On Nov. 3, 1964, Barry Goldwater suffered a landslide defeat. It followed a presidential campaign in which the notorious “Daisy commercial” showed an adorable little girl, seconds before she is vaporized by a nuclear explosion, while Lyndon Johnson intoned, “We must either love each other, or we must die.” On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached. One reason the world avoided global annihilation despite not establishing universal love is that, in the intervening 25 years and 6 days, Ronald Reagan became a politician, a governor, Goldwater’s successor as the leader of the conservative movement, and a two-term president.

With …