Did you know R. Emmett Tyrrell or the other AmSpec writers of that period?
Tyrell, yes, I read him. Mostly Buckley, and Mona Charen & Thomas Sowell were getting started.
Mostly I read political theory in a historical context: Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Marx, Lenin, Bukharin. In addition to LOTS of regular history.
I knew Marxism was crap when I was 12. Nothing convinced me any different since then. I was shocked in college that supposedly smart professors were Marxists. One of my life-long friends at IU was also a Poli-Sci major. We would laugh at the AI who came to class in her olive-drab combat fatigue pants. Yeah, Ms. Che Guevara groupie, like you’re gonna go man the barricades and be down with the struggle. Right after your next latte. Or the professor who advocated “the workers owning the means of production.” I worked construction to get through college and I knew what would happen if you tried to turn the means of production over to the crew at Rome Builders. The building wasn’t getting built, the “worker’s committee” was going to head to the parking lot for a keg of beer and a bucket of chicken, and the “means of production” (company tools) were going home with them that night and not being returned. If I had balls and didn’t need the grade to get to law school, I would have advocated “students controlling the means of production of grades,” had the class vote ourselves A+’s, and then convened the class at Nick’s for several beers.