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Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleo or paleocon when the context is clear) is an anti-authoritarian They also criticize social democracy, which some refer to as the therapeutic managerial state, and helped create another paleocon organ, The American Conservative. Its concerns overlap those of the Old Right that opposed the U.S. New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the American social conservatism of the late 20th Century.
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Paleo and conservative
The prefix paleo derives from the Greek root palaeo- meaning "ancient" or "old." It is somewhat tongue-in-cheek -- and refers to the paleocon's claim to represent a more historic tradition than neocons. Supporters describe themselves simply as "paleo." National Review’s Rich Lowry claims the prefix “is designed to obscure the fact that it is a recent ideological creation of post-Cold War politics.”
The paleocons use the suffix conservative somewhat differently from some American opponents of Leftism. It refers specifically to their stated desire to restore the culture and heritage of Christendom. Paleocons reject attempts by Rush Limbaugh and others to graft short-term policy goals -- such as school choice, enterprise zones, and faith-based initiatives -- into the core of conservatism.
Moreover, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming and some other paleocons de-emphasized the "conservative" part of the "paleoconservative" label, saying that they do not want the status quo preserved. Fleming and Paul Gottfried called such thinking "stupid tenacity" and described it as "a series of trenches dug in defense of last year's revolution." Francis defined authentic conservatism as “the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions.” He said of the paleo movement:
What paleoconservatism tries to tell Americans is that the dominant forces in their society are no longer committed to conserving the traditions, institutions, and values that created and formed it, and, therefore, that those who are really conservative in any serious sense and wish to live under those traditions, institutions, and values need to oppose the dominant forces and form new ones.
The earliest mention of the word paleoconservative listed in Nexis is a use in the October 20, 1984, issue of The Nation, referring to academic economists who allegedly work to redefine poverty. The American Heritage Dictionary (fourth edition) lists a generic, informal use of the term, meaning "extremely or stubbornly conservative in political matters." Outside of the United States, the word is sometimes spelled palaeoconservative.
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The conservative heritage
Many paleoconservatives identify themselves as "classical conservatives" and trace their philosophy to the Old Right Republicans of the interwar period Rather, they seek the renewal of "small-r" republican society in the context of the Western heritage, customs and civilization. while supporting capital punishment, handgun ownership and an original intent reading of the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, paleocons are often more sympathetic to environmental protection, animal welfare, and anti-consumerism than others on the American right.
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A better guide than reason
Paleocons argue that since human nature is limited and finite, so any attempt to create a man-made utopia is headed for disaster and potential carnage. They also see social democracy, ideology, and managerial society as malevolent attempts to remake humanity.[ Instead, they lean toward tradition, family, customs, religious institutions and classical learning to provide wisdom and guidance.][http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3366.html]
Thomas Fleming stated this opposition to abstract ideals in a way that critic David Brooks called a "startling crescendo:"
Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy; equality, and natural rights; the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government. No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe in any of this.
Historian W. Wesley McDonald explains the opposition to ideology this way:
In a humane social order, a community of spirit is fostered in which generations are bound together. According to Russell Kirk, this link is achieved through moral and social norms that transcend the particularities of time and place and, because they form the basis of genuine civilized existence, can only be neglected at great peril. These norms, reflected in religious dogmas, traditions, humane letters, social habit and custom, and prescriptive institutions, create the sources of the true community that is the final end of politics.[http://www.umsystem.edu/upress/spring2004/mcdonald.htm]
Along these lines, Joseph Sobran, in his "Pensees," argues that Western civilization relies on civility at the center of the society:
Civility is the relationship among citizens in a republic. It corresponds to the condition we call "freedom," which is not just an absence of restraint or coercion, but the security of living under commonly recognized rules of conduct. Not all these rules are enforced by the state; legal institutions of civility depend on the ethical substratum and collapse when it is absent. And in fact the colloquial sense of civility as good manners is relevant to its political meaning: citizens typically deal with each other by consent, and they have to say "please" and "thank you" to each other.[http://www.wildwestcycle.com/f_pensees.htm]
Paleocons often say that tradition is a better guide than reason. For example, Mel Bradford wrote that “certain questions are settled before any serious deliberation concerning a preferred course of conduct may begin.” This ethic is based in a "culture of families, linked by friendship, common enemies, and common projects." So a good conservative keeps "a clear sense of what Southern grandmothers have always meant in admonishing children, ‘we don't do that.’"[quoted in The Rebuke of History, p. 233]
Thomas Fleming calls tradition "a body of wisdom and truth and a set of attitudes and behavior handed down from one generation to another. It is our parents’ respect for their grandfathers that we reflect when we refuse to think ourselves wiser than our ancestors and do not presume to condemn their shortcomings." By following tradition, Joseph Sobran said that society can maintain continuity with the past, through words, rituals, records, commemorations, and laws:
There is no question of "resisting change." The only question is what can and should be salvaged from "devouring time." Conservation is a labor, not indolence, and it takes discrimination to identify and save a few strands of tradition in the incessant flow of mutability. In fact conservation is so hard that it could never be achieved by sheer conscious effort. Most of it has to be done by habit, as when we speak in such a way as to make ourselves understood by others without their having to consult a dictionary, and thereby give a little permanence to the kind of tradition that is a language.
Furthermore, James Kalb argues that tradition succeeds where ideology fails because it includes habits and attitudes about things that are hard to articulate rationally. Many aspects of social life resist clear definition, so technocratic approaches to social policy deserve suspicion:
Our knowledge is partial and attained with difficulty. The effects of political proposals are difficult to predict and as the proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable. We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge critically.[http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/chris.holt/home.informal/lounge/politics/conservativism/]
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Against abstraction
Many paleocons also say that Westerners have lost touch with their classical and European heritage to the point that they are in danger of losing their civilization.
Robert S. Griffin notes that paleocons fear the United States becoming a "secularized, homogenized, de-Europeanized, pacified, deluded, manipulated, lowest-common-denominator-leveled, popular-culture-dopified country" Clyde Wilson once remarked:
The decadence of a civilization by loss of faith and vigour can be observed more than once in history. What is extraordinary about the American situation is the stupidity. The Romans, such is my impression, did not become stupid and incompetent with their decadence. Americans have not lost faith in their cultural inheritance---they have been entirely separated from it. How this happened is one of the few topics still worth exploring in this Twilight.
Paleocons tend to dislike abstract principles presented without connection to concrete roots, like religion, heritage or traditional instutions. This distate for universalism includes the doctrinal conclusions by socialists, neo-Thomists and Straussians. For example, Mel Bradford wrote in "A Better Guide Than Reason" (citing Michael Oakeshott) that:
The only freedom which can last is a freedom embodied somewhere, rooted in a history, located in space, sanctioned by genealogy, and blessed by a religious establishment. The only equality which abstract rights, insisted upon outside the context of politics, are likely to provide is the equality of universal slavery. It is a lesson which Western man is only now beginning to learn.
Some paleocons also profess a conservative value-centered historicism, which Gottfried defines as “the belief that historical circumstances set values.” This is distinguished from nihilism, postmodernism and moral relativism. Samuel Francis argued that this position is a “Burkean appeal to tradition.” For example, Edmund Burke wrote in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France."
I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.
Claes Ryn says that life has “an enduring purpose, but one that manifests itself differently as individuals and circumstances are different.” He writes:
For the conservative, the universal imperative that binds human beings does not announce its purpose in simple, declaratory statements. How, then, does one discern its demands? Sometimes only with difficulty. Only through effort can the good or true or beautiful be discovered, and they must be realized differently in different historical circumstances. The same universal values have diverse manifestations. Some of the concrete instantiations of universality take us by surprise. Because there is no simple roadmap to good, human beings need freedom and imagination to find it. Universality has nothing to do with uniformity.
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Federalism
Federalism is another key aspect of paleoconservatism, which they use as an antitype to the managerial state. The paleocon flavor urges decentralism, local rule, private property and minimal bureaucracy. In an American context, this view is called anti-federalism and paleocons often look to John Calhoun for inspiration.
As to the role of statecraft in society, Thomas Fleming says it should not be confused with soulcraft. He gives his summary of the paleocon position:
Our basic position on the state has always been twofold: 1) a recognition that man is a social and political animal who cannot be treated as an "individual" without doing damage to human nature. In this sense libertarian theory is as wrong and as potentially harmful as communism. The commonwealth is therefore a natural and necessary expression of human nature that provides for the fulfillment of human needs, and 2) the modern state is a cancerous form of polity that has metastasized and poisoned the natural institutions from which the state derives all legitimacy--family, church, corporation (in the broadest sense), and neighborhood. Thus, it is almost always a mistake to try to use the modern state to accomplish moral or social ends.
Russell Kirk, for example, argued that most government tasks should be performed at the local or state level. This is intended to ward off centralization and protect community sentiment by putting the decision-making power closer to the populace. He rooted this in the Christian notion of original sin; since humanity is flawed, society should not put too much power in a few hands. Gerald J. Russello concluded that this involved “a different way of thinking about government, one based on an understanding of political society as beginning in place and sentiment, which in turn supports written laws.”
This federalism extends to culture too. In general, this means that different regional groups should be able to maintain their own distinct identity. For example, Thomas Fleming and Michael Hill argue that the American South and every other region have the right to “preserve their authentic cultural traditions and demand the same respect from others.” In their Southern context they call on citizens to “take control of their own governments, their own institutions, their own culture, their own communities and their own lives” and “wean themselves from dependence on federal largesse.”
They say that:
A concern for states' rights, local self-government and regional identity used to be taken for granted everywhere in America. But the United States is no longer, as it once was, a federal union of diverse states and regions. National uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League.
In a similar fashion, Pat Buchanan argued during the 1996 campaign that the social welfare should be left to the control of individual states. He also called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and hand decision-making over to parents, teachers and districts. Controversies such over evolution, busing and curriculum standards would be settled on a local basis.
In addition, he opposed a 1998 Puerto Rican statehood plan on the grounds that the island would be ripped from its cultural and linguistic roots: "Let Puerto Rico remain Puerto Rico, and let the United States remain the United States and not try to absorb, assimilate and Americanize a people whose hearts will forever belong to that island."
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A universal rule
Paleocons often argue that modern managerial society is a threat to stable families. Allan Carlson, former president of the Rockford Institute, argues that
The family is the natural and fundamental social unit, inscribed in our nature as human beings, rooted in marriage, rooted in the commitment to bring new life into the world, and rooted in a deep respect for both ancestors and posterity.
Joseph Sobran picks up this same theme, saying that heterosexual marriage is hard-coded into human nature:
Even the Pope can’t change the nature of marriage. It existed, by necessity of human nature, long before Jesus or even Abraham... This has nothing to do with mere disapproval of sodomy. Even societies that were indifferent to sodomy saw no reason to treat same-sex domestic partnerships as marriages. Why not? Because such unions don’t produce children.... To put it as unromantically as possible, people who have children should be stuck with each other, sharing the responsibility.
Many paleocons also question the validity of feminism in similar ways, both in both radical and moderate forms. They say that the push for total gender equality dehumanizes both men and women, damaging the nuclear family and sacralizing abortion. Feminism also creates room for the managerial state to try engineering sexual equality. Gottfried described this position, which was influenced by scholar Allan Carlson, thus:
The change of women’s role, from being primarily mothers to self-defined professionals, has been a social disaster that continues to take its toll on the family. Rather than being the culminating point of Western Christian gentility, the movement of women into commerce and politics may be seen as exactly the opposite, the descent by increasingly disconnected individuals into social chaos.•
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The "post-family order"
Carlson says that we live in a “post-family order,” in which elites no longer accept the centrality of family life.[http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc_acc_wcfregdc_0111.htm][Thomas Fleming argues that this very denial means this system is doomed. *] In response, he calls for a pro-active social conservatism that seeks “real alternatives to the centralized ‘corporate state’ that are compatible with liberty and family life." He argues that there is a permanent tension between the family and “individualist, industrialized society.”[http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc_acc_dectnf.htm]
He says the modern “abstract state” too often sees the family as “its principal rival” and tries to suppress it. It can also hurt family living by the unintended consequences of public policy with good intentions.[ He also chides U.S. Republicans “for consistently favoring Wall Street over Main Street.”][http://www.profam.org/press/thc.pr.060320.htm]
As an alternative to the "abstract state," Carlson argues the state must recognize that "are different in reproductive, economic, and social functions," even though they share political and property rights.[ He says that churches and other religious bodies must step in and help rebuild “family-centered communities.”][ As for common people, he says,]
Men and women are both called home to rebuild families with an inner sanctity, to relearn the authentic meanings of the ancient words husbandry and housewifery, and to exercise the natural family functions of education, the care of the weak, charity, and a common economic life.
Carlson argues that the family's greatest challenge in the early 21st Century comes from what he calls "“soft totalitarianisms," which are "packaged around a militant secular individualism, but still seeking to build a marriage-free, post-family order."[http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc_acc_frc_sfl_040616.htm] This includes same-sex marriage, the Left's association of family values with fascism, abortion,[http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc.acc.060211.econ.abort.htm] and "equity feminism."[ Samuel Francis uses similar ideas to argue that society should regulate sexual behavior, specifically laws against sodomy and gays in the military][“Sex and consequences,” The Washington Times, February 2, 1993.]
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The coalition
Paleoconservatives come from all walks of life, including Evangelical Christians, Calvinists, traditionalist Catholics, libertarian individualists, Midwestern agrarians, Reagan Democrats, and southern conservatives. Other contemporary luminaries include Donald Livingston, a Professor of Philosophy at Emory and corresponding editor for ''Chronicles'';[ novelist and essayist Chilton Williamson, senior editor for books at ''Chronicles'';][ classicist Thomas Fleming, editor of ''Chronicles'';][http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_120201.htm] and historian Clyde N. Wilson, long-time contributing editor for ''Chronicles''.[ ]
Another prominent paleoconservative, Theodore Pappas,[a former ''Chronicles'' managing editor] is the current executive editor of Encyclopædia Britannica.[ - EB corporate site mentioning Pappas]
Paleoconservatism is unusual in that it seeks to be both noble and populist at the same time.[ For example, Thomas Fleming, who urges his readers to study classical philosophy and Christianity's Church Fathers, salutes Middle America thus:]
A patriot loves his nation and his people. Neoconservatives hate the real America. At best, we represent a four-hour delay between appointments in New York and Los Angeles; at worst, we are pitchfork-wielding rednecks, fundamentalists, kukluxers, wobblies, and Coughlinites who prefer reruns of The A-Team to reruns of Friends. We buy our clothes at Marshall's instead of Saks or Brooks Brothers. We still eat fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy for Sunday dinner, and we drink tap water, for goodness sake, not Evian..."[http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/55950/index.php]
The movement combines disparate people and ideas that might seem incompatible in another context.[http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAD9C.htm]
In addition, while paleoconservatism is not a doctrinal movement, supporters typically sympathize with the Christian Right's attacks on moral relativism, big government and secular humanism, even as they complain that the movement is obsessed with the Middle East and the Republican Party's short-term goals. Pat Buchanan argues that a good politician must "defend the moral order rooted in the Old and New Testament and Natural Law" -- and that "the deepest problems in our society are not economic or political, but moral.[http://www.buchanan.org/pma-00-0621-fulani.html] On the other hand, Samuel Francis complained that the "Religious Right" focuses on certain social issues and neglects other civilizational crises.[http://www.samfrancis.net/pdf/all1994.pdf]
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The Kirkian legacy
Russell Kirk is a key figure, in that several of his books present an outline of a pervasive Anglo-American conservative tradition that exists despite many other distinctions. His own career stretched long enough to for him to defend Robert Taft in the 1950s, write for National Review during the Cold War, criticize neoconservatism in the 1980s, and give speeches supporting Buchanan in 1992. One neoconservative writer, Dan Himmelfarb, even refers to Kirk's The Conservative Mind as "the seminal work of paleoconservatism," even though it was first published in 1953. He said that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."
Kirk called libertarians "chirping sectaries," quoting T.S. Eliot, and said that they and conservatives have nothing in common. He called the movement "an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating." He said a line of division exists between believers in "some sort of transcendent moral order" and "utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct." He put libertarians in the latter category.
Kirk also popularized the Irish-born Edmund Burke as the prototypical conservative -- and many paleocons consider him a hallowed ancestor.• For them, he represents a vital link between the American right and the greater tradition of British customs and common law.• As such, his ideas are a touchstone for a conservatism that respects tradition, while rejecting authoritarianism.
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Precursors of paleo
In the United States, the Southern Agrarians,• among others, articulated positions that have proved influential among contemporary paleoconservatives. Some paleocons enthusiastically embrace the decentralizing tenets of the Anti-Federalists,• The German-born Johannes Althusius and his tract Politica with its core emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity has proven influential, as well.
Paul Gottfried once noted an "occasional paleo association with over-the-top Catholicism." In fact, counter-revolutionary (Roman Catholic) European precursors to the paleoconservatives include Joseph de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, and Pope Pius IX, though they tend to carry influence limited to the Roman Catholic traditionalist subset of paleoconservatism. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc• are also popular Catholic forebears of paleo thought.• As for Chesteron and Belloc, Joesph Sobran explained their relevance:
This new, paganized Western society under the comprehensive state would have come as much less of a surprise to us if we’d paid more attention to the two great English Catholic writers of the pre-Bolshevik period.... In 1912, Belloc predicted the rise of a new form of tyranny, which he called “the Servile State,” neither capitalist nor socialist, in which one part of the population would be forced to support the other. He was not always accurate in detail, but he was right in principle. He saw that the cellular structure of Christian society was under assault. Chesterton agreed. Together both men resisted modernity in religion, morality, politics, economics, and art. They celebrated the Middle Ages, small private property, and above all Catholicism. In a famous epigram, typically defiant in its simplicity, Belloc proclaimed: “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.”
Some non-Catholic paleocons, such as Sam Francis, complained that this tradition is overrepresented among conservative intellectuals, thus putting the movement out of step with Middle America. He reluctantly acknowledged the Southern Presbyterian influence upon his own thinking. In addition, precursors of a Protestant paleoconservatism can be seen in 19th Century figures such as Robert Lewis Dabney, Charles Hodge, Friedrich Julius Stahl, Abraham Kuyper and Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer.
Many paleocons also look to more modernist or historicist sources, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes and even Gramsci for intellectual ammunition. Contrarian Leftists such as Eugene Genovese, Christopher Lasch and Paul Piccone also influenced the movement. Samuel Francis even explored the nihilistic fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. To them, such thinkers help explain modernity, power relationships, and show how managerial society subverted Western traditions.
Some modern European continental conservatives, such as Frenchmen Jacques Barzun, Alain de Benoist, and René Girard, have a mode of thought and cultural criticism esteemed by many paleoconservatives. While Nouvelle Droite and radical Traditionalist ideas may have influenced some paleocons, they often represent radically anti-capitalist, anti-Christian and anti-bourgeois views which differ from virtually all American conservatisms.
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The Southern tradition
The southern conservative thread of paleoconservatism embodies the statesmanship of nineteenth-century figures such as John Randolph of Roanoke,
Murphy wrote that they developed “a particularistic politics of states' rights and localism, which they combine with a cultural and social criticism defined by Christian and patriarchal organicism.”
Conversely, critics at the Southern Poverty Law Center claim that these Southern paleocons, along with the Rockford Institute. American Renaissance and Mises Institute, are actually part of the “neo-confederate” cause. They claim this movement is “increasingly rife with white supremacists and racist ideology” and venerates “the Jim Crow South” and “American apartheid.” A group statement says that “somehow, support for racist theories, segregation and Southern secessionism — key elements behind the Civil War — has become the ugly core of a contemporary social movement.” The SPLC also accused DiLorenzo of "whitewashing the Confederacy." Fleming described the SPLC as “ultra-left” and “Anti-American”
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The Cold War coalition
William F. Buckley, Jr. is an unwitting influence on paleoconservatism.• Some paleocons argued that fusionism failed• William Rusher, former publisher of Buckley's magazine, claims that paleocons are not "representative" conservatives. "The break between the National Review and the paleoconservatives is no tempest in a teapot," he says. "It may well determine the direction of American foreign policy for decades to come."
One problem, according to Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis, was that this was an “archaic conservatism.” This means it saw too much continuity between ancient traditions and the contemporary West, which was in "mortal combat" with Communists and other enemies. Gottfried says the problem with this mindset, which he finds even in Russell Kirk, is that it missed that "the U.S. was then clearly on its way to becoming a self-identified multicultural society overseen by a post-Christian managerial elite." So these conservatives became too optimistic about modern-day civic virtue. Looking back, Thomas Fleming remarked that “In theory, the Cold Warriors were protecting the people of Britain, France, and the United States against the expansion of an evil empire, but nations can only be successfully defended by people who believe in nationhood, which is anathema to the liberal assumptions that are the foundation of most Western states.”
One notable group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), still follows the old fusionism.• It showcases both neoconservative and Old Right ideas, such as anti-interventionism, limited government and cultural regionalism, in its publications and conferences. While they favor free-market solutions they tend to recognize the limitations of the market, or as economist Wilhelm Roepke says, "the market is not everything." ISI scholarship includes analysis of agrarian and distributist works, along with the idea of an "humane economy."•
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The Burnham revolution
One of the fusionists, James Burnham, left an important influence on paleocons, especially on Samuel Francis. Paul Gottfried said that the two men believed that social forces create ideologies -- and that “moral visions are the mere accompaniments of the process by which classes make themselves economically dominant and try to control other groups.”
Francis also said, however, that ideology helps the managerial elite increase its grip on scoiety:
It is in the long-term interest of the overclass (not of anyone else) to managerialize society so that all aspects of life are organized, packaged, routinized and subjugated to manipulation by the technical skill the overclass possesses, and that interest requires the undermining of institutions and norms that are independent of, and impediments to, overclass control.
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Foreign echoes
As paleoconservatism germinated as a reaction to neoconservatism, most of its development has been in the United States, although it has echoes in other Western nations. British conservatives such as Peter Hitchens, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Flew (whom the Rockford Institute awarded the Ingersoll Prize), and Roger Scruton•, as well as Scruton's Salisbury Review and Derek Turner's Right Now! magazines, may be considered broadly sympathetic to paleo ideas. For example, Hitchens wrote, in opposition to the Iraq War,
There is nothing conservative about war. For at least the last century war has been the herald and handmaid of socialism and state control. It is the excuse for censorship, organized lying, regulation and taxation. It is paradise for the busybody and the nark. It damages family life and wounds the Church. It is, in short, the ally of everything summed up by the ugly word ‘progress.’•
The One Nation movement in 1990s Australia,• Germany's Junge Freiheit,• and Italy's Lega Nord• reflect many paleo concerns. So may former Russian dissidents Andrei Navrozov• and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. German ordoliberalism, represented by Wilhelm Ropke, influenced some paleocon thinkers (see below). Paleocons also tend to be euroskeptics.
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Biology, genes and behavior
While paleocons have criticized Darwinism, several are also interested in the findings of anthropology, genetics, and sociobiology for insight into human behavior. Murphy says that Thomas Fleming was influenced by the works of the work of writers like E. Evans-Pritchard and Edward O. Wilson. While criticizing left-wing Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, they see evidence for traditional values in these fields. The Rockford Institute even awarded sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson a 1989 Ingersoll Prize.
Thomas Fleming takes a view of human nature that mixes classical philosophy with sociobiology. He said, "the laws and decrees enacted by human government are mutable and sometimes tyrannical,” yet "the laws of human nature, worked tight within the spirals of the genetic code, are unchanging and just.” Critic Tony Glaister describes the attitude thus:
For Fleming, human nature is rooted in the biological family; consequently, the extension of state power he sees as thoroughly deleterious. Family adhesion is the glue of our biologically determined natural social environment. From John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to existentialism (and by implication, nihilism) and social fragmentation, the way is shorter than we think. The principle that society consists of a social bond created contractually between each member and every other, is in accordance with the existentialist belief that existence precedes essence. For the existentialist, man creates his nature and his history by existing and the actions which constitute that existence and not by virtue of a biological inheritance or the unfolding of an inherent “human nature”. If there is no God which precedes Man, there is no essence to which his reactions refer. This implies a rejection of essential or immutable human nature.
In this way, Fleming sees both the sexual revolution and reproductive rights as “a revolution against human nature and against the most basic elements of human society.”
Do not look for parallels in ancient Greek bisexuality (a much misinterpreted phenomenon) or Roman decadence. Ordinary people in the ancient world lived as most ordinary people have always lived, dividing their time between worrying about crops and chasing after the children who are supposed to be tending the livestock or working in the fields. The tiny elite classes might become as decadent as they liked without influencing the rest of us whose lives are shaped by natural necessities. Yes, in 18th century Europe an anti-ethic of irresponsible hedonism reached its peak in figures like Voltaire and Sade, but the sexual antics of the Palais Royal were not being imitated by peasants in the Vendée. Only in the 20th century have we universalized the rebellion against nature and God and communicated it to the common man.
On race, Fleming wrote:
Race and ethnicity are partly rooted in genetics and partly social constructions. There was a time when the English looked at the Irish as another race and a barely human one, and when Germans had the same view of Slavs. Some notion of the people as an extended family is natural to humanity and makes an important part of any sane society.
Differing views exist on the specific question of intelligent design. Fleming says it is “a boneheaded piece of pseudo-science, almost as simplistic as the naive materialism that Darwinists teach." Pat Buchanan says that “science itself points to intelligent design,” such that the existence of natural laws, such as in gravity, physics or chemistry, implies “the existence of a lawmaker.”
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Paleocons vs. neocons
The phrase paleoconservative ("old conservative") was originally a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder used in the 1980s to differentiate traditional conservatives from neoconservatives and Straussians. Pat Buchanan calls neoconservatism "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology.” The paleoconservatives argue that the "neocons" are illegitimate interlopers in the conservative movement.
(For more, see Neoconservative - Paleoconservative Conflict)
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The humane society
Paleoconservatives esteem the principles of subsidiarity and localism in recognizing that one may be an Ohioan, Texan or Virginian as surely they are an American. They usually embrace federalism within a broader framework of nationalism and are typically staunch supporters of states' rights. They tend to be critical of overreaching federal power usurping state and local authority. For example, Thomas Fleming opposed efforts to federalize the Terri Schiavo case in 2005 -- and said President Bush was hypocritical to position himself as a pro-life spokesman.• On the other hand, even though some have argued that the Supreme Court came down on the side of local decision-making, Scott Richert, executive editor of Chronicles, denounced Kelo v. City of New London as an exercise in federal power that substantially removed traditional common-law restraints on state and local governments:•
The Fifth Amendment does point to one important aspect of the common-law understanding of eminent domain that bound all governments in America—local, state, and federal. Property could be taken only for “public use,” and this is where the foes of the Incorporation Doctrine who have greeted Kelo with enthusiasm are sorely mistaken. In the process of removing federal-court oversight of state and local eminent-domain proceedings, the Supreme Court has expanded the concept of eminent domain to include circumstances that the common law would have flatly rejected—and, in so doing, has expanded the power of local and state governments to tyrannical levels. Post-Kelo, every governmental body can redistribute any property within its boundaries as it sees fit—as long as it can argue that the new owner will put it to better economic use than the previous one had. And who will judge whether the governmental body has proved its argument? According to Kelo, that judgment is left up to the governmental body itself, not the courts.
Many paleoconservatives are sympathetic to the critiques of economist Wilhelm Roepke and sociologist Robert Nisbet. Roepke was critical of political and economic centralization, and "the cult of the colossal." Roepke recognized the interplay between the political and economic order, and held that a decentralized political federal polity was conducive to the ideal economic order most compatible with the human condition.
Nisbet posited that the preoccupation with community was a result of the displacement of the intermediary institutions between the individual and the state whether the family, neighborhood, guild, church, or voluntary and civic associations. The corps intermediaries—that is the intermediary institutions between the individual and the state—served as the only effective restraint against the centripetal forces of centralized political and economic power. The displacement of these institutions so vital to civil society and the accompanying obsession with community was precipitated by the activities and structure of the modern state.
Nisbet held that the centralized state has dissolved the natural bonds and allegiances of civil society. In totalitarian movements in Europe, there was actually a conscious effort by the state to dissolve those allegiances. Much of the later twentieth century social pathologies, dependency, poverty, and rampant crime perhaps owe to authentic community being ground in the millstone of central state authority. As a result, paleoconservatives hope to restore authentic community by devolving power and authority back to the corp intermediaries while curtailing state power.
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Culture wars
The ideas of culture war, political correctness and cultural Marxism have played a large role in paleoconservatism.
Last month, during a week at CNN in New York, I rode nightly up Eighth Avenue in a cab. It was like passing through a different world. We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second, and want only to get clear of it.[http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/frum031903.asp]
A year later, Buchanan delivered a keynote address at the 1992 Republican National Convention, which spoke of a culture war in the United States. "There is a religious war going on," he said, "in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself."
The agenda Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton would impose on America--abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat--that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.
A month later,[ Buchanan elaborated that this conflict was about power over society's definition of right and wrong. He named abortion, sexual preference and popular culture as major fronts – and mentioned other controversies, including clashes over the Confederate Flag, Christmas and taxpayer-funded art. He also said that the negative attention his talk of a culture war received was itself evidence of America’s polarization. ]
In a 2004 column,
Samuel Francis expanded the notion of culture war, advising Buchanan to defend "such social particularisms—tribalisms, if you will—as class, cult, kinship, community, race, ethnicity, and nationality, each of which are legitimate and important parts of the politico-cultural complex.” He elaborated:
The way to win Middle Americans is to communicate to them that you, as a candidate and a public leader, understand that they and their way of life are under siege, that the ruling class of the country in alliance with its underclass is besieging them, and that you are willing to ally with them against their enemies.[quoted in "The Rebuke of History," p. 239.]
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The perils of pop culture
In addition, paleocons are typically concerned about the culture-eroding effects of popular culture.[http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/paleoconservatism/]
Thomas Fleming chortles that “protesting the message of a Hollywood movie is like protesting a Marxist’s economics.”[http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/hardright.cgi/Da_Vinci_Code_Prote.html?seemore=y]
Samuel Francis complained that corporate "garbage," protected by bureaucratic market controls, kicked traditional and regional music, poetry and art out of the mainstream. For example, chain bookstores “offer exactly the same stock in every city in the country, almost none of which would have complied with the conventional and moderate obscenity laws of the 1950s.” He said that pop culture, beyond being crude and mass-produced, promotes a multicultural, managerial ideology.[ ]
For example, Francis argued that Star Trek represents “global democratic capitalism gone galactic." It shows what the “cultural elite” would do if it could turn much of the universe into a totalitarian “Federation.” He said the show's plots are “transparent allegorical representations of whatever social crisis preoccupies the real cultural elite,” such as “racism,” “sexism” and “the obsolete customs and sometimes obnoxious beliefs and habits of 20th century man.” He argued that the decades-long popularity of the franchise shows the power of this myth.
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Censorship and social control
As part of this conflict, paleoconservatives say that elites use censorship and social control, to shield certain left-wing ideas, especially feminism and multiculturalism, from public criticism. Sometimes this is called "political correctness." In this way, they argue that many mass media, public sector and academia elites enforce these dogmas as representatives of a New Class, which is isolated from (and fearful of) Middle America.
Joseph Sobran speaks of an ideology of alienism, which is the opposite of nativism. He defines it as “a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossesed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to ‘build a new society’ by destroying the basic institutions of the native.”[ He explains:]
The "alienist animus" is the willfully estranged attitude toward the general society typical of modern intellectuals and found, in various ways, among some so-called minority groups.... The language abounds in words signifying the hatreds, fears, and suspicions of cultural insiders toward outsiders. We are all acquainted with racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, nativism, and the like; these words have a certain hothouse quality about them, suggesting their recent invention to serve particular needs. Even older words such as prejudice, bias, bigotry, discrimination, and hatred itself have taken on the same anti-majoritarian connotations, although it is humanly probable that there is hostility of at least equal intensity in the opposite direction. We have no specific vocabulary at all to suggest this reciprocal possibility.[http://www.sobran.com/articles/leads/2006-06-lead.shtml]
Paleocon William S. Lind calls PC a form of cultural Marxism, descended from the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory.[http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_06/review.html]
Furthermore, Paul Gottfried argues that the Left substitutes political correctness, multiculturalism and the welfare state for the old vision of industrialized socialism.[ These policies are a "politics of guilt"][ Gottfried says this mindset is more about political style than writing style. Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen summarized and quoted his interpretation thus:]
Liberalism survived as a series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and totalized by its opposition to anti-liberal critics. According to Gottfried: "By the end of the twentieth century, liberalism has become a pillar of whatever liberal democracy the United States and its imitators are thought to embody," while the "consolidation of the managerial state and the imposition of its pluralist ideology" had become "the defining features of contemporary Western life." More precisely, managerial liberalism has given way to a managerial democracy within which liberal principles, such as freedom of speech and association, are readily set aside whenever political expediency requires it.[Uses and abuses of Carl Schmitt, by Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen, Telos.]
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Pushing the limits
In response, Paleoconservatives often urge people to push against "the limits of permissible dissent,"[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/793011/posts] even on such topics as immigration and race relations. In some cases, this has led to accusations of racism and strife among the paleoconservatives themselves.[, hosted on National Investor] For example some paleoconservatives have attacked the Civil Rights Movement and criticized Martin Luther King, Jr.[ They also say that whites should not be labeled “racist” for bringing up racial issues. As Mel Bradford said in 1992:]
I can understand the outrage of a black person equipped to manage full membership in a white society and being prevented from doing so. I would feel the same way if I were black. On the other hand, a white mother not wanting her child assigned to a school where there is an undercurrent of violence and tension, a real danger—her attitude is perfectly human and natural, and to attribute it simply to racism is abusive.”[http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/1992-03-01/academia-2.php]
Paul Gottfried questions whether King or the civil rights movement "pushed the U.S. along an uplifting path that changed us by its moral force." He says it "had more to do with political coercion and relentless indoctrination than with appeals to conscience."[http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Gottfried/NewsPG022603.html] He also wrote that paleocons "raise issues that the neoconservatives and the Left would both seek to keep closed, for instance, questions about the desirability of political and social equality, the functionality of human rights thinking, and the genetic basis of intelligence."[quoted in Conservatives and neoconservatives, by Adam Wolfson Public Interest January 1, 2004]
Francis also argued that society should regulate sexual behavior, including laws against sodomy against gays in the military. Also, many paleocons also question the validity of feminism, both in both radical and moderate forms. They say that the push to make genders somehow even dehumanizes both men and women, damaging the nuclear family and sacralizing abortion. Feminism also creates room for the managerial state to try engineering sexual equality. "The dilemma we face today," Fleming writes, "is not how to make women more like men, but how to let women be fully women."[ Gottfried described this position, which was influenced by Allan Carlson, thus:]
The change of women’s role, from being primarily mothers to self-defined professionals, has been a social disaster that continues to take its toll on the family. Rather than being the culminating point of Western Christian gentility, the movement of women into commerce and politics may be seen as exactly the opposite, the descent by increasingly disconnected individuals into social chaos.
In addition, Thomas Fleming, Peter Brimelow and other paleocons adopted the word “Christophobia” as a pejorative for those they say have an irrational fear of Christianity or paranoia about the activities of conservative Christians.[http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_120805.htm] The charge of “Christophobia” is also used to defend religious expressions, such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, against charges of anti-Semitism. It has not, however, been used to describe anti-interventionist Gore Vidal, whose anti-Christian writings are voluminous,[See, for example, "Live from Golgotha," "Monotheism and Its Discontents" and "Messiah"] nor Alain de Benoist, who developed an entire far right philosophy based on rejecting Christianity,[See "On Being a Pagan] nor Richard Dawkins.
(As for Gibson, the paleo defense has its limits. While Thomas Fleming and Paul Gottfried both defended the filmmaker, they distanced themselves from his "drunken ravings" and panned his film.[http://blog.ilanamercer.com/?cat=45])
Fleming also defends the constitutionality of the Dred Scott decision, rejecting some pro-lifers' analogy to Roe v. Wade:
Although the separate concurring opinions put the Dred Scott decision in the company of the most confusing Supreme Court rulings, Justice Roger Taney’s principal contention was that the Court could not make black Americans citizens, if both the states and the federal government refused to do so. In other words, he stood by the Constitution as it had been written and interpreted for over two generations.[http://catholiccitizens.org/platform/platformview.asp?c=8209]
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Jews and defamation
Paul Gottfried, himself Jewish, regularly challenges the Anti-Defamation League, whom he accuses of publishing fear and promoting white guilt. He calls Abraham Foxman “whiny” and “pathologically anti-Christian” and says he “blames everyone and his cousin for the Holocaust.” He says they “make themselves ridiculous and vulnerable when they denounce those who oppose the granting of drivers licenses in California to illegal immigrants as far-right anti-Semites — while they simultaneously defend Israel as a ‘Jewish state.’"
Gottfried also complains that orthodox Judaism has failed to be a bulwark against social liberalism. Nor does it serve as an alternative to the managerial elite. He says that most of its membership "are welfare-state Democrats and uninterested in moral issues outside their own communities."•
Further, Gottfried challenges critics he sees as blatantly anti-Jewish. To one, he wrote that “if gentiles were as gullible as you suggest and if Jews were as brilliant, it would be poetic justice for the Jews to dominate.” He wrote:
I wonder whether my anti-Jewish correspondents have ever thought the obvious, that minorities often behave the way majorities want them to. America’s German and Sephardic Jews in the nineteenth century tried to model themselves on WASP high society, believing that they had to do so to move up socially and professionally. Today Jews who spew hate on gentiles also move up, because they are doing to Euro-American-Christians what the majority society wants, blaming that society for the ills of humanity and urging it to become a multicultural mess. This should not be read as a justification of the usual suspects but it is a reminder of why Dershowitz, Foxman, and Goldhagen make money and enjoy popularity among loads of Christians as well as Jews. Unlike nineteenth-century Germany or an older America, in our society it pays for bad-mannered, resentful Jews to exhibit their worst qualities. They are providing a morally confused and historically misinformed majority with what it craves.
Thomas Fleming remarked that "it used to be said that an anti-Semite was anyone who won an argument with Norman Podhoretz." He claims that charge of anti-Semitism is used to prevent rational discussion. He says Midge Decter stretched the term to include Pope John Paul II and George Herbert Walker Bush. He said:
Personally, I am tired of the whole pro-Jewish/anti-Jewish thing. It is as tedious as the Holocaust myth and the anti-holocaust myth. Millions of Jews died in German camps. It is hardly defense of the Nazis to say that many or most of them might have died of natural causes. The architects of the killing of Jews, Catholics, and Slavs were evil because what they did was evil. On the other hand, there is so much evil to deplore, I do not see why Nazi evil is more serious than Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist evil, just as I do not see why it is OK for Americans and Israelis to target civilians but not for Muslim terrorists.
Fleming also says that neoconservatives' charge of anti-Semitism is "a despicable and cynical abuse of the authentic sufferings of Jewish people." He says the neocons have their own racial animosities and self-hatreds:
Neoconservatives don't care one bit about anti-Semitism, because they care nothing at all for Judaism. Believing Jews and brave Israelis alike would spit on these little slanderers and cowards. If they ever wake up and find something to believe in, something to love, something to risk lives and careers on, then they might be worth something either as enemies or friends. Even a gang-banger who loves his brothers and his territory is more worthy of respect—though the negrophobic neoconservatives can never find anything good to say about real black people in America. The dirty little non-secret of the neoconservatives is their paranoid hatred and fear of African Americans. Beneath their angry diatribes against Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their denunciations of affirmative action lies the recognition that black males are men, whose virile capacity for both joy and violence intimidates them.
(See also the accusations of anti-Semitism section in the topic relating to Pat Buchanan.)
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The managerial worldview
One distinctive of paleoconservatives is their critique of modern social democracy, or the managerial state, which they see as a manifestation of Western decline. Theorists like Samuel Francis and Paul Gottfried say this is an ongoing regime that remains in power, regardless of what political party holds power. Francis, following James Burnham, said that under this historical process, “law is replaced by administrative decree, federalism is replaced by executive autocracy, and a limited government replaced by an unlimited state.” It acts in the name of abstract goals, such as equality or positive rights, and uses its claim of moral superiority, power of taxation and wealth redistribution to keep itself in power.
Gottfried, in "After Liberalism", defines this worldview as a "series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and it maintains its power by pointing its finger accusingly at antiliberals." He calls it a new theocratic religion. In this view, when the managerial regime cannot get democratic support for its policies, it resorts to social engineering, via programs, court decisions and regulations. This includes mass welfarism, positive rights, laws punishing "racism," "sexism" and "homophobia," and centralized control of public education. While paleocons often criticize neoconservatism, they still see these opponents as just one of many power blocs that support this managerialism.
(For more see Managerial state.)
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Middle American revolution
Paleocons disagree over whether the exact nature of the “managerial state” and whether it is reversible. Francis and Gottfried, who debated each other, argued that this regime is here indefinitely. Francis advocated transforming the managerial state into a new regime that supports the right’s demographic and cultural goals and institutions. He argued that “Middle America,” a vanguard of "working-class social conservatives" and "the still-structured middle class," provide a social base for resistance. Likewise, Murray Rothbard said paleolibertarians should promote a bourgeois middle class revolt against social democracy.
Bill Kauffman, a former advisor to neoconservative Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, says an anti-progressive "reactionary radical" spirit exists in Middle America. Localist and anti-progressive, it defies the boundaries of left and right, embodying diverse people from Charles Lindbergh, Dorothy Day, Millard Fillmore, Grant Wood and Eugene McCarthy. He says this “lies far from the center: in local communities, in neighborhoods, in small farms and small towns--the classic cradle of populism.”
To fight the existing order, paleocons often call for a “Middle American revolution” in the United States, a popular rejection of the existing elite and its values. They often call for a “New Right,” one that sought to reach ordinary citizens who were disenfranchised by the elite in the media, government and academia. Samuel Francis argued that this new coalition would support the “values and goals” of this “increasingly alienated and threatened strata.” It should then assert leadership and rally Middle America “in radical opposition to the regime."
Pat Buchanan's 1992 GOP convention speech spoke of people who "don't read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they came from the same schoolyards and playgrounds and towns as we did. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart." The phrase "conservatives of the heart" became part of his repertoire, as did another, "peasants with pitchforks."
William S. Lind developed a different strategy, called cultural conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, as a culture war battle plan. It argues that traditional culture is the foundation of conservative thought. Lind therefore urges the Right to create new institutions of education, media, entertainment, and high culture that reinforce Western culture. The goal is that these entities will restore traditional culture to predominance.
Conversely, political scientist Claes Ryn argues that “the old Western civilization” is “too badly damaged” and “cannot return.” – and that there is “no realistic prospect” for reversing present trends toward “the centralization and homogenization of life.” He says that “a resurgent spirit of civilization” will apply parts of the Western tradition to new circumstances, while retaining positive elements of the modern world. So he argues that Westerners should not wait for society to change around them, but instead improve themselves and concentrate on their individual and concrete responsibilities, while treating one’s neighbors rightly. This, mixed with “a renewed dedication to learning and the arts,” are part of what he calls a necessary new moral realism.
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Beyond left and right
Various paleocons suggest working with specific liberals as co-belligerents to fight common battles, such as opposing the Iraq War. For example, Bill Kauffman calls for a left/right anti-globalist coalition that would consider social issues as local matters, saying “let San Francisco be San Francisco, and let Utah be Utah.”[http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_07_31/review.htm] Also, Samuel Francis suggested that The American Conservative "forget about the social issues” that divide left- and right-wing anti-interventionists.[http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020722&s=foer072202]
Thomas Fleming, who called himself a "countercultural leftist" as a graduate student,[http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020722&s=foer072202] He also says that “the cultural left defines itself by its hatred of Christendom, but there are the remnants of a more humane, almost Chestertonian left that sees the New World Order as the realization of the Rockefeller dream of one market, one state, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.”[ He also said:]
If there is to be not a coalition but some sort of joint operation, both parties had better be clear about the limits of what they agree on. The only ideological coalition worth talking about will be the union of reactionary Christians when they find the will to resist the Jacobin governments that have destroyed their world, but even a popular front alliance should have its rules. At a bare minimum, it could not include sentimental pacifists who oppose the use of violence, civil disobediants who believe in doing evil that good may come of it, and nostalgic leftists who cannot believe that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Tito have let them down.[ ]
Plans to find common ground between paleo Right and progressive Left face skepticism. '‘Chronicles’’, officially opposes making “common cause alliances with leftists." It condemns “both antiwar and antiglobalist demonstrators” as “moral anarchists.”[http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/032103FrumLies.html] Also, Clyde Wilson remarked that "The leftists have made some cogent criticisms of Bush imperialism, some of which have appeared on LewRockwell.com, but I wish they would stop attributing his sins to his being a Christian and a Texan."[http://www.lewrockwell.com/wilson/wilson14.html]
Pat Buchanan, however, attempted a “left/right coalition” when socialist Lenora Fulani helped his 2000 presidential campaign. When she resigned, she said one of her concerns was that Buchanan tried to make the Reform Party into a party “of and for only social conservatives,” which “increasingly excluded me, my adherents inside the party and the base to which I relate.”[ Buchanan responded to this point, saying,]
I do believe the deepest problems in our society are not economic or political, but moral. And while the solution to our social crisis may lie less in politics than the human heart, I am and remain proudly pro-life. Moreover, I believe that political leaders must defend the moral order rooted in the Old and New Testament and Natural Law that is under relentless assault; just as we must defend our heritage, history, and heroes, now being denigrated. Else, our society is on a permanent downhill run, as is our country.
In addition, starting in the mid-1980s, Paul Gottfried introduced some paleocon and European New Right ideas to Leftist intellectuals affiliated with the critical theory journal "Telos". Yet Gottfried did not share the group’s devotion to Frankfort School philosophy. The ties between them began to unravel when he argued that the school’s “sense of marginalization” stemmed from their Jewishness. Gottfried wrote that “their editorial judgment suggested that I was recycling a position that is intrinsically anti-Semitic.” Yet Gottfried kept cordial relations with editor-in-chief Paul Piccone until his death in 2004.
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The welfare-warfare state
Economic issues are not a basis for paleo unity.
Here is how Fleming described his relations with libertarian Murray Rothbard:
We struck a bargain from the beginning: Although I believe that the commonwealth is a natural and necessary part of human social life, I nevertheless agreed with Murray that about 90 percent of what modern states do is evil and destructive. "When we get to the last ten percent," I said, "it will be time for us to quarrel." The offer stands open to any libertarian who wants to work with us for the common good (if that phrase is not too "socialistic").
While on some issues paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians are indistinguishable, this sphere makes the distinction more visible. Paleolib Lew Rockwell once ribbed his paleocon colleagues for "denouncing chain stores, TV dinners, and dead Austrian economists." Conversely, Thomas Fleming said that Rockwell "thinks he cannot defend economic liberty without supporting the multi-national take-over of our economy or defending McDonalds cuisine."
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Anti-globalization
Many paleoconservatives hold conceptions of trade policy that many call protectionist -- in particular, applying revenue tariffs to foreign-made products -- and other views that critics call mercantilist. For example, Samuel Francis argued that big business should serve the interests of Middle America.•
In addition, Pat Buchanan•
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Laissez-faire
Followers of the late Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell who embrace paleolibertarianism, and who, being culturally conservative, espouse many of the same themes of paleoconservatives, are also wholly committed to laissez-faire economics. dismiss Conversely, many paleocons favor laissez-faire and free trade. While they say America has economic ills, they do not attack foreign competition. Instead, they point to the benefits of free trade, economies of scale, comparative advantage, and specialization of labor.
Many blame America's economic problems on over-regulation, especially bad fiscal, tax and monetary policy, and accept the Austrian theory of trade cycle. Nonetheless, they concurrently reject treaties such as the WTO, GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA, and FTAA. Lew Rockwell summarizes this position:
NAFTA is imperialist. It preaches to other countries about what kinds of laws and regulations they should have-the social democratic mixed economy that is impoverishing us. NAFTA is, of course, not the free trade of Jefferson, Randolph, Taylor and Calhoun. It is trade for the few and not the many, for the particular interests and not the general interests.•
Thus, both groups of paleos complain that globalism, globalization and international finance erode national sovereignty and generally oppose so-called free trade treaties.
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Against "entangling alliances"
In relations with other nations, paleoconservatives are more willing to question the logic of globalism and globalization, along with immigration policy and the lack of enforcement against undocumented immigrants -- and they characteristically embrace an anti-interventionist foreign policy. Pat Buchanan once wrote that "we love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like 'new world order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers." Times of London columnist David Aaronovitch remarked that paleocons "want out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan, out of everywhere and bring up the drawbridge."
Many paleocons support a foreign policy based upon non-interventionism, which some call isolationism. American "isolationists" of the 20th Century opposed political and military commitments, or alliances with, foreign powers (or for that matter international bodies), particularly those in Europe. They find support in the wisdom of the founding fathers and a subsequent generation of antebellum statesmen.
George Washington had declared, "It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world." John Quincy Adams avowed, "America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
About Washington, Bill Kauffman once remarked, "This pacific counsel is today derided as 'isolationism,' fit only for indurated knuckle-draggers. American isolationists -- who oppose killing foreigners -- are tagged xenophobes, while those ordering the missile launches and inviting suicide attacks are the humane internationalists. Go figure."• He also said of the first president's policy, "I rather doubt that he'd have made an exception for Israel."•
Taki Theodoracopulos said he did not call for isolation, but that "we cannot go around in alien cultures imposing democracy." Here's how fellow American Conservative co-founder Pat Buchanan made the case in a 1999 speech to the Cato Institute:
Friends, America today faces a choice of destinies: Are we to be a republic or an empire? Will we be the peacemaker of the world, or its policeman, who goes about night-sticking the trouble-makers of the world, until we, too, find ourselves in a bloody brawl we cannot handle. Let us use this transient moment of American preeminence to encourage and assist other countries to stand on their own feet and begin to provide for their own defense.
Claes Ryn complains that American interventionism follows a “new Jacobinism.” This reference to the French Revolution describes what he calls “the idea that societies ought to be radically remade and that those who know what needs to be done should dominate others for their benefit. This “ideology of virtuous empire” invokes universal principles like “democracy,” equality,” and “freedom.”
Thomas Fleming speaks of American intervention in strong terms. He defended Jacques Chirac’s refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq. “I respect and admire the French,” he said, “who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs.” During the 1990s, he actively opposed US actions in the Balkans. "We are the evil empire," he once wrote. "Our war in Kosovo is the latest chapter in a century of American imperialism that includes Vietnam, the Gulf War and our shameful, secret wars in Central America."
As for the term "isolationist,” Joseph Sobran says the term is used to marginalize war opponents and create a false atmosphere of "gung-ho unanimity." He says it “suggests a churlish provincialism, a refusal to face the outside world; presumably showering that world with bombs is the cosmopolitan approach.” Instead, he argues that the war proponent bears a heavy burden of proof.•
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Just war
Paleoconservatism is not pacifism, however, nor does it mean opposition to all wars. Thomas Fleming argues that the principles of just war are not obvious to contemporary leaders. Quoting Thomas Aquinas that peace is the object of a just war, he says:
The criteria for just war are sometimes presented as a list of arbitrary commandments with no obvious relation to each other. However, the theoretical criteria can be resolved into three questions that, perhaps, even liberals should be able to grasp. In contemplating any proposed war, we must consider the "justice" of the causes of the war, the "methods" to be employed, and the ‘consequences’’ that can be expected.(emphasis his)
Paul Gottfried argues that a conservative war includes defense of one's homeland from foreign invaders, but not a "permanent revolution" to "destabilize traditional societies and impose American modernity."
Arguably a war might claim a conservative foundation even where the civilian population is not consistently spared, laws of proportionality are not properly observed, and even where just cause is not entirely evident. What makes the launching of a war “conservative,” from a strictly historical prospective, is the declared intention of those who embark on the struggle to achieve recognizably conservative ends. Attempts to preserve a customary way of life against outside threats, and to resist violence directed against persons and property fit the definition of a conservative war.
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Rebuilding the Old Right
Paul Gottfried says that the paleocons resurrected political alignments from the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Moreover, he says that for veteran paleocons, the current "struggle for democracy" smacks of Marxism. It serves as "a harmful diversion from dismantling the managerial regime at home,"
In the 1930s, paleo predecessors, the Old Right joined with the anti-interventionist left, including Charles Beard, to oppose U.S. entry into any European war. Similarly, they saw no interest worth protecting in Asia. So in the 1930s, for the United States to commit itself to the Dutch East Indies and Singapore, it served as a back door to war, and it antagonized the Japanese. Paleoconservatives often esteem the America First principles of 1940 as being commensurate with those of the founding fathers as embodied in the Neutrality Act of 1794.
Paleocon Bill Kauffman remains critical of World War II. He says it "destroyed agrarianism as an active force in American intellectual life just as it fortified the urban citadels of power and money,” causing “the great exodus of rural Southerners, black and white, to the industrial cities.” Also, after the war, he says "the American Middle West and all its Middle American manifestations became inexplicable."
During the Cold War, some anti-interventionists supported overseas commitments as necessary to the defense of the United States against communist aggression. Yet Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) and the Old Right opposed NATO, almost from the impetus, and this was a central issue in the contest between Taft and Dwight Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination. But Taft lost; his death in 1953 deprived the Old Right of its most powerful leader.
The deaths in 1951 of publisher William Randolph Hearst -- and in 1955 of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick -- cost the movement its most critical media outlets. The new conservatism of National Review treated isolationism as a foolish anachronism. The anti-interventionist position was not widely heard outside of libertarian circles (and the writings of leftist Gore Vidal) until the 1990s. During the Cold War, however, a new species of anti-Wilsonian foreign policy theory did appear that centered on the nation state: the classical realism of German scholar Hans Morgenthau and others.
In his 1995 book Isolationism Reconfigured, Eric Nordlinger observed that there "is virtually no disagreement about isolationism having served the country exceptionally well throughout the nineteenth century" and he further surmises "the strategic vision of historical and contemporary isolationism is one of quiet strength and national autonomy." In the eyes of paleocons, foreign interventionism is demonstrably counter-productive, and the "United States is strategically immune in being insulated, invulnerable, impermeable, and impervious and thus has few security reasons to become engaged politically and militarily."
Many paleocons may echo old republican concerns about large standing armies. Most conceptualize a foreign policy based on strategic independence, armed neutrality, and non-interventionism. Paleocons are not dogmatic with one another about the practical points of foreign policy, however.•
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Fourth generation warfare
William S. Lind interjects the idea of fourth-generation warfare, arguing that Iraq War and the fight against al-Qaeda are radically different from most of America's conflicts.
Fourth Generation war is the greatest change since the Peace of Westphalia, because it marks the end of the state’s monopoly on war. Once again, as before 1648, many different entities, not states, are fighting war. They use many different means, including "terrorism" and immigration, not just formal armies. Differences between cultures, not just states, become paramount, and other cultures will not fight the way we fight. All over the world, state militaries are fighting non-state opponents, and almost always, the state is losing. State militaries were designed to fight other state militaries like themselves, and against non-state enemies most of their equipment, tactics and training are useless or counterproductive.•
Thus Lind claims that the U.S. is bogged down fighting al-Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents because it planned these fights using an outdated worldview. Washington military planners did not fully understand that these new enemies fight without clear ties to existing nation-states. A big part of this problem is because American military and industrial still operate as if they are preparing to fight conflicts like the two World Wars.• Lind warns that this century may see weak forces defeat the strong.•
One paleocon, Srdja Trifkovic argues for a War on Terror, which he says differs from a War on Terrorism. He says that the Bush andministration, the neoconservatives and others confuse the enemy ("militant Islam") with the technique of terrorism. He says Western nations neglect a "fifth column" among Muslim immigrants who seek Islamic revolution.
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Cultural unity
Where immigration allows foreigners into a nation, it then becomes a domestic policy concern. Cultural cohesiveness and some degree of cultural homogeneity are important factors for paleoconservatives. Thomas Fleming compares nations to extended families, saying that immigration policy is the most “significant means of determining the future of our nation, and we owe it our children not to squander their birthright in spasms of imprudent charity.”
While paleocons often celebrate differences and vibrant regional cultures in the United States, they also oppose multiculturalism and mass Third World immigration. They see non-European immigration as being averse to their interests because it threatens to displace the historic European cultural unity of the United States. In this vein, the aphorism E Pluribus Unum has been co-opted into a mantra for diversity and multiculturalism. Samuel Francis once remarked that:
Just as the Christians turned pagan temples into churches and pagan holidays into Christian holidays, multiculturalism is replacing an old culture with a new one. It is the expression of a deep-seated hatred of this culture in its religious, racial and moral expressions."
These paleoconservatives look back to a different tradition, such as the one suggested by John Jay in Federalist 2, that emphasizes cultural homogeneity:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs... This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
Likewise, in modern times, the 1949 warning of British observer T.S. Eliot has elicited the attention of paleoconservatives:
The real revolution in that country was not what is called the Revolution, but is a consequence of the Civil War; after which arose a plutocratic elite; after which the expansion and material development of the country was accelerated; after which was swollen that stream of mixed immigration, bringing (or rather multiplying) the danger of development into a caste system which has not yet been quite dispelled. For the sociologist, the evidence from America is not yet ripe.
Neocons and paleocons differ radically on the nature of American nationhood. Neos tend to see the United States as “the first universal nation”, one that em |