But rather than embodying the future of the Republican Party, Paul embodies its past, the postwar conservative era when Ronald Reagan could proclaim that «the very heart and soul of conservatism is
libertarianism,» when National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. could publish a conspectus of his later work
under the subtitle «Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist,» and young blue - blazered Republicans of the Alex P. Keaton variety wore out their copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose.