I finally sat down and finished reading

The Betrayal of the American Right, by Murray Rothbard. That guy can sure write! This book should be made into a movie!

Let me give you the punch line, so to speak; though this excerpt is part of the summary (Ch. 13: The Early 1960s: From Right to Left, pp. 182-183 of the hard cover) and doesn't show the drama to be found in the rest of the book - the battles and final split of the paleocons and libertarians and the Buckleyite neocons:

Leonard Liggio then came up with the following profound analysis of the historical process, which I adopted.

First, and dominant in history, was the Old Order, the ancien regime, the regime of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a war-making, feudal or despotic ruling class, using the church and the priesthood to dupe the masses into accepting its rule. This was pure statism; and this was the "right wing." Then, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe, a liberal and radical opposition movement arose, our old heroes, who championed a popular revolutionary movement on behalf of rationalism, individual liberty, minimal government, free markets and free trade, international peace, and separation of Church and State--and in opposition to Throne and Altar, to monarchy, the ruling class, theocracy, and war. These--"our people"--were the Left, and the purer their libertarian vision the more "extreme" a Left they were.

...[B]ut what of socialism, that movement born in the ninetheenth century which we had always reviled as the "extreme left"? ...Liggio analyzed socialism as a confused middle-of-the-road movement, influenced historically by both the libertarian and individualist Left and by the conservative-statist Right. From the individualist Left the socialists took the goals of freedom: the withering away of the State, the replacement of the governing of men by the administration of things..., opposition to the ruling class and the search for its overthrow, the desire to establish international peace, an advanced industrial economy and a high standard of living for the mass of the people. From the conservative Right the socialists adopted the means to attempt to achieve these goals: collectivism, state planning, community control of the individual. But this put socialism in the middle of the ideological spectrum. It also meant that socialism was an unstable, self-contradictory doctine bound to fly apart rapidly in the inner contradiction between its means and its ends. And in this belief we were bolstered by the old demonstration of my mentor Ludwig von Mises that socialist central planning simply cannot operate an advanced industrial economy.

The rest of the book shows the consequences of adopting that analysis. The practical consequences. Rothbard was always trying to find a way to promulgate the message, which led to some bizarre alliances and associations.

This book disentangles the Gordian Knot of Twentieth Century American political history. It places all the movements where you can view them in the proper perspective.