Opposition to “omnipotent government,” anticommunism, and the defense of “traditional” values, by which were meant chiefly white, Christian values—these became the three pillars of conservatism from Buckley to Ronald Reagan. Indeed, much of conservative politics throughout the Cold War decades, and even today, lay in deliberately blurring the distinction between liberalism and communism, suggesting that the imposition of liberal principles, including those established by the Declaration and Bill of Rights, was akin to the totalitarian impositions of the communists and even of the Nazis.
