In 1990’s classic The Matrix, the lead character realizes that the world he thought he knew was false, and that the truth about his society was being hidden by a hostile power.  Many conservatives have a similarly Matrix-like moment in their intellectual development, that moment when they realize that much of what they had been taught to believe by progressive elites is simply not true.

In Conservative Heroes: Fourteen Leaders Who Shaped America, from Jefferson to Reagan, Garland Tucker attempts an act of recovery and an exit from the liberal matrix.  He traces a genealogy of conservative heroes who embody a counter-tradition to the dominant progressive narrative. This book, though different in tone, has strong echoes of Russell Kirk’s 1953 tome The Conservative Mind. Kirk’s book too was really a string of loosely connected biographies rather than a formal history of ideas. Conservatism, was not, Kirk insisted, primarily a set of abstractions but was rather a habit of mind. And most learn that habit best from examples, from which general principles can be discerned for both individual and social behavior. Tucker invokes Kirk, among others, to remind us that the progressive narrative deliberately obscures a rich history, in favor of presidential demagogues and speech codes imposed by ideological enforcers.