The "isolationist" faction of the GOP, led by Sen. Robert A. Taft, had been finally defeated by what Phyllis Schlafly later called the Republican "kingmakers" of the Eastern Establishment. And the looming menace of the cold war turning hot was everywhere in the headlines. While Eisenhower was rallying the nation against the alleged Communist "threat," Stevenson was calling for a nuclear test ban, negotiations with the Soviet Union, and an end to the military draft.

There was no organized libertarian movement at the time, although the people and institutions that would later emerge as the leadership were beginning to coalesce. Prominent among them was Murray Rothbard, then a thirty year old economist and consultant for the Volker Fund, who was also the Washington correspondent for the quasi-libertarian Faith and Freedom magazine. While most if not all conservatives and libertarians favored Eisenhower, Rothbard shocked his readers with a ringing endorsement of the liberal Democrat Stevenson.

While opposing Stevenson's domestic program of more government spending and expanded social programs, Rothbard explained that it was the Democratic nominee's position on the vital foreign policy issues of the day that ought to earn him libertarian support. While Eisenhower was playing the Soviet "threat" card, Stevenson was warning of the dangers of a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers. Richard Nixon was quick to jump on Stevenson as an "appeaser" when Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin endorsed Stevenson's nuclear test ban proposal. The Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt further escalated the cold war hysteria that was sweeping the nation, and Eisenhower easily won a second term.

Yet Rothbard's dissent was prescient: the Communist system, he wrote in Faith and Freedom, was "relatively inefficient" and doomed to fail. The enemy, he pointed out, was not merely communism, but "statism in all its forms." Furthermore, under a wartime regime the State made its greatest inroads on the private sector: America's wars had always been the occasion for a "great leap forward" in the power of the centralized State to impinge on every aspect of our lives. The ultra-conservative readers of Faith and Freedom were not convinced, and Rothbard was soon out as a columnist – yet his stand against the anti-communist hysteria and warmongering of the cold war Right was both prescient and principled.

As early as 1952, Rothbard had noted the fatal flaw in the "New Right" of  William F. Buckley, Jr., whose magazine, National Review, would become the flagship periodical of the conservative movement a few years later. In a piece for Commonweal, Buckley had written:

"We have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged … except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."

Buckley maintained that conservatives had to become apologists for "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy" and the "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington – even with Truman at the reins of it all."