"This Hephaestus at Yale"

"Kendall was a Trotskyist in the 1930s who went on to become a staunch conservative, embracing Senator Joseph McCarthy and advising Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. At Yale, where he taught political theory for a number of years, his mission was to topple liberal elites by creating a conservative vanguard. Kendall, you could say, was the original polarizer. A gifted political theorist and slashing orator, Kendall championed the fusion of conservatism with populism, contending that liberals possessed an 'instinctive dislike for the American way of life and for the basic political and social principles presupposed in it.' No one did more to forge the intellectual arsenal of the modern Right than Kendall."

At The National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn reviews Christopher H. Owen's Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall.