Ludwig von Mises, a foundational figure of modern libertarianism, was also for decades a hero of the American right. In George H. Nash's magisterial 1976 history The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the very first chapter stars the Austrian economist and his students and associates, saying that "it would be difficult to exaggerate the contributions of…Ludwig von Mises to the intellectual rehabilitation of individualism in America."

Mises' disciple Murray Rothbard complained that conservatives' adoption of Mises occluded the more radical portions of the economist's thinking: elements that were antistate, pro-peace, pro-immigration, even critical of the Christian tradition. In a 1981 essay in The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Rothbard gripedthat too many of Mises' right-wing fans "have unwittingly distorted [his views] and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States," as though Mises were "a sort of National Review intellectual."

Figures around National Review did admire Mises. In his introduction to National Review founder William F. Buckley's first blockbuster book—1951's God and Man at Yale, an attack on what Buckley saw as a leftist thrust to Ivy League education—the conservative journalist John Chamberlain named Mises as one of the social thinkers shamefully excluded from the typical Yale curriculum.

Yes, some conservative mandarins mistrusted Mises, fretting that his rationalistic, utilitarian focus on economic liberties failed to stress the importance of, as Russell Kirk put it, "supernatural and traditional sanctions." But a Misesian take on the benefits of private property and minimal economic interference was one of the three legs of the American intellectual right from the rise of Buckley's magazine to at least the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency (the other two being Judeo-Christian traditionalism and militant anticommunism). Mises' intellectual dominance was rooted in his masterfully detailed defenses of 19th century classical liberalism and free market economics, and also in his influence on other libertarian intellectual giants, such as Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, and Ayn Rand.

Among the most damaging changes Trumpism has wrought on conservatism has been the rejection of core elements of Mises' thought—the parts that undermined the idea that a "national interest" should supersede individual choice and freedom in markets.