"Fifty years ago, conservatism meant opposition to big government in all its manifestations and a belief in a non-interventionist foreign policy. Today, most people associate it with preserving the legacy of Harry Truman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hubert Humphrey, while supporting American cultural, economic, and political hegemony across the globe. What conservativism means today is at odds for what it used to stand for. What is the reason? John Birch Society president, John F. McManus, puts the blame squarely on William F. Buckley in his excellent new book, William F. Buckley Jr., Pied Piper for the Establishment."
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan succeeded in spite of Buckley and the Rockefeller Republicans, not because of them:
"The Birchers, the Randians, the libertarians – one by one they were led to the guillotine by the editors of National Review. Welch’s sin was that he saw the Vietnam disaster long before it occurred, and thus violated the central canon of the Cold War Right: the Randians, too, got in the way in the way of Buckley’s overriding principle: their influence would lead the GOP down the primrose path to “anarchic misanthropy,” as one of Buckley’s characters puts it, and so they, too, were dispatched. The libertarians were excommunicated on several occasions, and Rothbard, the most thoroughgoing exponent of laissez-faire capitalism since Ludwig von Mises, was excoriated as a “Leninist.” The purge of dissident elements within the conservative movement did not lead to the triumph of the Right, however, but to the victory of “big government conservatism.” “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move,” said George W. Bush on Labor Day this year. As Ramesh Ponnuru recently pointed out in National Review, FDR couldn’t have said it better. We have, says Ponnuru, been “swallowed by Leviathan” – and so, I would argue, has the conservative movement."
This nation will not survive without returning to it's constitutional roots in regards to the federal government.