One of Buckley's great triumphs was the fusion of small-L libertarians with conservatives in opposition to the ever-growing state.
Buckley? Opposition to the ever-growing state? Is this the same Buckley we speak of?
Yes, it is.
Without him and his work, it would be larger. He & his buds did the work of making conservatism and the idea of limited government respectable again.
Recall, he started
National Review in the mid-1950s, when almost all policritters and polite society was united in a point of view that viewed ever-expanding gov't a good and natural thing. New Deal, Fair Deal, etc.
...The Republican party had effectively marginalized its remaining conservative members by the 1950s. Although a few Republican statesmen such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio maintained a rear-guard action against the growth of the state during Roosevelt's New Deal, the party was firmly in the camp of its relatively liberal and pro-government Eastern establishment...
...Buckley and Frank Meyer also promoted the idea of fusionism, whereby different schools of conservatives, including libertarians, would work together to combat what were seen as their common opponents...
NR's founding statement:Lets Face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that of course; if National Review is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."
["History" defined as the ever-growing power of the state relative to the individual--jfruser]
"In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation... the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not... express themselves in ideas but only... in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
----Lionel Trilling, 1950
It is through the work of Buckley and his kind that the USA is not just a larger, polyglot reflection of the EU.
Such work is not and will never be 100% complete or thorough. Struggle is the expectation for those that champion civilization and the dignity and sovereignty of the individual.
