A UNIVERSAL PROGRAM IS PERFECTLY CONSISTENT WITH REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

All the way back in 1968, William F. Buckley Jr. published a little book called Gratitude. Subtitled "Reflections On What We Owe To Our Country," the book was Buckley's attempt to propose a Switzerland-style national-service program for America's youth, born out of his concern that the younger generation lacked responsibility and patriotism. No doubt fully aware of the controversy that his proposal would ignite among many of his fellow travelers on the political right, Buckley wrote:

The conviction of some conservatives that the state can't have a genuine, non-predatory interest in the cultivation of virtue strikes me as an anarchical accretion in modern conservative thought, something that grew from too humorless a reading of such spirited individualists as Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken. . . . National service, if transformed merely into a state bureaucracy with huge powers of intimidation, is not only to be avoided, but to be fought. But we can open our minds to something other than a statist program, or one that lodges in the state the kind of power conservatives have been taught, at great historical expense, to husband for social uses.

So conscious was Buckley of the ire that his argument would provoke from the libertarian faction of the conservative coalition, he wrote an entire chapter entitled "Anticipating the Libertarian Argument." Despite his support for free markets, he begrudgingly acknowledged the limitations of economic liberty. "The deep wellsprings of patriotism are fed by other forces, and these do not leave fingerprints in the market," he wrote. "They must be investigated by the use of entirely different instruments."

This is similar to a view that many of the more market-skeptical Burkean traditionalists have expressed in contemporary intra-conservative debates: the idea that the state has a vested interest in protecting and even proactively nurturing our civic institutions, placing some aspects of our cultural inheritance beyond the reach of the creative destruction that is inherent to any dynamic liberal society. It's a view that stems from a particular concern for what Buckley called "connections between the individual and the community beyond those that relate either to the state or to the marketplace."

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