Politics is boring, conferences are boring, and theory is boring. A conference about political theory, held in a windowless basement of a chain hotel, promises to be gnaw-off-my-own-foot, shoot-me-now boring. But the fifth National Conservatism Conference in early September was anything but boring. When politics change, as they are now, politics needs ideas, and both must confer if they are to touch reality. The life of the mind needs the body politic.

You may actually have a life, so you might have missed the political mind maps circulating on social media lately. They show the detached lobes of the American left-brain and right-brain and map their networks of political thought. The blue network is shrunken and dense like a walnut. Surrounded by empty white space, it is a mass of dead e

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