Bill's barfing worms from the grave. Now no one thinks.

Barry Goldwater.

Ah, the fantastic charity of the Rothbardians makes an appearance. Your opening bid seems to be calumny. The line in question was a compromise statement and thus, not an "opening bid". There may have been a way to win against the USSR without any compromise but we certainly were not willing to do it in the Eisenhower years. I doubt it was possible without tossing Westphalianism overboard, which would likely have led to a resurgence of violence and warfare of the 30 Years War type, which horrified Europe into creating the Westphalian system in the first place. I also have not seen anyone in the liberty zealot camp ever bother to lay out and advocate such a plan with the partial exception of Ron Paul who sketched out the barest stub of such a thing in the aftermath of 9/11 with his advocacy of letters of marque and reprisal. That plan, of course, does toss Westphalianism out the window which is why it went nowhere in DC. The practical destruction of ordered liberty that would come about as a consequence of the loss of the Westphalian system might have been less than that caused by the temporary acquiescence to the warfare state but nobody in the zealot camp has ever gone to the trouble to prove it or even make a particularly good case for that proposition. I suspect that it is because they can't.

One cannot calumniate a person by quoting him accurately. Buckley's overt endorsement of a "totalitarian bureaucracy" came a scant year after his public introduction with the publication of "God and Man at Yale." He didn't "compromise" with respect to individual liberty; he skipped that stage and went directly to surrender. The man often described as Buckley's mentor, Frank Chodorov, was both better-informed regarding the nature of Communism (including its fatal internal weaknesses) and more perspicuous in his prescriptions for dealing with the Communist threat, which for him meant focusing most intently on Washington, rather than Moscow. Given Buckley's background in the shallower end of the Deep State it isn't surprising that he pursued precisely the opposite course. We are now in the *seventh* decade of our "temporary acquiescence to the warfare state," whose apologists are endlessly resourceful in finding crises suitable to the needs of defending the state.

FreedomZealot You're really resuscitating a two year old thread comment? Of course you can engage in calumny by context stripping a nuanced position into what it is not. The rest is just elaboration. I'm not particularly fond of the warfare state myself which is why I was happy that we drew that down in the 1990s. The question that is relevant is what is the actual level of threat from others and what would be sufficient to deter those threats so we do not actually have to engage in violence. I'd be much more interested in your answer to the question of 2017 threats than in rehashing the Cold War. Again.

I can't honestly be blamed for the uncharacteristic tardiness of Google's notification system. :-) There is no context that can mitigate an explicit endorsement of totalitarianism. In any case, I provided context, rather than stripping it, by offering additional, and quite germane, details about Mr. Buckley's background -- and by contrasting his callow dogmatism with the insights of wiser and better-informed commentators. When, exactly, did the US government draw down the warfare state? It had an opportunity to do so in the mid-1990s. In keeping with the Iron Law of Bureaucratic Self-Preservation, it found -- some would say devised -- new rationales to preserve and expand the warfare state. To his credit, Buckley in his dotage expressed regret over the military adventurism his brand of conservatism had promoted with such avidity. As to the threats we face in 2017, the only ones of any real consequence emanate from Washington, although there are subsidiary threats that are largely the result of Washington's deranged conduct; witness Obama's perverse determination to provoke a conflict with Russia.

If you think that the only threats of consequence are domestic, we're about done. I hope you never, in your daily life, figure out how wrong you are.

Would you imagine what the USA would be like if Goldwater was president. Our country would've been much more decent and streamlined to say the least. :)

Too many uneducated American voters incapable of rational thought.