In 1985, President Ronald Reagan addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. It had been a very good five years for Republicans, starting with his own election in 1980 and, for the first time in 28 years, a Republican Senate.

He began by thanking the various groups in the room: the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, National Review, and Human Events. “When you work in the White House, you don’t get to see your old friends as much as you’d like,” he playfully said.

And then, he delivered a line that would become famous: “And I always see the CPAC speech as my opportunity to dance with the one that brung ya.”

It was an important acknowledgment that conservatives had worked hard to wrest decades of control away from Democrats to become a mainstream party. “We are where we are because we’re winning the contest of ideas,” he said.

Reagan knew how he’d become president — it wasn’t because he was a kind of messianic figure who’d been ordained to rule over the fawning masses. It was because conservatives, who’d spent a century in the political “wilderness,” had slowly and arduously built a movement of ideas and........

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