chronicled it, from landslide defeat with Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964 to a pair of landslide victories under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s followed by decades of trying to turn the Reaganite project into a durable philosophy of governance. Goldwater, Edwards wrote, “laid the foundation for a political revolution and led a generation of conservatives to understand that theirs was a winning as well as a just cause.”
A scholar at the Heritage Foundation, founding chairman of the Victims of Communism Foundation, and author of more than a dozen books, Edwards was a press aide to the Goldwater presidential campaign. He helped found Young Americans for Freedom and was an editor of its magazine, the New Guard. While the Right was challenging a liberal political consensus that began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and faltered as Lyndon B. Johnson built the Great Society, much of the early fight took place within the Republican Party.
Born in Chicago in 1932, Edwards was the son of a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, then a rare source of opposition to FDR’s policies and political coalition in a Democratic-dominated era. But when the younger Edwards was in his 20s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin emerged as a populist anticommunist crusader, and William F. Buckley Jr. authored his first books and founded National Review. Edwards was among the 90 young conservatives present at Buckley’s home in 1960 for the drafting of the Sharon Statement, a brief document that would summarize the principles that animated the movement from at least Goldwater to Reagan.
It was really in Edwards’s books about conservatism’s primary figures and institutions that he stood out from the crowd influenced by Buckley, Frank Meyer, and M. Stanton Evans. Even liberal critics of his work acknowledged that 1995’s Goldwater: The Man Who Made A Revolution was filled with unique insights and original information. Ronald Reagan: A Political Biography was originally published in 1967, as the Hollywood actor turned arch-Goldwaterite embarked on his transformative political career. The mild-mannered Edwards, who died late last year in Arlington, Virginia, at the age of 92, wrote histories, polemics, and treatises aimed at encouraging young activists.
As Edwards painstakingly chronicled the lives and work of conservatism’s leading lights, he was also devoted to the causes that defined the movement: the fight against communism generally and the Soviet empire specifically, the defense of the free economy and constitutionally limited government, and the preservation of traditional values under sustained progressive assault.
Reagan turned the tide of the Cold War, bringing to fruition his slogan for dealing with the Soviet Union: “We win, they lose.” While an oversimplification of the bold diplomacy that accompanied Reagan’s rebuilding of a robust national defense, the Berlin Wall would soon fall and the USSR would cease to exist.
Another Reagan-era conservative success story was the eradication of stagnation. Both inflation and unemployment were halved, confounding Keynesian economists. Marginal tax rates were slashed, with the top rate cut from 70% to 28%. The number of tax brackets went from 14 to just two, the closest thing to a flat tax we have seen in modern times. The United States added the equivalent of Japan’s whole economy to its GDP from 1983 to 1989, the bulk of what the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Bartley would call “the seven fat years.”
Other conservative priorities were more challenging. The size and scope of the federal government remained out of wack with the Constitution’s enumerated powers. It took until 1997 for Republicans to achieve a balanced budget, and only then in partnership with a Democratic president. Republicans would then squander it in the next Congress and administration, with $1 trillion deficits now the norm.
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It took nearly 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade. While this was the biggest victory for social conservatives and the conservative legal movement alike, Republican politicians were ill-prepared, and Democrats used abortion to cling to power in the 2022 midterm elections. Goldwater and Reagan were the only true movement conservatives to win the GOP presidential nomination, though many Republican running mates could be so described.
Edwards would nevertheless justifiably consider his life’s work a success unimaginable to many of his contemporaries. He left behind not just a history for his would-be successors to study, but also a blueprint for them to try.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.