Conservatives at the moment are evincing stratospheric levels of hubris. It is a nearly universal belief on the right that President Obama has exploded the deficit, voters have turned against him for this reason, and embraced the Republican vision of more limited government.

All these myths are usefully contained within Peggy Noonan's column today. Here's Noonan on Obama and the deficit:

Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush

By John Yoo

(Kaplan, 544 pp., $29.95)

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

By Garry Wills

(Penguin, 288 pp., $27.95)

I.

In December 2008, Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “If the president, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” Cheney’s answer included a reference to a military authority that President Bush did not exercise. “The President of the United States,” he said, “now for fifty years is followed at all times, twenty-four hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.” The vice president added that the president “could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen” without checking with Congress or the courts, and noted also that “he has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.” And then he shifted to the war on terrorism: “It’s unfortunate, but I think we’re perfectly appropriate to take the steps we have.”

In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the founding of National Review, the movement's first serious political journal. Ten years later, the right's next leader, Barry Goldwater, suffered one of the most lopsided losses in election history.

Today marks the fortieth birthday of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, one of the most important pieces of paper the United States has signed in the last half century--and one of the most popular. Even Bush officials, who went on a treaty-killing spree during their first year in office, made an exception for the NPT.

We're slamming Phyllis Schlafly for her role in the culture wars, but she was arguably more destructive during the 1950s, '60s and '70s--decades she spent facilitating Barry Goldwater's rise (authoring A Choice, Not An Echo), while agitating against arms control and "appeasement" of China and the Soviet Union.

As activists on the right gather this week in Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), TNR has dipped into our archives to bring you a look back at some of the forces that have shaped the GOP. Before Thomas Schaller wrote his famous tract Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South, TNR contributor Michael Lind wrote an impressive account of the Southernization of the Republican Party. Pegged to the Republicans' Contract with America and electoral landslide in 1994, Lind compiled an impressive, comprehensive history of the decline of northern, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicanism and the rise of a new crop of Southern GOP leaders. “Is there a way out of this?” asked Lind. “The construction of a national, political and social response to the Southern coup will require a long, and difficult, period of sustained effort. But it can only begin if Democrats--and those few principled Republicans who are left--actively contest the claim of the Southern-dominated GOP that it now speaks in any way for a new American majority.” With the conservative movement gaining momentum and some commentators predicting a Democratic walloping in 2010 akin to that of 1994, Lind’s piece is essential reading for those who want to understand the past, present, and future of the GOP.

When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.