ROGER KIMBALL: Marco Rubio Reasserts the Moral Legitimacy of American Power.

Reagan lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm election. But even in the midst of that gloomy situation, the embers of renewal began to glow. As it happens, 1982 was the year that the Federalist Society was founded. Formed by a handful of conservative jurists, including Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, the organization was dedicated to reshaping the legal profession by “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty, and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning.” Nineteen-eighty-two was also the year that Reagan’s economic policies began to bear fruit, sparking what would become the greatest generation of wealth in history. The electorate took notice. In 1984, Reagan resoundingly won his second term. He took 49 states to Walter Mondale’s one (plus the District of Columbia), 525 electoral votes to 13. As Rubio stressed, one of those lessons of that turnaround is that “politics requires more than simply winning elections.” Why? “[B]ecause the government is not the only source of political power.”

This is a key point.

Power also lives in the universities. Power lives in the press. Power lives in the whole expanse of civil society, all of the institutions that define and shape our understanding of ourselves as a nation and as a people. Every society . . . has an elite, has a ruling class. And in ours, that class resides not just in the White House, not just in Congress or the courts; it also resides in academia, in powerful nonprofits, and in nongovernment organizations. It resides in corporate boardrooms and C-suites and think tanks and journals, in foundations and in mass media, stretching across the commanding heights of business and education and culture.

One of Rubio’s greatest intellectual strengths follows from his understanding of the real, as distinct from the utopian or politically correct, metabolism of power: what it is and what legitimates it.

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