The capital-p Progressives set in motion an ideological realignment that is today the central cleavage in American politics. Inherently intertwined with modernity, Progressivism would break from the past and remake American government. Progressives had a new method—a new way of thinking—to diagnose and improve American politics. Progressives relentlessly juxtaposed their new conception of the social world—their governing project—as flexible, modern, and evolving as set against a static, dogmatic, mechanical, a priori worldview and a fixed human nature. Thus, a constitutional ideology that allowed for experimentation in light of new social facts was needed. Progressives saw the dominant conceptions of American constitutionalism as pre-modern ways of understanding the social world. Their “living constitutionalism” had little patience for strict adherence to constitutional forms and mining the text for its “intent.” With these tenets, Progressives built the Liberal Establishment. In addition to building and staffing the administrative state, slowly taking over the Democratic Party and the knowledge producing institutions (universities and journalism), in the years from the New Deal to the liberal consensus Progressives increasingly dominated the mainline churches, Hollywood, the charitable foundations, and believed they had tamed the large corporate form. If the liberal consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s was just that, it is an underappreciated accomplishment. Conservatives, too, desired an ideological realignment. Obscured by conceptualizations of it as a three-corner stool consisting of economic, social, and anti-communist factions, modern American conservatism cannot be understood without reference to Progressivism. Conservatism’s rival governing project was grounded in their post-World War I response to the Progressives’ assault. Against Progressive inroads, the first generation of modern conservatives quickly developed a formalistic conception of the separation of powers to constitutionally cabin the administrative state, voting rights, and reinforce the importance of minoritarian constitutional rights vis-à-vis majoritarian democracy (among other principles). Spurred by Brown v. Board of Education, conservatives created their constitutional ideology: “originalism.” Thus, the archival record is clear: conservative governing elites and intellectuals—not merely the “grassroots”—were powered by racially regressive politics. Neither did the “Christian Right” burst onto the scene in 1970s. This conceptualization blurs the steady, deep religiosity of “secular” conservatives. Moreover, it was religious conservatives who first saw the antithetical nature of conservatism and liberalism and formed their own institutions prior to World War II. Because there was little need for “factions” to “fuse,” it was in the 1970s that conservatism took its contemporary form as the administrative state expanded under LBJ, Nixon, and Ford. Upon Ronald Reagan’s election, conservatives still believed they could roll back the administrative state. They quickly discovered the liberal state would not be so easily uprooted—Reagan’s would be a “transitional revolution.” Finally, in the 1990s conservative intellectuals—not the far right—began to, especially in reaction to cultural losses in the Supreme Court, downplay the importance of democratic norms. Other concerns were paramount. Thus, well before the Tea Party and Donald Trump the predicates were laid for a conservative state via a no holds barred politics.