Defeat does strange things to a political coalition. It can send a political party out into the wilderness for generations, or it can lead to fierce internecine fighting that destroys a political movement altogether. Sometimes it can lead to a resurgence and a return to power that no one could have predicted.

Decades of working in the margins of American politics brought the conservative movement to a head with the Reagan coalition and Reagan’s stunning defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980. Reagan’s big tent GOP was famously described as the Three-Legged Stool of conservatism: social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and defense conservatism all wrapped up in one. This brought evangelicals, national security and anti-communist hawks, and fiscal libertarians and deficit hawks all under one broad umbrella, and allowed Reagan to siphon off a number of socially conservative blue collar Democrats, or Reagan Democrats as they’ve come to be known.