True conservatism goes back to the pre-William F. Buckley days, where conservatives believed in small government and staying out of the affairs of foreign countries. It's not quite libertarianism, but very close.
WaPo has a fascinating take today on this, though I doubt they truly understand what they have uncovered.
Let's start with an understanding of the Old Right
In 1994, Murray Rothbard explained the Old Right:
The original right of which I speak, and of which I am one of the few survivors, stretched from 1933 to its approximate death, or fading away, upon the advent ofNational Review in 1955. The Old Right began in 1933 in response to the coming of the New Deal. It was "reactionary" in the best and most generous sense: it was a horrified reaction against the Roosevelt Revolution, against the Great Leap Forward toward collectivism that enraptured socialist intellectuals and enraged those who were devoted to the institutions and the strict limitations on centralized government power that marked the Old Republic...
The Old, original, Right realized the horrors of the New Deal and predicted the collectivist road on which it was setting the nation. The Old Right was a coalition of ideologies and forces that did not have one single, common, positive program, but "negatively" it was solidly united: all opposed the New Deal and were committed to its total repeal and abolition – lock, stock, and barrel. The fact that its unity was "negative" did not make it any less strong or cohesive: for there was total agreement on rolling back this collective excrescence and on restoring the Old Republic, the true America...
This, of course, has to be contrasted with the current day neo-conservatives, or media conservatives. For these conservatives, it's all about more and more foreign entanglements. The more, the better. This is the exact opposite of the Old Right.
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