Conservatives got an inkling of how bad 2020 would be before the year even started. On Dec. 30, 2019, Gertrude Himmelfarb died. She was just the first of many conservative luminaries to die over the next 12 months — and it is worth remembering each one and what they contributed to conservatism and our country. As conservatism enters its next chapter, without a slew of great ideas or clarity regarding its future direction, learning lessons from these heroes of the past can potentially be a first step in discerning the way forward into the future. Let’s start with Himmelfarb, an eminent historian and also wife of the late Irving Kristol. She wrote scholarly and compelling works about anti-Semitism and the Victorian era that always had contemporary relevance. Even those who disliked her politics could not question her scholarship. As the New York Times acknowledged in its obituary of Himmelfarb, “she viewed the growing absence of footnotes in scholarly books as ‘a moral lapse.’” Owen Harries was another conservative who died in 2020. Harries was at the helm of the National Interest when it published the most famous article in its history, and one of the most famous articles in the history of any magazine, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “The End of History?” I was a young think tank researcher in Washington at the time, and it is hard to overstate how widely read and debated the...