Forget Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton as well. And do the same regarding Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. The most consequential American president since the end of World War II was Lyndon Baines Johnson. The man — who possessed a unique combination of savvy, lack of character and progressive faith — created the Great Society and helped to shape the modern-day United States. Whether you like him or not, we all live under the shadow cast by one of the most hated and misunderstood presidents of America.

We would have known little about Johnson had a young Robert Caro not developed a special interest for the former president after visiting him on his ranch in Texas. The result of Caro’s curiosity was a masterful piece about American history and this unique character that started his life as a school’s teacher and climbed all the way up to the White House.

Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson shows a man who understood, from an early age, the meaning and the ways to power. The tallest of all George Washington’s successors and extremely ungainly, Johnson’s physical characteristics seemed to reflect the psyche of an outcast...

Jair Bolsonaro is bringing in the right people, straight from the Austrian School.

Presidents and prime ministers often resort to the appointment of “czars” to handle a crisis or coordinate complex policies when a show of urgent political engagement seems in order. But these modern day czars, unlike their autocratic namesakes, are often short termers with greatly constrained powers and, by the very nature of the complex problem (autos, health care, drugs, etc.), hard to pin down on achievements.

Then there’s Paulo Guedes.

The new Brazilian government’s czar for economic affairs masterminded the pro-market platform embraced by Jair Bolsonaro, inaugurated on Jan. 1 as the country’s president. During his campaign, Bolsonaro made so many complimentary remarks about Guedes and the role he would play in a future administration that the once obscure economist became better known than some presidential candidates.

The recent victory of the conservative populist Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian presidential elections brought the name of the philosopher Olavo de Carvalho to the center of Brazilian political debate. Many have since stated that Carvalho is an intellectual precursor to the populist candidate – as someone who was able to reshape the Brazilian political discussion in ways that cleared an intellectual path for Bolsonaro’s electoral victory. It is not a coincidence that when Bolsonaro gave his victory speech, Carvalho’s best-selling book The Minimum You Need to Know not to be an Idiot (2013), was in plain sight.

Carvalho’s influence over the Brazilian new right is indubitable. Many of his disciples supported Bolsonaro since the beginning. Some of them were elected to the Congress in the conservative wave that shifted Brazilian politics. So how was Carvalho able to provide public debate in ways that helped bring Bolsonaro to power?

First and foremost, Carvalho provided a political philosophy capable of structuring conservative ideas in ways that undermined the intellectual hegemony of the left.