Paleoconservatism

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Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleo or paleocon when the context is clear) is an anti-communist, anti-authoritarian^[1] right wing movement based primarily in the United States that stresses tradition, civil society and classical federalism, along with familial, religious, regional, national and Western identity.^[2] Chilton Williamson, Jr. describes paleoconservatism as "the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture — an identity that is both collective and personal.”^[3] It is not an ideology and has no party line.^[4]

Paleoconservatives in the 21st century often focus on their points of disagreement with neoconservatives, especially on issues like immigration, affirmative action, foreign wars, and welfare.^[2] They also criticize social democracy, which some refer to as the therapeutic managerial state,^[5] the welfare-warfare state^[6] or polite totalitarianism.^[7] They see themselves as the legitimate heir to the American conservative tradition.^[8]

Paul Gottfried is credited with coining the term in the late 20th century.^[9] He says the word originally referred to various Americans, such as traditionalist Catholics and agrarian Southerners, who turned to anticommunism during the Cold War.^[10] It then began referring to the conservative opposition to neoconservatism.

Paleoconservative thought incubated in the pages of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.^[11] Patrick J. Buchanan was heavily influenced by its articles^[10] and helped create another paleocon organ, The American Conservative.^[12] Its concerns overlap those of the Old Right that opposed the U.S. New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s,^[13] as well as the American social conservatism of the late 20th century. For example, the book Single Issues by Joseph Sobran.

Contents 1 Core beliefs 1.1 Paleo and conservative 1.2 The conservative heritage 1.3 A better guide than reason 1.4 Against abstraction 1.5 Federalism 1.5.1 Constitutionalism 1.6 Family 1.6.1 A universal rule 1.6.2 The "post-family order" 2 Paleoconservative intellectuals 2.1 The coalition 2.2 The Kirkian legacy 2.3 Precursors of paleo 2.4 The Southern tradition 2.5 Beyond fusionism 2.5.1 The Cold War coalition 2.5.2 The Burnham revolution 2.6 Foreign echoes 2.7 Heredity and human nature 2.7.1 Biology, genes and behavior 3 Paleocons vs. neocons 4 Cultural wars 4.1 The humane society 4.2 Culture wars 4.3 The perils of pop culture 4.4 Censorship and social control 5 The managerial state 5.1 Social Democracy 5.1.1 The managerial worldview 5.2 Middle American revolution 6 Economic debate 6.1 The welfare-warfare state 6.2 Anti-globalization 6.3 Laissez-faire 7 Foreign wars 7.1 Anti-intervention 7.1.1 Against "entangling alliances" 7.1.2 Just war 7.2 Rebuilding the Old Right 7.3 Fourth generation warfare 8 Immigration reform 8.1 Cultural unity 8.2 Ethnicity and demographics 8.2.1 Balkanization 8.2.2 Immigration and terror 8.2.3 Racial consciousness 8.2.4 The limits of racial politics 9 References and further reading 9.1 About the right 9.2 Critiques of neoconservatism 9.3 Immigration 9.4 Anti-intervention 9.5 Culture, history and social issues 9.6 Critical views 10 Prominent paleoconservatives 11 Paleoconservative organizations 12 External links 12.1 Magazines 12.2 Talk Radio 12.3 Misc 13 References

[edit] Core beliefs

[edit] 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, authentic conservative tradition than neocons. Adherents of paleoconservatism often describe themselves simply as "paleo-." Rich Lowry of National Review claims the prefix “is designed to obscure the fact that it is a recent ideological creation of post-Cold War politics.”^[14]

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.^[15]

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.^[16][17] 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."^[18] Francis defined authentic conservatism as “the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions.”^[19] 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.^[20]

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.^[21] 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.^[22]

[edit] The conservative heritage

Many paleoconservatives identify themselves as "classical conservatives" and trace their philosophy to the Old Right Republicans of the interwar period^[23] which kept the U.S. out of the League of Nations, reduced immigration with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, and opposed Franklin Roosevelt. They often look back even further, to Edmund Burke, as well as the American anti-federalist movement that stretched from the days of Thomas Jefferson to John C. Calhoun.^[24]

Paleoconservatives question the supposition that European culture and mores can ever be transplanted or even forced upon non-white cultures, due to separate cultural heritages.^[25] As a result, paleocons are most distinctive in their emphatic opposition to open immigration by non-Europeans, and their general disapproval of U.S. intervention overseas for the purposes of exporting democracy. They are also strongly critical of American neoconservatives and their sympathizers in print media, talk radio and cable TV news.^[26] Paleocons say they are not conservatives in the sense that they necessarily wish to preserve existing institutions or seek merely to slow the growth of liberalism.^[27] Nor do they wish to be closely identified with the U.S. Republican Party.^[26] Rather, they seek the renewal of "small-r" republican society in the context of the Western heritage, customs and civilization.^[28] Joseph Scotchie wrote.

Republics mind their own business. Their governments have very limited powers, and their people are too busy practicing self-government to worry about problems in other countries. Empires not only bully smaller, defenseless nations, they also can’t leave their own, hapless subjects alone. . . Empires and small government aren’t compatible, either.^[29]

By contrast, paleocons see neoconservatives as empire-builders and themselves as defenders of the republic, pointing to Rome (and sometimes Star Wars^[30]) as an example of how an ongoing campaign of military expansionism can destroy a republic.^[31]

On some issues, many paleocons are hard to distinguish from others on the conservative spectrum. For example, they tend to oppose abortion on demand^[32] and gay marriage,^[33][34][35] while supporting capital punishment,^[36] handgun ownership^[37] and an original intent reading of the U.S. Constitution.^[38] On the other hand, paleocons are often more sympathetic to environmental protection,^[39] animal welfare,^[40] and anti-consumerism^[41] than others on the American Right.

[edit] A better guide than reason

Paleocons argue that since human nature is limited and finite, 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.^[34] Instead, they lean toward tradition, family, customs, religious institutions and classical learning to provide wisdom and guidance.^[42]

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.^[43]

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.^[44]

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.^[45]

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.’"^[46]

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.^[45]

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.^[47]

[edit] 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.^[48] 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"^[49] 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.^[50]

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.^[51]

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.”^[52] 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.^[53]

Claes Ryn says that life has “an enduring purpose, but one that manifests itself differently as individuals and circumstances are different.”^[54] 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.^[55]

[edit] 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.^[56] In an American context, this view is called anti-federalism and paleocons often look to John Calhoun for inspiration.^[57]

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.^[58]

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.”^[59]

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.^[60]

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.^[61]

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."^[62]

[edit] Constitutionalism

A number of paleoconservatives believe the particular kind of federalism found in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution to be central to realizing paleoconservative goals. These people sometimes distinguish themselves as constitutional conservatives.

[edit] Family

[edit] A universal rule

Paleocons often argue that modern managerial society is a threat to stable families. Allan C. 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.^[63]

He calls this a universal rule of human nature, true for Westerners and non-Westerners alike. He also argues that happiness "comes through natural family bonds" and that the "the future of any nation shall be by way of the family."^[64] He defines family as "a man and a woman living in a socially sanctioned bond called marriage for the purposes of propagating and rearing children, sharing intimacy and resources, and conserving lineage, property, and tradition."^[65]

To be human is to be familial. Any significant departure from the family rooted in stable marriage, the welcoming of children, and respect for ancestors and posterity—any deviation from this social structure makes us in a way less “human”: that is, I think it fair to say, the true message of modern science.^[63]

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.^[66]

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.^[67]

[edit] The "post-family order"

Allan C. Carlson says that we live in a “post-family order,” in which elites no longer accept the centrality of family life.^[68][69] 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.”^[70] 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.^[70] He also chides U.S. Republicans “for consistently favoring Wall Street over Main Street.”^[71]

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.^[65] He says that churches and other religious bodies must step in and help rebuild “family-centered communities.”^[70] 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.^[70]

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."^[72] This includes same-sex marriage, the Left's association of family values with fascism, abortion,^[73] and "equity feminism."^[65] Samuel Francis uses similar ideas to argue that society should regulate sexual behavior, specifically laws against sodomy and gays in the military^[74]

[edit] Paleoconservative intellectuals

[edit] 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;^[75] Paul Craig Roberts, an attorney and former Reagan administration Treasury official; commentator Joseph Sobran, a columnist and contributing editor for Chronicles;^[75] novelist and essayist Chilton Williamson, senior editor for books at Chronicles;^[75] classicist Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles;^[76] and historian Clyde N. Wilson, long-time contributing editor for Chronicles.^[75] Another prominent paleoconservative, Theodore Pappas,^[77] is the current executive editor of Encyclopædia Britannica.^[78]

The movement combines disparate people and ideas that might seem incompatible in another context.^[79] Such diversity of thought echoes the paleo opposition to ideology and political rationalism, reflecting the influence of thinkers like Russell Kirk^[80] and Michael Oakeshott.^[81]

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.^[82] On the other hand, Samuel Francis complained that the "Religious Right" focuses on certain social issues and neglects other civilizational crises.^[83]

[edit] 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.^[84]

Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism. Gerald J. Russello described them thus:

1. a belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
2. an affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
3. a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural distinctions;"
4. a belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
5. a faith in custom, convention and prescription, and
6. a recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which is a respect for the political value of prudence.^[85]

In addition, Kirk said Christianity and Western Civilization are “unimaginable apart from one another.”^[49] 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."^[86]

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.^[87]

Kirk also popularized the Irish-born Edmund Burke as the prototypical conservative — and many paleocons consider him a hallowed ancestor.^[88] For them, he represents a vital link between the American right and the greater tradition of British customs and common law.^[89] As such, his ideas are a touchstone for a conservatism that respects tradition, while rejecting authoritarianism.

[edit] Precursors of paleo

In the United States, the Southern Agrarians,^[90] John T. Flynn,^[91] Albert Jay Nock,^[92] Garet Garrett,^[93] Robert R. McCormick,^[94] Felix Morley,^[95] and Robert Nisbet,^[34] among others, articulated positions that have proved influential among contemporary paleoconservatives. Some paleocons enthusiastically embrace the decentralizing tenets of the Anti-Federalists,^[96] such as John Dickinson^[97] and George Mason.^[98] Neoconservative critic David Brooks lists William Jennings Bryan, T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Walker Percy as major paleo influences.^[43] 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."^[99] 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^[100] and Hillaire Belloc^[101] are also popular Catholic forebears of paleo thought.^[102] As for Chesteron and Belloc, Joseph 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.”^[103]

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.^[104] 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.^[105] Samuel Francis even explored the nihilistic fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.^[106] To them, such thinkers help explain modernity, power relationships, and show how managerial society subverted Western traditions.^[107]

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.

[edit] The Southern tradition

The southern conservative thread of paleoconservatism embodies the statesmanship of nineteenth-century figures such as John Randolph of Roanoke,^[108] John Taylor of Caroline and John C. Calhoun. It found a modern expositor in the late Mel Bradford. Historian Paul V. Murphy argues that paleoconservatism is rooted in a group of intellectuals fascinated by antebellum culture and the Southern Agrarians, including Thomas Fleming, Clyde Wilson and Bradford. In the 1970s, Fleming, Wilson and Samuel Francis attended the University of North Carolina together, becoming what Walker Percy called "the Chapel Hill conspiracy."^[49]

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.”^[109] He also says the Southern traditionalist worldview evolved into what appeared in "Chronicles" from the mid-1980s onward, a focus on national identity mixed with regional particularity, plus skepticism of abstract theory and centralized power. They also said the mainstream view of the old South was distorted. For example, Bradford said:

The way to look at the institution of slavery is not backward from 1991 but forward from the hundred years before 1860. Slavery was like the rising and setting of the sun, a fixture of life. In pre-Colonial times, everyone was racist, except a few Quakers. Jefferson thought that Negroes were not capable of taking care of themselves, that they were somewhere between helpless children and orangutans.”^[110]

In the 1995 "New Dixie Manifesto", Fleming and Michael Hill argued that Southerners are pelted with ethnic slurs, denied self-government and stripped of their symbols, including the Confederate flag.^[111] Like any other people, they have the right to their history and cultural identity. “After so many decades of strife,” they wrote, “black and white Southerners of good will should be left alone to work out their destinies, avoiding, before it is too late, the urban hell that has been created by the lawyers, social engineers and imperial bureaucrats who have grown rich on programs that have done nothing to help anyone but themselves.”

Thomas DiLorenzo revisited the Southern paleo critique of Abraham Lincoln in his book, The Real Lincoln. He gives it a paleolibertarian twist, saying the president followed mercantilism, protectionism and the example of Alexander Hamilton.^[112] He also said that the Civil War was about destroying the right of secession, not freeing slaves. Furthermore, he claims that the praise Lincoln commonly receives from conservatives is misguided:

The Gettysburg Address was brilliant oratory, but it was also political subterfuge. As H.L. Mencken pointed out, it was the Southerners who were fighting for the consent of the governed and it was Lincoln’s government that opposed them. They no longer consented to being governed by Washington, DC. Lincoln’s admonition that government "of the people, by the people, for the people" would perish from the earth if the right of secession were sustained was equally absurd. The United States remained a democracy, and the Confederate States of America would have been a democratic country as well. Lincoln’s notion that secession would "destroy" the government of the United States is also bizarre in light of the fact that after secession took place the US government fielded the largest and best-equipped army and navy in the history of the world up to that point for four long years.^[113]

As for the 1861-1865 conflict, Clyde Wilson suggest it be referred to as "The War to Preserve Southern Independence." Fleming argues that secession was legal:

Those who hold the opinion (false and easy to refute) that the United States in 1860 were an amalgamated central state believe that the secession of South Carolina and the other Southern states was illegal, an act of wickedness that can be explained only by the desire of evil Southerners to defend slavery. Thus. in the upside-down and fact-free world of leftists like Harry Jaffa, the war was a “civil war” between the citizens of the same state or, better yet, a rebellion. Abolitionists clearly did not believe this, because after the War, they insisted that Southern states had left the Union and needed to be reconstructed. Everybody knew that it is a basic principle of international law, going back to Grotius at least, that in a confederated state the members have a right to leave.^[114]

Francis, while endorsing “authentic federalism,”^[115] stopped short at supporting a contemporary return to Southern secessionism, saying it is impractical and that the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. He said that Middle Americans in both regions face the same threats.^[116]

David Brooks, a neoconservative critic, says that paleocons do not dream of seeing slavery reborn. Instead, he concludes that they link rural communities to a transcendent order and ancient institutions:

They do not shy away from expressing their true beliefs, and if they supported slavery they would probably say so. They merely believe in the social hierarchies. In those southern communities, they say, social roles were crucial to happiness and ordered sociability. "Aristotle recognized that a well-ordered society protected an ascending order of good through the institutionalization of rank", Fleming and co-author Paul Gottfried wrote in their book The Conservative Movement. They are talking about the social pecking order in old-time towns — the folks who live on the hill, the merchants on Main Street, the village idiot on the green. On a larger scale, the paleocons contrast the virtues of the republic with the corruptions of empire. The empire throws its weight around in the world; the republic minds its own business.^[43]

[edit] Beyond fusionism

[edit] The Cold War coalition

William F. Buckley, Jr. is an unwitting influence on paleoconservatism.^[117] During the Cold War, his National Review magazine^[118] vowed to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop."^[119] It promoted both Burke and Kirk, along with Frank Meyer's theory of fusionism;^[120] it suggested that conservatives and libertarians reduce arguments with one another and present a united front against Communism.^[121] Many first-generation paleocons were National Review supporters,^[122] but slowly grew weary as the journal reflected more and more neoconservative influence,^[123] starting in the 1970s.^[124] Chronicles founder Leopold Tyrmand complained that the movement gave political solutions to cultural problems.^[125]

Open hostility broke out in the mid-1980s and was never resolved.^[123] Some paleocons argued that fusionism failed^[126] and suggested a new alliance on the right to stand outside the neoconservative consensus.^[127] Pat Buchanan's statement that "We are old church and old right, antimperialist and antinterventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana" reflects this new coalition.^[128][43] 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."^[129]

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.^[130] 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.”^[131]

One notable group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), still follows the old fusionism.^[132] 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."^[133]

[edit] 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.”^[134] Burmham wrote in 1967:

In real life, men are joined on a much less than universal scale into a variety of groupings — family, community, church, business, club, party, etc. — which on the political scale reach the maximum significant limit in the nation. Since there is at present time no Humanity or Mankind (socially and historically speaking), there cannot be a World Government - though conceivably there could be a world empire.^[135]

Burnham presented a theory of managerial bureaucracy, presenting a class of elites that gain power in government, business and the media, based on technical skill. Here’s how Francis, who said this theory inspired George Orwell’s "1984", explained it:

Those who hold such skills are able to dominate the state, the economy, and the culture because the structures of these sectors of modern society require technical functions that only specially skilled personnel can provide. The older elites simply lack those skills and eventually lose actual control over the key institutions of modern mass society. As the new, managerial elites take over, society is reconfigured to reflect and support their interests as a ruling class—interests radically different from those of the older elites. Generally, the interests of the new managerial elites consist in maintaining and extending the institutions they control and in ensuring that the needs for and rewards of the technical skills they possess are steadily increased, that society become as dependent on them and their functions as possible.^[136]

Francis, unlike some other paleocons, argued that the existence of managers alone is harmless. Rather, the multiculturalist ideology they adopted drives it toward tyranny.. He said that “white, Christian, male-oriented, bourgeois values and institutions” are the principal restraints of managerial power, which this class seeks to undermine. He explained:

If we could somehow take out the ideology, change the minds of those who control the state, and convert them into paleo-conservatives, the state apparatus itself would be neutral. What really animates its drive toward a totalitarian conquest and reconfiguration of society and the human mind itself comes from the ideology that the masters of the managerial state have adopted, a force that is entirely extraneous and largely accidental to the structure by which they exercise power.^[136]

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.^[137]

[edit] 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,^[138] Auberon Waugh,^[139] Anthony Flew (whom the Rockford Institute awarded the Ingersoll Prize),^[140] and Roger Scruton^[141] as well as Scruton's Salisbury Review and Derek Turner's Right Now!^[142] 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.’^[143]

The One Nation movement in 1990s Australia,^[144] Germany's Junge Freiheit,^[145] and Italy's Lega Nord^[146] reflect many paleo concerns. So may former Russian dissidents Andrei Navrozov^[147] and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.^[148] German ordoliberalism, represented by Wilhelm Ropke, influenced some paleocon thinkers (see below). Paleocons also tend to be euroskeptics.

[edit] Heredity and human nature

[edit] 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.^[149] Murphy says that Thomas Fleming was influenced by the works of the work of writers like E. Evans-Pritchard and Edward O. Wilson.^[150] While criticizing left-wing Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould^[151] and Richard Dawkins,^[152] 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.”^[153] 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.^[154]

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.^[155]

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."^[156] 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.”^[157]

[edit] 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.”^[158] The paleoconservatives argue that the "neocons" are illegitimate interlopers in the conservative movement.

Further information: Neoconservative - Paleoconservative Conflict

[edit] Cultural wars

[edit] The humane society

Paleoconservatives esteem the principles of subsidiarity and localism in recognizing that one may be an Ohioan, Texan or Virginian as surely as they are an American. They usually embrace federalism 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.^[159] 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:^[160]

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.^[161]

Nisbet posited that the contemporary 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.^[162]

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.^[163]

[edit] Culture wars

The ideas of culture war, political correctness and cultural Marxism have played a large role in paleoconservatism.^[164] For example, Patrick Buchanan remarked in 1991:

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.^[165]

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."^[166] In addition to criticizing "environmental extremists" and "radical feminism", he said:

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.^[166]

A month later,^[164] 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,^[167] Buchanan said the culture war had reignited and that Americans no longer inhabited the same moral universe. He gave such examples as gay civil unions, the "crudity of the MTV crowd", and the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. He argued that "a radical Left aided by a cultural elite that detests Christianity and finds Christian moral tenets reactionary and repressive is hell-bent on pushing its amoral values and imposing its ideology on our nation."^[167]

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.^[168]

[edit] The perils of pop culture

In addition, paleocons are typically concerned about the culture-eroding effects of popular culture.^[169] Thomas Fleming chortles that “protesting the message of a Hollywood movie is like protesting a Marxist's economics.”^[170] 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.^[83]

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.^[83]

[edit] 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.^[136]

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.”^[45] 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.^[171]

Paleocon William S. Lind calls PC a form of cultural Marxism, descended from the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory.^[172] Paul Gottfried says the phenomenon does not really reflect Marxism, but the "attitudes and grievances" of Theodor Adorno. In this view, New Class intellectuals see "bourgeois normality, belief in God, and patriotism" as "a slippery slope leading to fascism."^[173]

Furthermore, Paul Gottfried argues that the Left substitutes political correctness, multiculturalism and the welfare state for the old vision of industrialized socialism.^[172] These policies are a "politics of guilt"^[174] that gives supporters legitimacy, prestige and a sense of moral superiority.^[175] Paleocons also argue that neoconservatives also benefit from PC, which they claim to oppose, because they share most of the Left's core values.^[34] 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.^[176]

[edit] The managerial state

[edit] Social Democracy

[edit] 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.”^[177] 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.

Further information: Managerial state

[edit] 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.^[178] Likewise, Murray Rothbard said paleolibertarians should promote a bourgeois middle class revolt against social democracy.^[179]

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.^[180] He says this “lies far from the center: in local communities, in neighborhoods, in small farms and small towns—the classic cradle of populism.”^[181]

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."^[182]

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."^[183] The phrase "conservatives of the heart" became part of his repertoire,^[184] as did another, "peasants with pitchforks."^[185]

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.^[186]

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.^[187]

[edit] Economic debate

[edit] The welfare-warfare state

Economic issues are not a basis for paleo unity.^[188] Many reject free trade and laissez-faire economics as an ideological abstraction,^[189] arguing that it leads to the deterioration of the country's industrial base^[190] or deracinates workers.^[191] Others, however, support laissez-faire economic policies articulated by classical liberals such as Frédéric Bastiat in the nineteenth century.^[192] Paleocons who support Austrian economics, free trade and laissez-faire often call themselves paleolibertarians.^[193]

Both groups attack what Murray Rothbard called the welfare-warfare state,^[194] or the use of state taxation power to fund global military intervention and bureaucratic social assistance programs. Here's how paleocon James Kalb describes some dynamics of economic thought common to both sides:

Conservatives particularly favor free markets when the alternative is to expand bureaucracy to implement liberal goals, a process that clearly has the effect of damaging virtue and community. They also recognize that the market reflects men's infinitely various and often unconscious and inarticulate perceptions and goals far better than any bureaucratic process could. Since conservatism is in part the belief that social life can't in general be administered, conservatives tend to prefer self-organization to central control.^[195]

Yet some paleocons argue that government should intervene to protect domestic industry, while others call this harmful state intrusion. Both sides, however, oppose treaties like GATT and NAFTA, which they say imposes bureaucracy in the name of free trade. For example, Thomas Fleming said:

[In the West,] which is supposedly devoted to economic liberty, governments regulate small businessmen in order to benefit giant corporations, and under misnamed free trade agreements and the World Trade Organization, a small coterie of multinational executives is attempting to eliminate competition, destroy small economic communities (such as nations), and to replace free enterprise with a global economic bureaucracy that will act as a NATO without weapons, though they will always be able to call in NATO troops whenever their usual methods of bribery and intimidation fail.^[131]

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."^[196] 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."^[197]

[edit] 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.^[198] "What Middle Americans need", he said, "is a political formula and a public myth that synthesizes the attention to material-economic interests offered by the left and the defense of concrete and national identity offered by the right."^[199] He argued that defense of capitalism is not a conservative issue^[198]

In addition, Pat Buchanan^[200] and William R. Hawkins are expositors of economic nationalism^[201] They say America's industrial base is eroding and warn of peril posed by uncontrolled free trade and globalization. They also lament large trade deficits between the United States and its trading partners, notably China. Hawkins wrote:

The invasion of foreign products has taken a larger toll on the U.S. economy and society than the invasion of illegal immigrants. Last year [2005], the U.S. imported over $1.6 trillion worth of goods produced overseas. Foreign firms are responsible for much of this assault on American industry. But it is the political influence of nominally American firms that keeps Congress from taking action to secure the U.S. border against foreign economic rivals.^[202]

Philosophically, they believe domestic products deserve tax breaks over imported goods. They also encourage a return to the days when tariffs served most of America's revenue needs. Outsourcing and the underground economy of undocumented labor are also special concerns.

In 1995, Buchanan also proposed radical changes in federal taxes affecting businesses. He released an economic proposal to slash or eliminate the capital gains tax, the federal income tax for small businesses, and inheritance taxes on all family businesses and family farms. Nevertheless, a 17-percent flat tax on large corporations accompanied the cuts.^[203]

Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative also raises income inequality as a conservative issue. Political scientist James Kurth writes in a cover story:

Although they are the largest beneficiaries of the American way of life, including the rule of law, when it comes to the issue of illegal immigration, the rich do everything they can to undermine the American way for the vast majority of other Americans. There is nothing conservative about these actions by the rich; rather, the true conservatives are the less well-off who oppose illegal immigration and who are trying to preserve (and conserve) what was once an established and respected order. But immigration policy is only one example of the most serious problem with increasing economic inequality: the holders of great wealth—especially if they are organized into a political lobby of similar holders of great wealth—can buy not only more goods, more capital, and more people. They can also buy (through the vehicle of campaign contributions) more important people: politicians and other public officials and therefore public policies.^[204]

On another level, Thomas Fleming, who once called himself “more of an anarcho-capitalist than most of the free-marketers I have met,”^[205] calls Austrian economics a Christian heresy.^[206] He attacks lassisez-faire as a nihilistic ideology that actually subverts liberty to "the whims of fashion and the promptings of our glands." This robs people of the stability of family and community. Therefore even capitalism must be rooted in culture and tradition.

Economic liberty and political liberty are part of the good life to which many of us aspire, but they are not universal givens or precious jewels picked up by the first men living in a state of nature. They are the hard-won cultural achievements of the Greek and Roman, English and American political thinkers who discovered and expounded them and of the soldier-farmers who defended them. In other societies, freedom is as little prized as the principles of logic, and in abandoning the West’s moral, social, and cultural traditions, liberals make it impossible either to defend the liberties we have left or to recover those we have lost, and so long as “conservatives” attempt to base their defense of liberty on liberal grounds, they will continue to fail as miserably as they have failed over the past 50 years.^[191]

[edit] Laissez-faire

Main article: Paleolibertarianism

Followers of the late Murray Rothbard^[207] and Lew Rockwell^[208] who embrace paleolibertarianism, and who, being culturally conservative, espouse many of the same themes of paleoconservatives, are also wholly committed to laissez-faire economics.^[209] 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.^[210]

Thus, both groups of paleos complain that globalism, globalization and international finance erode national sovereignty and generally oppose so-called free trade treaties.

[edit] Foreign wars

[edit] Anti-intervention

[edit] 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."^[211] Columnist David Aaronovitch (The Times of London) remarked that paleocons "want out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan, out of everywhere and bring up the drawbridge."^[212]

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."^[213] He also said of the first president's policy, "I rather doubt that he'd have made an exception for Israel."^[214]

Taki Theodoracopulos said he did not call for isolation, but that "we cannot go around in alien cultures imposing democracy."^[215] 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.^[216]

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.^[217] This “ideology of virtuous empire” invokes universal principles like “democracy,” equality,” and “freedom.”^[218]

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.”^[219] 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 war America."^[220]

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.^[221]

[edit] 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)^[222]

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.^[223]

[edit] 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,"^[224]

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.^[225]

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."^[226]

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.^[227]

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.^[228]

[edit] 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.^[229]

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.^[230][231] 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.^[232] Lind warns that this century may see weak forces defeat the strong.^[233]

One paleocon, Srdja Trifkovic argues for a War on Terror, which he says differs from a War on Terrorism. He says that the Bush administration, 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.^[234]

[edit] Immigration reform

[edit] 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.”^[235]

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."^[236]

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.^[237]

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.^[238]

Neocons and paleocons differ radically on the nature of American nationhood. Neos tend to see the United States as “the first universal nation”,^[239] one that embodies rational, democratic principles about freedom, equality and virtue that are applicable everywhere.^[240] Paleocons, on the other hand, see the country as a nation of people sharing a common heritage, culture and language. For example Pat Buchanan says “every true nation is the creation of a unique people.” Further, “Americans are a people apart from all others, with far more in common that political beliefs.”^[241] He also says that America's modern-day sexual immorality and "imperial decadence", promoted by both neo-conservatives and the Left, are not worth emulating.^[242]

[edit] Ethnicity and demographics

[edit] Balkanization

Buchanan's recent book The Death of the West and Chilton Williamson's The Immigration Mystique are contemporary paleoconservative expressions on immigration and culture. Paleoconservatives perceive Balkanization, social and ethnic strife will be the end result of runaway immigration. They complain the attendant failure to cope with illegal immigrants, and the myth of America being "the universal nation."

Many paleocons call for reduced immigration into the United States, including higher selectivity in accepting legal immigrants, favoring Western Europe and the Anglosphere. Others want all immigraion halted permanently.^[243] Some say that whites will be become an ethnic minority even with immigration controls, due to low white birthrates.^[244]

Taki Theodoracopulos of The American Conservative says he rejects racial qualifications for immigrants. Yet he says the United States should not have the demographics of Brazil. "I personally think that it would be nice to have some more Europeans coming in because it was after all a European nation", he remarks.^[245]

Still, American paleocons emphasize appreciation for vibrant regional subcultures, while admitting a need for some degree of European-American cultural unity. Pat Buchanan expressed concern at the declining numbers of whites in America in his book The Death of the West, arguing that few nations have ever held together without an ethnic majority. The regimes which did succeed were widely despised authoritarian states, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus, there is no reason to believe the United States will be any exception.^[246]

[edit] Immigration and terror

Srdja Trifkovic argues that Western nations should use "cultural and religious criteria" when examining potential immigrants. Specifically, widespread Muslim immigration into the West creates a "fifth column" that threatens security:

This is the only immigrant group that harbors a substantial segment of individuals who share the key objectives with the terrorists, even if they do not all approve of their methods. A sizeable minority of them wishes to transform the United States of America into a Caliphate and to replace the Constitution with the Sharia by whatever means. A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy, therefore, must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the West.^[247]

Further, he argues that this situation creates a cultural challenge. He complains that in several Western countries, there are more Muslims at prayer on Fridays than Christians in church on Sunday:

For a Christian the real task is to help our fellow humans who are trapped in Islam and to help them become free. But the more pressing task than that is to help our fellows former Christians, or post-Christians, to become aware of who they are and to become proud of their civilizational and spiritual legacy, because that's the only defense we have. If we fall into the pattern of post-Christian hedonistic and functionally nihilistic post-modern West as we have it today, our goose is cooked—demographically, spiritually, materially, and politically. One can almost not blame Muslims for doing what they are doing, immigrating into the West, procreating at five times the rates of Western nations, because, to paraphrase Martin Luther, they kann nicht anders, they cannot do otherwise. But we do have ourselves to blame for having fallen victim to the putrid, horrible, lukewarm ideology of multiculturalism that cannot be the basis of defense of anything at all. It is a form of anti-culturalism that opens the floodgates of hell.^[248]

[edit] Racial consciousness

The Charles Martel Society goes further, calling for a "third school" to emerge from paleoconservatism resembling European identity politics.^[249] Some paleoconservatives, such as Samuel Francis and Virginia Abernethy and groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, American Renaissance and the journal The Occidental Quarterly, embrace this idea. The Southern Poverty Law Center and similar critics accuse them of racism.^[250]

Francis explicitly linked American success with European demographics.^[251] He also called for "white racial consciousness", equating it with eurocentrism, the "supremacy of white European culture." He distanced this view from white separatism or the white supremacy "obtained under slavery or segregation." He said "there is no reason why nonwhites who reside in the United States could not enjoy equality of legal rights."^[252] He also denied that he proposed "political domination of one race by another or military or coercive 'conquest' in any literal sense.^[253]

[edit] The limits of racial politics

Francis said that paleoconservatism itself makes no scientific conclusions about the nature of race, but gave a summary of the paleo view of race and the state:

What you think the state ought to do about race has little to do with what you think about race. It has everything to do with what you think about the state. Under the properly limited federal government with which this country started out and to which it should return, the state would be unable to do very much at all about race. In the modern leviathan created by liberals, where smoking, sexual beliefs and guns are approved targets of federal meat-grinding, there’s no limit to what the state might do about race or those whose IQs it doesn’t approve.^[34]

Paleocons such as Thomas Fleming, reject explicitly racial politics.^[254] Paleolibertarian Justin Raimondo said that Francis' views on race "are most definitely not shared by Pat Buchanan, Chronicles magazine, or, indeed, any of the paleos I know."^[255] Francis himself said that paleocons could even believe that race is a social construct, "but they should be able to agree, at a minimum, that if the historic character of the American nation is to survive, the exploitation of race as a political weapon by the ruling class must end."^[34]

Fleming distinguished paleoconservatism from white nationalism:

I make no secret of what we stand for: the civilization of the West, the Christian religion that sustained and revived that civilization, a limited and decentralized constitutional government that would vigorously defend American interests while preserving and leaving in peace the real communities in which people work, rear their families, and create whatever is useful, true, and beautiful. However, far too few of the people who share our views on immigration and globalism are willing to take their stand with us on the broader questions. Many of them make no secret of their loathing of Christianity as a “Jewish cult”. The very people who should be defending our civilization would like to tear it up from its roots and wipe out the last 1500 years.^[256]

Scott McConnell also said that immigration reformers should make a distinction between themselves and "racist nuts" bearing swastikas. He said the movements must respond to existing demographic change, that "the Euro-America that existed until roughly 1980 has passed into history." So he argues that "the United States could better welcome and assimilate new immigrants if their rate of entry were reduced."^[257]

In the McConnell-run The American Conservative Steve Sailer posits his own alternative political theory, called "citizenism", which says that national identity should take priority over race.^[258] While calling Francis a thoughtful moderate,^[259] he says that "Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners." He argues that white people are too idealistic and self-sacrificing for "explicit white ethnocentrism" to succeed."^[260]

[edit] References and further reading

[edit] About the right

• "What Is Paleoconservatism?", an editors' roundtable, Chronicles, January 2001.
• "The State of Conservatism: A Symposium", Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1986.
• "What Libertarians and Conservatives Say About Each Other: An Annotated Bibliography", by Jude Blanchette, LewRockwell.com, October 27, 2004.
• Buchanan, Patrick J., Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, 2004. ISBN 0-312-34115-6
• Francis, Samuel T., Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, 1993. ISBN 0-8262-0976-9
• "The Paleo Persuasion", by Samuel Francis, American Conservative, December 12, 2002.
• "How Russell Kirk (And The Right) Went Wrong", by Paul Gottfried, VDARE.com.
• Gottfried, Paul E., The Conservative Movement, 1993. ISBN 0-8057-9749-1
• Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind, 7th Ed., 2001. ISBN 0-89526-171-5
• "The Conservative Movement: Then And Now", by Russell Kirk. Heritage Foundation lecture, n.d.
• Kirk, Russell. The Politics of Prudence, 1993. ISBN 1-882926-01-3
• Nisbet, Robert, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, 2001. ISBN 0-7658-0862-5
• “What I Learned from Paleoism" by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. LewRockwell.com, May 2, 2002.
• Scotchie, Joseph, ed., The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right, 1999. ISBN 1-56000-427-4.

[edit] Critiques of neoconservatism

• Response to Norman Podhoretz, by Patrick J. Buchanan, letter to The Wall Street Journal dated November 5, 1999.
• "Whose War?", by Patrick J. Buchanan, American Conservative, March 24, 2003.
• "Neo-Con Invasion", by Samuel Francis. The New American, August 5, 1996
• "Notes on Neoconservatism", by Paul Gottfried, World and I, September 1986.
• "What’s In A Name? The Curious Case Of Neoconservative", by Paul Gottfried, VDare.com.
• "The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species", by Russell Kirk. Heritage Foundation, Heritage lecture 178, December 15, 1988.
• "Among the Neocons", by Scott McConnell, American Conservative, April 11, 2003.
• "The Ideology of American Empire", by Claes G. Ryn, Orbis 47 2003.
• “Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative" by Stephen J. Tonsor. National Review, June 20, 1986.
• “What Is Paleoconservatism?" by Chris Woltermann. Telos issue 97, 1993.

[edit] Immigration

• Brimelow, Peter, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, 1996. ISBN 0-06-097691-8
• Buchanan, Patrick J., The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, 2001. ISBN 0-312-28548-5
• Buchanan, Patrick J., State of Emergency: How Illegal Immigration Is Destroying America, 2006. ISBN 0-312-36003-7
• Fleming, Thomas, ed., Immigration and the American Identity: Selections From Chronicles, 1985-1995, 1995. ISBN 0-9619364-7-9
• Francis, Samuel T., "America Extinguished: Mass Immigration and the Disintegration of American Culture", 2002. ASIN B0006S696U
• "American Citizenship Is Precious", by Phyllis Schlafly, Phyllis Schlafly Report, November 2005.
• Williamson, Chilton, The Immigration Mystique: America's False Conscience, 1996. ISBN 0-465-03286-9

[edit] Anti-intervention

• Buchanan, Patrick J., A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, 1999. ISBN 0-89526-272-X
• "The Pornography of Compassion and The Cost of Empire", by Thomas Fleming, Chronicles Extra, September 18, 2001
• Kauffman, Bill, America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics, 1995. ISBN 0-87975-956-9
• "Understanding Fourth Generation War" by William S. Lind, Antiwar.com.
• Raimondo, Justin, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, 1993. ISBN 1-883959-00-4.
• Ryn, Claes, America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire, 2003. ISBN 0-7658-0219-8
• "America the Abstraction", by J.P. Zmirak, American Conservative, January 13, 2003.

[edit] Culture, history and social issues

• Bradford, M.E., Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative, 1985. ISBN 0-8203-0766-1
• "The Sad Suicide of Admiral Nimitz", by Patrick J. Buchanan, column dated January 18, 2002.
• Fleming, Thomas, The Politics of Human Nature, 1988. ISBN 1-56000-693-5
• Kirk, Russell, America's British Culture, 1993. ISBN 1-56000-066-X
• Kopff, E. Christian, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition, 2000. ISBN 1-882926-57-9
• Nisbet, Robert, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, 1990. ISBN 1-55815-058-7
• "The Missing Case for Free Trade", by Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE.com, March 15, 2004.
• "Who Will Save America?", by Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch, February 6, 2006.
• Roepke, Wilhelm. A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, ISI edition, 1998. ISBN 1-882926-24-2
• Roepke, Wilhelm. The Social Crisis of Our Time, 1991. ISBN 1-56000-580-7
• "Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow" by Joseph Sobran, National Review, December 31, 1985.
• Sobran, Joseph, Single Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Questions, 1983. ISBN 1-199-24333-7.
• Woods, Thomas E. Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History , 2004. ISBN 0-89526-047-6

[edit] Critical views

• "Pat Buchanan In His Own Words", unbylined FAIR press release dated February 26, 1996.
• "Buchanan's White Whale", by Lawrence Auster, Frontpagemag.com,March 19, 2004.
• “Buchananism: An Intellectual Cause,” by David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, March 11, 1996.
• "Unpatriotic Conservatives", by David Frum, National Review, April 7, 2003.
• "The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism", by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Mises Institute, March 2005.
• "The Buchanan Doctrine", by John Judis, New York Times, October 3, 1999.
• "The End of Paleoconservatism" by James Lubinskas, FrontPageMagazine, November 30, 2000
• "Buchanan and Market", by Jeffrey A. Tucker, Lew Rockwell.com, March 23, 2002.

[edit] Prominent paleoconservatives

[edit] Paleoconservative organizations

[edit] External links

[edit] Magazines

• The American Cause
• The American Conservative
• American Renaissance
• Chronicles Magazine
• The Occidental Quarterly
• Right Now!
• Salisbury Review
• The University Bookman
• VDARE

[edit] Talk Radio

• The Ron Smith Show (Balitimore)
• The Charles Goyette Show (Phoenix paleolibertarian)

[edit] Misc

• Abbeville Institute
• Breaking All the Rules (BATR)
• For the Cause
• James Kalb's Conservatism FAQ
• Council of Conservative Citizens
• Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Old Right Topic News
• The Robert A. Taft Club
• William S. Lind on War

[edit] References