Paleoconservatism
Encyclopedia
Paleoconservatism is a term for a conservative
political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition
, limited government
, civil society
, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism and anti-federalism
, along with religious, regional, national and Western
identity. 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." Paleoconservatism is not expressed as an ideology and its adherents do not necessarily subscribe to any one party line.
Paleoconservatives in the 21st century often highlight their points of disagreement with neoconservatives, especially regarding issues such as military interventionism, immigration
, affirmative action
, free trade
, and foreign aid
, to which they are opposed. They also criticize social welfare and social democracy
, which some refer to as the "therapeutic managerial state
," the "welfare-warfare state" or "polite totalitarianism." They see themselves as the legitimate heirs to the American conservative tradition.
Paul Gottfried
is credited with coining the term in the 1980s. He says the term originally referred to various Americans, such as conservative and traditionalist Catholics and agrarian
Southerners
, who turned to anticommunism during the Cold War
. Paleoconservatism is closely linked with distributism
.
Paleoconservative thought has developed within the pages of the Rockford Institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
. Pat Buchanan
was heavily influenced by its articles and helped create another paleocon publication, The American Conservative
. Its concerns overlap those of the Old Right
that opposed the New Deal
in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as American social conservatism
of the late 20th century expressed, for example, in the book Single Issues by Joseph Sobran
.
root palaeo- meaning "ancient" or "old". It is somewhat tongue-in-cheek—and refers to the paleocons' claim to represent a more historic, authentic conservative tradition than that found in neoconservative. 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."
The paleoconservatives use the suffix conservative
somewhat differently from some US opponents of leftism
. Paleocons may 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. This is mainly due to the paleoconservative's desire to see these incorporated as long-term institutional goals, rather than short-term victories for the movement itself. In this way, paleocons are generally regarded as taking the "long view" toward US conservatism, willing to suffer temporary setbacks while never taking their aim off the goal of establishing the primacy of conservative thought into US politics.
Moreover, Samuel T. Francis, Thomas Fleming and some other paleocons de-emphasized the "conservative" part of the "paleoconservative" label, saying that they do not want the status quo preserved. Fleming and Paul Gottfried called such thinking "stupid tenacity" and described it as "a series of trenches dug in defense of last year's revolution." Francis defined authentic conservatism as "the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions." He said of the paleoconservative movement:
The earliest mention of the word paleoconservative listed in Nexis
is an article by J. Patrick Lewis
in the October 20, 1984, issue of The Nation
, referring to academic economists who allegedly work to redefine poverty. The American Heritage Dictionary (fourth edition) lists a generic, informal use of the term, meaning "extremely or stubbornly conservative in political matters." Outside of the United States
, the word is sometimes spelled palaeoconservative.
Republicans of the interwar period which influenced the U.S. not to join the League of Nations
, reduce immigration with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924
, and oppose Franklin Roosevelt. They often look back even further, to Edmund Burke
, as well as the anti-federalist
movement that stretched from the days of Thomas Jefferson
to John C. Calhoun
.
Paleoconservatives question the supposition that European culture
and mores can ever be transplanted or even forced upon non-Western cultures, due to separate cultural heritages. 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. Sam Francis
wrote:
They are also strongly critical of neoconservatives and their sympathizers in print media, talk radio and cable TV news.
Paleocons often say they are not conservatives in the sense that they necessarily wish to preserve existing institutions or seek merely to slow the growth of modern big government liberalism
. They do not wish to be closely identified with the U.S. Republican Party
. Rather, they seek the renewal of "small 'r'" republican society in the context of the Western heritage, customs and civilization. Joseph Scotchie wrote.
By contrast, paleocons see neoconservatives
as empire
-builders and themselves as defenders of the republic, pointing to Rome as an example of how an ongoing campaign of military expansionism
can destroy a republic.
On some issues, many paleocons are hard to distinguish from others on the conservative spectrum. For example, they tend to oppose abortion
on demand and gay marriage, while supporting capital punishment
, handgun
ownership and an original intent
reading of the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, paleocons are often more sympathetic to environmental protection
, animal welfare
, and anti-consumerism
than others on the US Right.
is limited and finite, any attempt to create a man-made utopia
is headed for disaster and potential carnage. Instead, they lean toward tradition, family, customs, religious institutions and classical learning to provide wisdom and guidance.
Thomas Fleming stated this opposition to abstract ideals in a way that critic David Brooks
called a "startling crescendo":
Historian W. Wesley McDonald explains the opposition to ideology this way:
Along these lines, Joseph Sobran
, in his "Pensees", argues that Western civilization relies on civility at the center of the society:
Certain paleoconservatives 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."
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:
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:
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"
Paleocons tend to dislike abstract principles presented without connection to concrete roots, like religion, heritage or traditional institutions. This distaste 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:
Some paleocons also profess a conservative value-centered historicism
, which Gottfried defines as "the belief that historical circumstances set values." This is distinguished from nihilism
, postmodernism
and moral relativism
. Samuel Francis argued that this position is a "Burkean appeal to tradition." For example, Edmund Burke
wrote in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France."
Claes Ryn says that life has "an enduring purpose, but one that manifests itself differently as individuals and circumstances are different." He writes:
is another key aspect of paleoconservatism, which adherents see as an antitype to the managerial state. The paleocon flavor urges honoring the principle of subsidiarity, that is, decentralized government, local rule, private property and minimal bureaucracy. In an international context, this view would be known as federalism
and paleocons often look to former Congressman
, Senator
, Secretary of War
, Secretary of State
, and Vice President
John C. Calhoun
for inspiration.
As to the role of statecraft in society, Thomas Fleming says it should not be confused with soulcraft. He gives his summary of the paleocon position:
Russell Kirk
, for example, argued that most government tasks should be performed at the local or state level. This is intended to ward off centralization and protect community sentiment by putting the decision-making power closer to the populace. He rooted this in the Christian notion of original sin; since humanity is flawed, society should not put too much power in a few hands. Gerald J. Russello concluded that this involved "a different way of thinking about government, one based on an understanding of political society as beginning in place and sentiment, which in turn supports written laws."
This anti-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:
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 handing decision-making over to parents, teachers and districts. Controversies such as evolution
, bus
ing and curriculum
standards would be settled on a local basis.
In addition, he opposed a 1998 Puerto Rican statehood plan on the grounds that the island would be ripped from its cultural and linguistic roots: "Let Puerto Rico
remain Puerto Rico, and let the United States remain the United States and not try to absorb, assimilate and Americanize a people whose hearts will forever belong to that island."
, former president of the Rockford Institute
, argues that
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 future of any nation shall be by way of the family." 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."
Joseph Sobran
picks up this same theme, saying that heterosexual marriage is hard-coded into human nature:
Paleocons also question the validity of gender feminism in similar ways, some questioning feminism in both its 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. Certain attitudes toward feminism also create room for the managerial state to try engineering sexual equality. Gottfried described this position, which was influenced by scholar Allan Carlson, thus:
says that we live in a "post-family order", in which elites no longer accept the centrality of family life. 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."
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 consequence
s of public policy with good intentions. He also chides U.S. Republicans "for consistently favoring Wall Street over Main Street."
As an alternative to the "abstract state", Carlson argues the state must recognize that men and women "are different in reproductive, economic, and social functions", even though they share political and property rights. He says that churches and other religious bodies must step in and help rebuild "family-centered communities." As for common people, he says,
Carlson argues that the family's greatest challenge in the early 21st century comes from what he calls "soft totalitarianism
s", which are "packaged around a militant secular individualism, but still seeking to build a marriage-free, post-family order." This includes same-sex marriage, the Left's association of family values with fascism
, abortion
, and "equity feminism". Samuel T. Francis uses similar ideas to argue that society should regulate sexual behavior, specifically laws against sodomy and gays in the military.
, a Professor of Philosophy at Emory and corresponding editor for Chronicles
; Paul Craig Roberts
, an attorney and former Reagan administration
Treasury official; commentator Joseph Sobran
(died 2010), a columnist and contributing editor for Chronicles; novelist and essayist Chilton Williamson, senior editor for books at Chronicles; classicist Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles; and historian Clyde N. Wilson
, long-time contributing editor for Chronicles.
Another prominent paleoconservative, Theodore Pappas
, is the current executive editor of Encyclopædia Britannica
.
The movement combines disparate people and ideas that might seem incompatible in another context. Such diversity of thought echoes the paleo opposition to ideology
and political rationalism, reflecting the influence of thinkers like Russell Kirk
and Michael Oakeshott
.
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." On the other hand, Samuel Francis complained that the "Religious Right
" focuses on certain social issues and neglects other civilizational crises.
(1914-1994) is a key figure in paleoconservatism, 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.
Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism. Gerald J. Russello described them thus:
In addition, Kirk said Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another." He said that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."
Kirk called libertarians "chirping sectaries", quoting T. S. Eliot
, and said that they and conservatives have nothing in common. He called the movement "an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating." He said a line of division exists between believers in "some sort of transcendent moral order" and "utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct." He put libertarians in the latter category.
Kirk also popularized the Anglo-Irish
statesman Edmund Burke
as the prototypical conservative—and many paleocons consider him a hallowed ancestor. For them, he represents a vital link between the American right and the greater tradition of British customs and common law. As such, his ideas are a touchstone for a conservatism that respects tradition, while rejecting authoritarianism.
, John T. Flynn
, Albert Jay Nock
, Garet Garrett
, Robert R. McCormick
, Felix Morley
, and Richard M. Weaver
among others, articulated positions that have proved influential among contemporary paleoconservatives. Some paleocons enthusiastically embrace the decentralizing tenets of the Anti-Federalists, such as John Dickinson
and George Mason
. 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. The German-born Johannes Althusius
and his tract Politica, with its core emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity
, has proven influential as well.
Paul Gottfried once noted an "occasional paleo association with over-the-top Catholicism." In fact, counter-revolutionary (Roman Catholic) European precursors to the paleoconservatives include Joseph de Maistre
, Charles Maurras
, Juan Donoso Cortes
, Klemens Wenzel von Metternich
, and Pope Pius IX
, though they tend to carry influence limited to the Roman Catholic traditionalist subset of paleoconservatism. G. K. Chesterton
and Hillaire Belloc are also popular Catholic forebears of paleo thought. As for Chesterton and Belloc, Joseph Sobran explained their relevance:
Some non-Catholic paleocons, such as Sam Francis, complained that this tradition is overrepresented among conservative intellectuals, thus putting the movement out of step with Middle America. He reluctantly acknowledged the Southern Presbyterian influence upon his own thinking. In addition, precursors of a Protestant paleoconservatism can be seen in 19th century figures such as Robert Lewis Dabney
, Charles Hodge
, Friedrich Julius Stahl
, Abraham Kuyper
and Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer
.
Many paleocons also look to more modernist or historicist sources, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes and even Gramsci for intellectual ammunition. Contrarian Leftists such as Eugene Genovese, Christopher Lasch
and Paul Piccone
also influenced the movement. Samuel Francis even explored the nihilistic fiction of H. P. Lovecraft
. To them, such thinkers help explain modernity, power relationships, and show how managerial society subverted Western traditions.
Some modern European continental conservatives, such as Frenchmen Jacques Barzun
, Alain de Benoist
, and René Girard
, have a mode of thought and cultural criticism esteemed by many paleoconservatives.
, John Taylor of Caroline
and John C. Calhoun
. It found modern expositors in the late Richard M. Weaver
and 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 novelist Walker Percy
called "the Chapel Hill conspiracy."
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
." 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:
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. 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
. 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:
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:
Francis, while endorsing "authentic federalism," 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.
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:
was an unwitting influence on paleoconservatism. During the Cold War
, his National Review
magazine vowed to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop." It promoted both Burke and Kirk, along with Frank Meyer's theory of fusionism
; it suggested that conservatives and libertarians reduce arguments with one another and present a united front against Communism. Many first-generation paleocons were National Review supporters, but slowly grew weary as the journal reflected more and more neoconservative influence, starting in the 1970s. Chronicles founder Leopold Tyrmand
complained that the movement gave political solutions to cultural problems.
Open hostility broke out in the mid-1980s and was never resolved. Some paleocons argued that fusionism failed and suggested a new alliance on the right to stand outside the neoconservative consensus. Pat Buchanan's statement that "We are old church and old right, antiimperialist and antinterventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana" reflects this new coalition. William Rusher, former publisher of Buckley's magazine, claims that paleocons are not "representative" conservatives. "The break between the National Review and the paleoconservatives is no tempest in a teapot", he says. "It may well determine the direction of American foreign policy for decades to come."
One problem, according to Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis, was that this was an "archaic conservatism." This means it saw too much continuity between ancient traditions and the contemporary West, which was in "mortal combat" with Communists and other enemies. Gottfried says the problem with this mindset, which he finds even in Russell Kirk, is that it missed that "the U.S. was then clearly on its way to becoming a self-identified multicultural society overseen by a post-Christian managerial elite." So these conservatives became too optimistic about modern-day civic virtue. Looking back, Thomas Fleming remarked that
One notable group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
(ISI), still follows the old fusionism. It showcases both neoconservative and Old Right ideas, such as anti-interventionism, limited government and cultural regionalism, in its publications and conferences. While they favor free-market solutions they tend to recognize the limitations of the market, or as economist Wilhelm Roepke says, "the market is not everything." ISI scholarship includes analysis of agrarian and distributist works, along with the idea of an "humane economy."
, 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." Burmham wrote in 1967:
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:
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:
Francis also said, however, that ideology helps the managerial elite increase its grip on society:
, and British conservatives such as Enoch Powell
, Peter Hitchens
, Antony Flew
(whom the Rockford Institute awarded the Ingersoll Prize), John Betjeman
, and Roger Scruton
as well as Scruton's Salisbury Review
and Derek Turner
's Quarterly Review
, emphasize skepticism, stability, and the Burkean inheritance, and may be considered broadly sympathetic to paleo values. For example, Hitchens wrote, in opposition to the Iraq War,
Note the One Nation movement in 1990s Australia, Germany's Junge Freiheit
, and Italy's Lega Nord.
And compare the Russian dissidents Andrei Navrozov
and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
.
, as such theories become widely accepted in society, many paleoconservative intellectuals have become interested in the findings of anthropology, genetics, and sociobiology for insight into human behavior. Murphy says that Thomas Fleming was influenced by the works of writers like E. Evans-Pritchard and Edward O. Wilson. While criticizing evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould
they see evidence for traditional values in these fields. The Rockford Institute even awarded sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson a 1989 Ingersoll Prize.
Thomas Fleming takes a view of human nature that mixes classical philosophy with sociobiology. He said, "the laws and decrees enacted by human government are mutable and sometimes tyrannical", yet "the laws of human nature, worked tight within the spirals of the genetic code, are unchanging and just." Critic Tony Glaister describes the attitude thus:
In this way, Fleming sees both the sexual revolution and abortion as "a revolution against human nature and against the most basic elements of human society."
Differing views exist on the specific question of evolution vs. intelligent design. Fleming says intelligent design is "a boneheaded piece of pseudo-science, almost as simplistic as the naive materialism that Darwinists teach." Pat Buchanan says that "science itself points to intelligent design", such that the existence of natural laws, such as in gravity, physics or chemistry, implies "the existence of a lawmaker." Steve Sailer
has argued that leftists downplay the "politically incorrect" implications of evolution. Sailer writes, for instance, that Richard Dawkins
dances around the real implications of kin selection
theory:
Eschewing Platonic definitions of race, Sailer argues that a race is better thought of in terms of common ancestry. He argues:
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition
Tradition
A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...
, limited government
Limited government
Limited government is a government which anything more than minimal governmental intervention in personal liberties and the economy is generally disallowed by law, usually in a written constitution. It is written in the United States Constitution in Article 1, Section 8...
, civil society
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...
, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism and anti-federalism
Anti-Federalism
Anti-Federalism refers to a movement that opposed the creation of a stronger U.S. federal government and which later opposed the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. The previous constitution, called the Articles of Confederation, gave state governments more authority...
, along with religious, regional, national and Western
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
identity. 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." Paleoconservatism is not expressed as an ideology and its adherents do not necessarily subscribe to any one party line.
Paleoconservatives in the 21st century often highlight their points of disagreement with neoconservatives, especially regarding issues such as military interventionism, immigration
Immigration
Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...
, affirmative action
Affirmative action
Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...
, free trade
Free trade
Under a free trade policy, prices emerge from supply and demand, and are the sole determinant of resource allocation. 'Free' trade differs from other forms of trade policy where the allocation of goods and services among trading countries are determined by price strategies that may differ from...
, and foreign aid
Aid
In international relations, aid is a voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another, given at least partly with the objective of benefiting the recipient country....
, to which they are opposed. They also criticize social welfare and social democracy
Social democracy
Social democracy is a political ideology of the center-left on the political spectrum. Social democracy is officially a form of evolutionary reformist socialism. It supports class collaboration as the course to achieve socialism...
, which some refer to as the "therapeutic managerial state
Managerial state
Managerial state is a paleoconservative concept used in critiquing modern social democracy in Western countries. The term takes a pejorative context as a manifestation of Western decline. Theorists Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried say this is an ongoing regime that remains in power,...
," the "welfare-warfare state" or "polite totalitarianism." They see themselves as the legitimate heirs to the American conservative tradition.
Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried
Paul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...
is credited with coining the term in the 1980s. He says the term originally referred to various Americans, such as conservative and traditionalist Catholics and agrarian
Agrarianism
Agrarianism has two common meanings. The first meaning refers to a social philosophy or political philosophy which values rural society as superior to urban society, the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values...
Southerners
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
, who turned to anticommunism during the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
. Paleoconservatism is closely linked with distributism
Distributism
Distributism is a third-way economic philosophy formulated by such Catholic thinkers as G. K...
.
Paleoconservative thought has developed within the pages of the Rockford Institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
Chronicles (magazine)
Chronicles is a U.S. monthly magazine published by the Rockford Institute. Its full current name is Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. The magazine is known for promoting anti-globalism, anti-intervention and anti-immigration stances within conservative politics, and is considered one of...
. Pat Buchanan
Pat Buchanan
Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought...
was heavily influenced by its articles and helped create another paleocon publication, The American Conservative
The American Conservative
The American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
. Its concerns overlap those of the Old Right
Old Right (United States)
The Old Right was a conservative faction in the United States that opposed both New Deal domestic programs and U.S. entry into World War II. Many members of this faction were associated with the Republicans of the interwar years led by Robert Taft, but some were Democrats...
that opposed the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as American social conservatism
Social conservatism
Social Conservatism is primarily a political, and usually morally influenced, ideology that focuses on the preservation of what are seen as traditional values. Social conservatism is a form of authoritarianism often associated with the position that the federal government should have a greater role...
of the late 20th century expressed, for example, in the book Single Issues by Joseph Sobran
Joseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...
.
Name
The prefix paleo derives from the GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
root palaeo- meaning "ancient" or "old". It is somewhat tongue-in-cheek—and refers to the paleocons' claim to represent a more historic, authentic conservative tradition than that found in neoconservative. Adherents of paleoconservatism often describe themselves simply as "paleo-." Rich Lowry
Rich Lowry
Richard A. Lowry is the editor of National Review, a conservative American news magazine, and a syndicated columnist.-Career:...
of National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
claims the prefix "is designed to obscure the fact that it is a recent ideological creation of post-Cold War politics."
The paleoconservatives use the suffix conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
somewhat differently from some US opponents of leftism
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
. Paleocons may reject attempts by Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is an American radio talk show host, conservative political commentator, and an opinion leader in American conservatism. He hosts The Rush Limbaugh Show which is aired throughout the U.S. on Premiere Radio Networks and is the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United...
and others to graft short-term policy goals—such as school choice
School choice
School choice is a term used to describe a wide array of programs aimed at giving families the opportunity to choose the school their children will attend. As a matter of form, school choice does not give preference to one form of schooling or another, rather manifests itself whenever a student...
, enterprise zones, and faith-based initiatives—into the core of conservatism. This is mainly due to the paleoconservative's desire to see these incorporated as long-term institutional goals, rather than short-term victories for the movement itself. In this way, paleocons are generally regarded as taking the "long view" toward US conservatism, willing to suffer temporary setbacks while never taking their aim off the goal of establishing the primacy of conservative thought into US politics.
Moreover, Samuel T. Francis, Thomas Fleming and some other paleocons de-emphasized the "conservative" part of the "paleoconservative" label, saying that they do not want the status quo preserved. Fleming and Paul Gottfried called such thinking "stupid tenacity" and described it as "a series of trenches dug in defense of last year's revolution." Francis defined authentic conservatism as "the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions." He said of the paleoconservative movement:
What paleoconservatism tries to tell Americans is that the dominant forces in their society are no longer committed to conserving the traditions, institutions, and values that created and formed it, and, therefore, that those who are really conservative in any serious sense and wish to live under those traditions, institutions, and values need to oppose the dominant forces and form new ones.
The earliest mention of the word paleoconservative listed in Nexis
LexisNexis
LexisNexis Group is a company providing computer-assisted legal research services. In 2006 it had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records related information...
is an article by J. Patrick Lewis
J. Patrick Lewis
J. Patrick Lewis is an American poet and prose writer noted for his children's poems and other light verse. He worked as professor of economics before devoting himself full-time to writing in 1998.- Career :J...
in the October 20, 1984, issue of The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, referring to academic economists who allegedly work to redefine poverty. The American Heritage Dictionary (fourth edition) lists a generic, informal use of the term, meaning "extremely or stubbornly conservative in political matters." Outside of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the word is sometimes spelled palaeoconservative.
Conservative heritage
Many paleoconservatives identify themselves as "classical conservatives" and trace their philosophy to the Old RightOld Right (United States)
The Old Right was a conservative faction in the United States that opposed both New Deal domestic programs and U.S. entry into World War II. Many members of this faction were associated with the Republicans of the interwar years led by Robert Taft, but some were Democrats...
Republicans of the interwar period which influenced the U.S. not to join the League of Nations
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace...
, reduce immigration with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924
Immigration Act of 1924
The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, and Asian Exclusion Act , was a United States federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already...
, and oppose Franklin Roosevelt. They often look back even further, to Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
, as well as the anti-federalist
Anti-Federalism
Anti-Federalism refers to a movement that opposed the creation of a stronger U.S. federal government and which later opposed the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. The previous constitution, called the Articles of Confederation, gave state governments more authority...
movement that stretched from the days of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
to John C. Calhoun
John C. Calhoun
John Caldwell Calhoun was a leading politician and political theorist from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun eloquently spoke out on every issue of his day, but often changed positions. Calhoun began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent...
.
Paleoconservatives question the supposition that European culture
Culture of Europe
The culture of Europe might better be described as a series of overlapping cultures. Whether it is a question of North as opposed to South; West as opposed to East; Orthodoxism as opposed to Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism as opposed to Secularism; many have claimed to identify cultural...
and mores can ever be transplanted or even forced upon non-Western cultures, due to separate cultural heritages. As a result, paleocons are most distinctive in their emphatic opposition to open immigration
Immigration
Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...
by non-Europeans, and their general disapproval of U.S. intervention overseas. Sam Francis
Sam Francis
Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker.-Early life:...
wrote:
We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people and that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies.
They are also strongly critical of neoconservatives and their sympathizers in print media, talk radio and cable TV news.
Paleocons often say they are not conservatives in the sense that they necessarily wish to preserve existing institutions or seek merely to slow the growth of modern big government liberalism
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
. They do not wish to be closely identified with the U.S. Republican Party
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
. Rather, they seek the renewal of "small 'r'" republican society in the context of the Western heritage, customs and civilization. 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.
By contrast, paleocons see neoconservatives
Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism in the United States is a branch of American conservatism. Since 2001, neoconservatism has been associated with democracy promotion, that is with assisting movements for democracy, in some cases by economic sanctions or military action....
as empire
Empire
The term empire derives from the Latin imperium . Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples united and ruled either by a monarch or an oligarchy....
-builders and themselves as defenders of the republic, pointing to Rome as an example of how an ongoing campaign of military expansionism
Expansionism
In general, expansionism consists of expansionist policies of governments and states. While some have linked the term to promoting economic growth , more commonly expansionism refers to the doctrine of a state expanding its territorial base usually, though not necessarily, by means of military...
can destroy a republic.
On some issues, many paleocons are hard to distinguish from others on the conservative spectrum. For example, they tend to oppose abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
on demand and gay marriage, while supporting capital punishment
Capital punishment
Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...
, handgun
Handgun
A handgun is a firearm designed to be held and operated by one hand. This characteristic differentiates handguns as a general class of firearms from long guns such as rifles and shotguns ....
ownership and an original intent
Original intent
Original intent is a theory in law concerning constitutional and statutory interpretation. It is frequently—and usually spuriously—used as a synonym for originalism generally; while original intent is indeed one theory in the originalist family, it has some extremely salient differences which has...
reading of the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, paleocons are often more sympathetic to environmental protection
Environmental protection
Environmental protection is a practice of protecting the environment, on individual, organizational or governmental level, for the benefit of the natural environment and humans. Due to the pressures of population and our technology the biophysical environment is being degraded, sometimes permanently...
, animal welfare
Animal welfare
Animal welfare is the physical and psychological well-being of animals.The term animal welfare can also mean human concern for animal welfare or a position in a debate on animal ethics and animal rights...
, and anti-consumerism
Anti-consumerism
Anti-consumerism refers to the socio-political movement against the equating of personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions...
than others on the US Right.
Human nature, tradition and reason
Paleoconservatives argue that since human natureHuman nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....
is limited and finite, any attempt to create a man-made utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
is headed for disaster and potential carnage. Instead, they lean toward tradition, family, customs, religious institutions and classical learning to provide wisdom and guidance.
Thomas Fleming stated this opposition to abstract ideals in a way that critic David Brooks
David Brooks (journalist)
David Brooks is a Canadian-born political and cultural commentator who considers himself a moderate and writes for the New York Times...
called a "startling crescendo":
Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy; equality, and natural rights; the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government. No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe in any of this.
Historian W. Wesley McDonald explains the opposition to ideology this way:
In a humane social order, a community of spirit is fostered in which generations are bound together. According to [Russell] Kirk, this link is achieved through moral and social norms that transcend the particularities of time and place and, because they form the basis of genuine civilized existence, can only be neglected at great peril. These norms, reflected in religious dogmas, traditions, humane letters, social habit and custom, and prescriptive institutions, create the sources of the true community that is the final end of politics.
Along these lines, Joseph Sobran
Joseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...
, 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.
Certain paleoconservatives say that tradition is a better guide than reason. For example, Mel Bradford
Mel Bradford
Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford was a conservative political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas....
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."
Thomas Fleming calls tradition "a body of wisdom and truth and a set of attitudes and behavior handed down from one generation to another. It is our parents' respect for their grandfathers that we reflect when we refuse to think ourselves wiser than our ancestors and do not presume to condemn their shortcomings." By following tradition, Joseph Sobran said that society can maintain continuity with the past, through words, rituals, records, commemorations, and laws:
There is no question of "resisting change." The only question is what can and should be salvaged from "devouring time." Conservation is a labor, not indolence, and it takes discrimination to identify and save a few strands of tradition in the incessant flow of mutability. In fact conservation is so hard that it could never be achieved by sheer conscious effort. Most of it has to be done by habit, as when we speak in such a way as to make ourselves understood by others without their having to consult a dictionary, and thereby give a little permanence to the kind of tradition that is a language.
Furthermore, James Kalb argues that tradition succeeds where ideology fails because it includes habits and attitudes about things that are hard to articulate rationally. Many aspects of social life resist clear definition, so technocratic approaches to social policy deserve suspicion:
Our knowledge is partial and attained with difficulty. The effects of political proposals are difficult to predict and as the proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable. We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge critically.
Concrete roots
Many paleocons also say that Westerners have lost touch with their classical and European heritage, to the point that they are in danger of losing their civilization.Robert S. Griffin notes that paleocons fear the United States becoming a "secularized, homogenized, de-Europeanized, pacified, deluded, manipulated, lowest-common-denominator-leveled, popular-culture-dopified country"
The decadence of a civilization by loss of faith and vigour can be observed more than once in history. What is extraordinary about the American situation is the stupidity. The Romans, such is my impression, did not become stupid and incompetent with their decadence. Americans have not lost faith in their cultural inheritance—they have been entirely separated from it. How this happened is one of the few topics still worth exploring in this Twilight.
Paleocons tend to dislike abstract principles presented without connection to concrete roots, like religion, heritage or traditional institutions. This distaste for universalism
Universalism
Universalism in its primary meaning refers to religious, theological, and philosophical concepts with universal application or applicability...
includes the doctrinal conclusions by socialists, neo-Thomists and Straussians. For example, Mel Bradford wrote in "A Better Guide Than Reason" (citing Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law...
) that:
The only freedom which can last is a freedom embodied somewhere, rooted in a history, located in space, sanctioned by genealogy, and blessed by a religious establishment. The only equality which abstract rights, insisted upon outside the context of politics, are likely to provide is the equality of universal slavery. It is a lesson which Western man is only now beginning to learn.
Some paleocons also profess a conservative value-centered historicism
Historicism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
, which Gottfried defines as "the belief that historical circumstances set values." This is distinguished from nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
, postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
and moral relativism
Moral relativism
Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...
. Samuel Francis argued that this position is a "Burkean appeal to tradition." For example, Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
wrote in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France."
I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.
Claes Ryn says that life has "an enduring purpose, but one that manifests itself differently as individuals and circumstances are different." He writes:
For the conservative, the universal imperative that binds human beings does not announce its purpose in simple, declaratory statements. How, then, does one discern its demands? Sometimes only with difficulty. Only through effort can the good or true or beautiful be discovered, and they must be realized differently in different historical circumstances. The same universal values have diverse manifestations. Some of the concrete instantiations of universality take us by surprise. Because there is no simple roadmap to good, human beings need freedom and imagination to find it. Universality has nothing to do with uniformity.
Anti-Federalism
Anti-FederalismAnti-Federalism
Anti-Federalism refers to a movement that opposed the creation of a stronger U.S. federal government and which later opposed the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. The previous constitution, called the Articles of Confederation, gave state governments more authority...
is another key aspect of paleoconservatism, which adherents see as an antitype to the managerial state. The paleocon flavor urges honoring the principle of subsidiarity, that is, decentralized government, local rule, private property and minimal bureaucracy. In an international context, this view would be known as federalism
Federalism
Federalism is a political concept in which a group of members are bound together by covenant with a governing representative head. The term "federalism" is also used to describe a system of the government in which sovereignty is constitutionally divided between a central governing authority and...
and paleocons often look to former Congressman
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
, Senator
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
, Secretary of War
United States Secretary of War
The Secretary of War was a member of the United States President's Cabinet, beginning with George Washington's administration. A similar position, called either "Secretary at War" or "Secretary of War," was appointed to serve the Congress of the Confederation under the Articles of Confederation...
, Secretary of State
United States Secretary of State
The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...
, and Vice President
Vice President of the United States
The Vice President of the United States is the holder of a public office created by the United States Constitution. The Vice President, together with the President of the United States, is indirectly elected by the people, through the Electoral College, to a four-year term...
John C. Calhoun
John C. Calhoun
John Caldwell Calhoun was a leading politician and political theorist from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun eloquently spoke out on every issue of his day, but often changed positions. Calhoun began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent...
for inspiration.
As to the role of statecraft in society, Thomas Fleming says it should not be confused with soulcraft. He gives his summary of the paleocon position:
Our basic position on the state has always been twofold: 1) a recognition that man is a social and political animal who cannot be treated as an "individual" without doing damage to human nature. In this sense libertarian theory is as wrong and as potentially harmful as communism. The commonwealth is therefore a natural and necessary expression of human nature that provides for the fulfillment of human needs, and 2) the modern state is a cancerous form of polity that has metastasized and poisoned the natural institutions from which the state derives all legitimacy—family, church, corporation (in the broadest sense), and neighborhood. Thus, it is almost always a mistake to try to use the modern state to accomplish moral or social ends.
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
, for example, argued that most government tasks should be performed at the local or state level. This is intended to ward off centralization and protect community sentiment by putting the decision-making power closer to the populace. He rooted this in the Christian notion of original sin; since humanity is flawed, society should not put too much power in a few hands. Gerald J. Russello concluded that this involved "a different way of thinking about government, one based on an understanding of political society as beginning in place and sentiment, which in turn supports written laws."
This anti-federalism extends to culture too. In general, this means that different regional groups should be able to maintain their own distinct identity. For example, Thomas Fleming and Michael Hill argue that the American South and every other region have the right to "preserve their authentic cultural traditions and demand the same respect from others." In their Southern context they call on citizens to "take control of their own governments, their own institutions, their own culture, their own communities and their own lives" and "wean themselves from dependence on federal largesse."
They say that:
A concern for states' rights, local self-government and regional identity used to be taken for granted everywhere in America. But the United States is no longer, as it once was, a federal union of diverse states and regions. National uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League.
In a similar fashion, Pat Buchanan
Pat Buchanan
Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought...
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 handing decision-making over to parents, teachers and districts. Controversies such as evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, bus
Bus
A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...
ing and curriculum
Curriculum
See also Syllabus.In formal education, a curriculum is the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university. As an idea, curriculum stems from the Latin word for race course, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow to become mature adults...
standards would be settled on a local basis.
In addition, he opposed a 1998 Puerto Rican statehood plan on the grounds that the island would be ripped from its cultural and linguistic roots: "Let Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
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."
Family
Paleocons often argue that modern managerial society is a threat to stable families. Allan C. CarlsonAllan C. Carlson
Allan C. Carlson is a scholar and professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He is the president of the Howard Center, a director of the Family in America Studies Center, the International Secretary of the World Congress of Families and editor of the Family in America...
, former president of the Rockford Institute
Rockford Institute
Rockford Institute is a conservative think-tank associated with paleoconservatism, based in Rockford, Illinois. It is known for the John Randolph Club, and publishes Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture....
, argues that
The family is the natural and fundamental social unitSocial unitSocial unit is a term used in sociology, anthropology, ethnology, and also in animal behaviour studies, zoology and biology to describe a social entity which is part of and participates in a larger social group or society....
, 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.
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 future of any nation shall be by way of the family." 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."
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.
Joseph Sobran
Joseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...
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.
Paleocons also question the validity of gender feminism in similar ways, some questioning feminism in both its radical and moderate forms. They say that the push for total gender equality dehumanizes both men and women, damaging the nuclear family
Nuclear family
Nuclear family is a term used to define a family group consisting of a father and mother and their children. This is in contrast to the smaller single-parent family, and to the larger extended family. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple, but not always; the nuclear family may have...
and sacralizing abortion. Certain attitudes toward feminism also create 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.
Post-family order
Allan C. CarlsonAllan C. Carlson
Allan C. Carlson is a scholar and professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He is the president of the Howard Center, a director of the Family in America Studies Center, the International Secretary of the World Congress of Families and editor of the Family in America...
says that we live in a "post-family order", in which elites no longer accept the centrality of family life. 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."
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 consequence
Unintended consequence
In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the outcomes intended by a purposeful action. The concept has long existed but was named and popularised in the 20th century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton...
s of public policy with good intentions. He also chides U.S. Republicans "for consistently favoring Wall Street over Main Street."
As an alternative to the "abstract state", Carlson argues the state must recognize that men and women "are different in reproductive, economic, and social functions", even though they share political and property rights. He says that churches and other religious bodies must step in and help rebuild "family-centered communities." As for common people, he says,
Men and women are both called home to rebuild families with an inner sanctity, to relearn the authentic meanings of the ancient words husbandry and housewifery, and to exercise the natural family functions of education, the care of the weak, charity, and a common economic life.
Carlson argues that the family's greatest challenge in the early 21st century comes from what he calls "soft totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
s", which are "packaged around a militant secular individualism, but still seeking to build a marriage-free, post-family order." This includes same-sex marriage, the Left's association of family values with fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
, and "equity feminism". Samuel T. Francis uses similar ideas to argue that society should regulate sexual behavior, specifically laws against sodomy and gays in the military.
Polemics
Other contemporary luminaries include Donald LivingstonDonald Livingston
Donald Livingston is an American philosophy professor based at Emory University with an expertise in the writings of David Hume. Livingston received his doctorate at Washington University in 1965. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and is on the editorial board of Hume...
, a Professor of Philosophy at Emory and corresponding editor for Chronicles
Chronicles (magazine)
Chronicles is a U.S. monthly magazine published by the Rockford Institute. Its full current name is Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. The magazine is known for promoting anti-globalism, anti-intervention and anti-immigration stances within conservative politics, and is considered one of...
; Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts is an American economist and a columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as a co-founder of Reaganomics. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and...
, an attorney and former Reagan administration
Reagan Administration
The United States presidency of Ronald Reagan, also known as the Reagan administration, was a Republican administration headed by Ronald Reagan from January 20, 1981, to January 20, 1989....
Treasury official; commentator Joseph Sobran
Joseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...
(died 2010), a columnist and contributing editor for Chronicles; novelist and essayist Chilton Williamson, senior editor for books at Chronicles; classicist Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles; and historian Clyde N. Wilson
Clyde N. Wilson
Clyde N. Wilson is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, U.S., a paleoconservative political commentator, a long-time contributing editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and Southern Partisan magazine, and an occasional contributor to National Review...
, long-time contributing editor for Chronicles.
Another prominent paleoconservative, Theodore Pappas
Theodore Pappas
Theodore N. "Ted" Pappas is the current executive editor of Encyclopædia Britannica. Earlier he was managing editor of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He has also written Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Other...
, is the current executive editor of Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
.
The movement combines disparate people and ideas that might seem incompatible in another context. Such diversity of thought echoes the paleo opposition to ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
and political rationalism, reflecting the influence of thinkers like Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
and Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law...
.
Pat Buchanan
Pat Buchanan
Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought...
argues that a good politician must "defend the moral order rooted in the Old and New Testament and Natural Law
Natural law
Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...
"—and that "the deepest problems in our society are not economic or political, but moral." On the other hand, Samuel Francis complained that the "Religious Right
Christian right
Christian right is a term used predominantly in the United States to describe "right-wing" Christian political groups that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative policies...
" focuses on certain social issues and neglects other civilizational crises.
Kirkian legacy
Russell KirkRussell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
(1914-1994) is a key figure in paleoconservatism, 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
Robert Taft
Robert Alphonso Taft , of the Taft political family of Cincinnati, was a Republican United States Senator and a prominent conservative statesman...
in the 1950s, write for National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
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.
Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism. Gerald J. Russello described them thus:
- a belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
- an affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
- a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural distinctions;"
- a belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
- a faith in custom, convention and prescription, and
- a recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which is a respect for the political value of prudence.
In addition, Kirk said Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another." He said that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."
Kirk called libertarians "chirping sectaries", quoting T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, and said that they and conservatives have nothing in common. He called the movement "an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating." He said a line of division exists between believers in "some sort of transcendent moral order" and "utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct." He put libertarians in the latter category.
Kirk also popularized the Anglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish was a term used primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries to identify a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until...
statesman Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
as the prototypical conservative—and many paleocons consider him a hallowed ancestor. For them, he represents a vital link between the American right and the greater tradition of British customs and common law. As such, his ideas are a touchstone for a conservatism that respects tradition, while rejecting authoritarianism.
Precursors
In the United States, the Southern AgrariansSouthern Agrarians
The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
, John T. Flynn
John T. Flynn
John Thomas Flynn was an American journalist best known for his opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to American entry into World War II.-Career:...
, Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock was an influential United States libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century.- Life and work :...
, Garet Garrett
Garet Garrett
Garet Garrett , born Edward Peter Garrett, was an American journalist and author who was noted for his criticisms of the New Deal and U.S. involvement in the Second World War.-Overview:...
, Robert R. McCormick
Robert R. McCormick
Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick was a member of the McCormick family of Chicago who became owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper...
, Felix Morley
Felix Morley
Felix Muskett Morley was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from the United States.-Biography:Morley was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, his father being the mathematician Frank Morley. Like his brothers, Christopher and Frank, Felix was educated at Haverford College and enjoyed a Rhodes...
, and Richard M. Weaver
Richard M. Weaver
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid- 20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric...
among others, articulated positions that have proved influential among contemporary paleoconservatives. Some paleocons enthusiastically embrace the decentralizing tenets of the Anti-Federalists, such as John Dickinson
John Dickinson (delegate)
John Dickinson was an American lawyer and politician from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Wilmington, Delaware. He was a militia officer during the American Revolution, a Continental Congressman from Pennsylvania and Delaware, a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, President of...
and George Mason
George Mason
George Mason IV was an American Patriot, statesman and a delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention...
. Neoconservative critic David Brooks
David Brooks (journalist)
David Brooks is a Canadian-born political and cultural commentator who considers himself a moderate and writes for the New York Times...
lists William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was an American politician in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He was a dominant force in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States...
, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
, John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...
, Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...
, and Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
as major paleo influences. The German-born Johannes Althusius
Johannes Althusius
Johannes Althusius was a German jurist and Calvinist political philosopher.He is best known for his 1603 work, "Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata"; revised editions were published in 1610 and 1614...
and his tract Politica, with its core emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity
Subsidiarity
Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which...
, has proven influential as well.
Paul Gottfried once noted an "occasional paleo association with over-the-top Catholicism." In fact, counter-revolutionary (Roman Catholic) European precursors to the paleoconservatives include Joseph de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre was a French-speaking Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat. He defended hierarchical societies and a monarchical State in the period immediately following the French Revolution...
, Charles Maurras
Charles Maurras
Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras was a French author, poet, and critic. He was a leader and principal thinker of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras' ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and "nationalisme...
, Juan Donoso Cortes
Juan Donoso Cortés
Juan Donoso Cortés, marqués de Valdegamas , Spanish author, political theorist, and diplomat, was born at Valle de la Serena...
, Klemens Wenzel von Metternich
Klemens Wenzel von Metternich
Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich was a German-born Austrian politician and statesman and was one of the most important diplomats of his era...
, and Pope Pius IX
Pope Pius IX
Blessed Pope Pius IX , born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, was the longest-reigning elected Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, serving from 16 June 1846 until his death, a period of nearly 32 years. During his pontificate, he convened the First Vatican Council in 1869, which decreed papal...
, though they tend to carry influence limited to the Roman Catholic traditionalist subset of paleoconservatism. G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG was an English writer. His prolific and diverse output included philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction....
and Hillaire Belloc are also popular Catholic forebears of paleo thought. As for Chesterton 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."
Some non-Catholic paleocons, such as Sam Francis, complained that this tradition is overrepresented among conservative intellectuals, thus putting the movement out of step with Middle America. He reluctantly acknowledged the Southern Presbyterian influence upon his own thinking. In addition, precursors of a Protestant paleoconservatism can be seen in 19th century figures such as Robert Lewis Dabney
Robert Lewis Dabney
Robert Lewis Dabney was an American Christian theologian, a Southern Presbyterian pastor, and Confederate Army chaplain. He was also chief of staff and biographer to Stonewall Jackson. His biography of Jackson remains in print today.Dabney and James Henley Thornwell were two of Southern...
, Charles Hodge
Charles Hodge
Charles Hodge was the principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878. A Presbyterian theologian, he was a leading exponent of historical Calvinism in America during the 19th century. He was deeply rooted in the Scottish philosophy of Common Sense Realism...
, Friedrich Julius Stahl
Friedrich Julius Stahl
Friedrich Julius Stahl , German ecclesiastical lawyer and politician, was born at Würzburg, of Jewish parentage....
, Abraham Kuyper
Abraham Kuyper
Abraham Kuijper generally known as Abraham Kuyper, was a Dutch politician, journalist, statesman and theologian...
and Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer , Dutch politician and historian, was born at Voorburg, near the Hague.-Overview:...
.
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
Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch was a well-known American historian, moralist, and social critic....
and Paul Piccone
Paul Piccone
Paul Piccone was the founder and long-time editor of the journal TELOS.He was born in L'Aquila in Italy to a family that emigrated to Rochester, New York in the mid-1950s. In 1968 he and others started the journal TELOS, which he edited until his death in 2004.He completed a doctorate in...
also influenced the movement. Samuel Francis even explored the nihilistic fiction of H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
. To them, such thinkers help explain modernity, power relationships, and show how managerial society subverted Western traditions.
Some modern European continental conservatives, such as Frenchmen Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun is a French-born American historian of ideas and culture. He has written on a wide range of topics, but is perhaps best known as a philosopher of education, his Teacher in America being a strong influence on post-WWII training of schoolteachers in the United...
, Alain de Benoist
Alain de Benoist
Alain de Benoist is a French academic, philosopher, a founder of the Nouvelle Droite and head of the French think tank GRECE. Benoist is a critic of liberalism, free markets and egalitarianism.-Biography:...
, and René Girard
René Girard
René Girard is a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy...
, have a mode of thought and cultural criticism esteemed by many paleoconservatives.
Southern tradition
The southern conservative thread of paleoconservatism embodies the statesmanship of nineteenth-century figures such as John Randolph of RoanokeJohn Randolph of Roanoke
John Randolph , known as John Randolph of Roanoke, was a planter and a Congressman from Virginia, serving in the House of Representatives , the Senate , and also as Minister to Russia...
, John Taylor of Caroline
John Taylor of Caroline
John Taylor usually called John Taylor of Caroline was a politician and writer. He served in the Virginia House of Delegates and in the United States Senate . He wrote several books on politics and agriculture...
and John C. Calhoun
John C. Calhoun
John Caldwell Calhoun was a leading politician and political theorist from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun eloquently spoke out on every issue of his day, but often changed positions. Calhoun began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent...
. It found modern expositors in the late Richard M. Weaver
Richard M. Weaver
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid- 20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric...
and Mel Bradford
Mel Bradford
Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford was a conservative political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas....
. 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
University of North Carolina
Chartered in 1789, the University of North Carolina was one of the first public universities in the United States and the only one to graduate students in the eighteenth century...
together, becoming what novelist Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
called "the Chapel Hill conspiracy."
Murphy wrote that they developed "a particularistic politics of states' rights
States' rights
States' rights in U.S. politics refers to political powers reserved for the U.S. state governments rather than the federal government. It is often considered a loaded term because of its use in opposition to federally mandated racial desegregation...
and localism
Localism (politics)
Localism describes a range of political philosophies which prioritize the local. Generally, localism supports local production and consumption of goods, local control of government, and promotion of local history, local culture and local identity...
, which they combine with a cultural and social criticism defined by Christian and patriarchal organicism
Organicism
Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole. By definition it is close to holism. Plato, Hobbes or Constantin Brunner are examples of such philosophical thought....
." 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.
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. 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
Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas James DiLorenzo is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland. He is an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. He is a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an associated scholar of the Abbeville Institute...
revisited the Southern paleo critique of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
in his book, The Real Lincoln
The Real Lincoln
The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War is a biography of Abraham Lincoln written by Thomas DiLorenzo in 2002...
. He gives it a paleolibertarian twist, saying the president followed mercantilism, protectionism and the example of Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury...
. He also said that the Civil War was about destroying the right of secession
Secession
Secession is the act of withdrawing from an organization, union, or especially a political entity. Threats of secession also can be a strategy for achieving more limited goals.-Secession theory:...
, 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 governedConsent of the governed"Consent of the governed" is a phrase synonymous with a political theory wherein a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and legal when derived from the people or society over which that political power is exercised...
and it was Lincoln's government that opposed them. They no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. 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.
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 CarolinaSouth CarolinaSouth Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
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.
Francis, while endorsing "authentic federalism," 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.
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. "AristotleAristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
recognized that a well-ordered society protected an ascending order of good through the institutionalization of rank", Fleming and co-author Paul GottfriedPaul GottfriedPaul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...
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.
Fusionism
William F. Buckley, Jr.William F. Buckley, Jr.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...
was an unwitting influence on paleoconservatism. During the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, his National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
magazine vowed to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop." It promoted both Burke and Kirk, along with Frank Meyer's theory of fusionism
Fusionism (politics)
Fusionism is an American political term for the combination or "fusion" of traditional conservatives with some libertarians and some social conservatives, forming the American conservative movement.-History and positions:...
; it suggested that conservatives and libertarians reduce arguments with one another and present a united front against Communism. Many first-generation paleocons were National Review supporters, but slowly grew weary as the journal reflected more and more neoconservative influence, starting in the 1970s. Chronicles founder Leopold Tyrmand
Leopold Tyrmand
Leopold Tyrmand was a Polish novelist and editor. He studied architecture for a year at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris before the war, and during the war was a resistance fighter in Poland, a waiter in Germany , and a prisoner in a Norwegian concentration camp...
complained that the movement gave political solutions to cultural problems.
Open hostility broke out in the mid-1980s and was never resolved. Some paleocons argued that fusionism failed and suggested a new alliance on the right to stand outside the neoconservative consensus. Pat Buchanan's statement that "We are old church and old right, antiimperialist and antinterventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana" reflects this new coalition. William Rusher, former publisher of Buckley's magazine, claims that paleocons are not "representative" conservatives. "The break between the National Review and the paleoconservatives is no tempest in a teapot", he says. "It may well determine the direction of American foreign policy for decades to come."
One problem, according to Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis, was that this was an "archaic conservatism." This means it saw too much continuity between ancient traditions and the contemporary West, which was in "mortal combat" with Communists and other enemies. Gottfried says the problem with this mindset, which he finds even in Russell Kirk, is that it missed that "the U.S. was then clearly on its way to becoming a self-identified multicultural society overseen by a post-Christian managerial elite." So these conservatives became too optimistic about modern-day civic virtue. Looking back, Thomas Fleming remarked that
- "In theory, the Cold Warriors were protecting the people of Britain, France, and the United States against the expansion of an evil empire, but nations can only be successfully defended by people who believe in nationhood, which is anathema to the liberal assumptions that are the foundation of most Western states."
One notable group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., or ', is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1953 as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists...
(ISI), still follows the old fusionism. It showcases both neoconservative and Old Right ideas, such as anti-interventionism, limited government and cultural regionalism, in its publications and conferences. While they favor free-market solutions they tend to recognize the limitations of the market, or as economist Wilhelm Roepke says, "the market is not everything." ISI scholarship includes analysis of agrarian and distributist works, along with the idea of an "humane economy."
Burnham revolution
One fusionist, James BurnhamJames Burnham
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...
, 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." 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.
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.
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.
Francis also said, however, that ideology helps the managerial elite increase its grip on society:
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.
International parallels
As paleoconservatism germinated as a reaction to neoconservatism, most of its development as a distinct political tendency under that name has been in the United States, although there are parallels in the traditional Old Right of other Western nations. French conservatives such as Jean RaspailJean Raspail
Jean Raspail is a French author, traveler and explorer.Jean Raspail was born the son of factory manager Octave Raspail and Marguerite Chaix...
, and British conservatives such as Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell, MBE was a British politician, classical scholar, poet, writer, and soldier. He served as a Conservative Party MP and Minister of Health . He attained most prominence in 1968, when he made the controversial Rivers of Blood speech in opposition to mass immigration from...
, Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens
Peter Jonathan Hitchens is an award-winning British columnist and author, noted for his traditionalist conservative stance. He has published five books, including The Abolition of Britain, A Brief History of Crime, The Broken Compass and most recently The Rage Against God. Hitchens writes for...
, Antony Flew
Antony Flew
Antony Garrard Newton Flew was a British philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, he was notable for his works on the philosophy of religion....
(whom the Rockford Institute awarded the Ingersoll Prize), John Betjeman
John Betjeman
Sir John Betjeman, CBE was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture...
, and Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
Roger Vernon Scruton is a conservative English philosopher and writer. He is the author of over 30 books, including Art and Imagination , Sexual Desire , The Aesthetics of Music , and A Political Philosophy: Arguments For Conservatism...
as well as Scruton's Salisbury Review
Salisbury Review
The Salisbury Review is a British conservative magazine, published quarterly and founded in 1982. Roger Scruton was its chief editor for eighteen years and published it through his Claridge Press. It was named after Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the British Prime Minister at the...
and Derek Turner
Derek Turner (journalist)
Derek Turner is a freelance journalist. In the early 1980s he served in the Irish Navy and moved to England in 1988.Derek Turner was editor of Right Now! magazine from 1995 until its demise in December 2006...
's Quarterly Review
Quarterly Review
The Quarterly Review was a literary and political periodical founded in March 1809 by the well known London publishing house John Murray. It ceased publication in 1967.-Early years:...
, emphasize skepticism, stability, and the Burkean inheritance, and may be considered broadly sympathetic to paleo values. 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.’
Note the One Nation movement in 1990s Australia, Germany's Junge Freiheit
Junge Freiheit
The Junge Freiheit is a German weekly newspaper for politics and culture, that describes itself as liberal-conservative...
, and Italy's Lega Nord.
And compare the Russian dissidents Andrei Navrozov
Andrei Navrozov
Andrei Navrozov, poet and writer, was born in Moscow in 1956, grandson of the playwright Andrei Navrozov , son of the essayist and translator Lev Navrozov .- Early life :...
and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
.
Biology, genes and behavior
While in the past, many paleocons have criticized DarwinismDarwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
, as such theories become widely accepted in society, many paleoconservative intellectuals have become interested in the findings of anthropology, genetics, and sociobiology for insight into human behavior. Murphy says that Thomas Fleming was influenced by the works of writers like E. Evans-Pritchard and Edward O. Wilson. While criticizing evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....
they see evidence for traditional values in these fields. The Rockford Institute even awarded sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson a 1989 Ingersoll Prize.
Thomas Fleming takes a view of human nature that mixes classical philosophy with sociobiology. He said, "the laws and decrees enacted by human government are mutable and sometimes tyrannical", yet "the laws of human nature, worked tight within the spirals of the genetic code, are unchanging and just." Critic Tony Glaister describes the attitude thus:
For Fleming, human nature is rooted in the biological family; consequently, the extension of state power he sees as thoroughly deleterious. Family adhesion is the glue of our biologically determined natural social environment. From John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to existentialism (and by implication, nihilism) and social fragmentation, the way is shorter than we think. The principle that society consists of a social bond created contractually between each member and every other, is in accordance with the existentialist belief that existence precedes essence. For the existentialist, man creates his nature and his history by existing and the actions which constitute that existence and not by virtue of a biological inheritance or the unfolding of an inherent "human nature". If there is no God which precedes Man, there is no essence to which his reactions refer. This implies a rejection of essential or immutable human nature.
In this way, Fleming sees both the sexual revolution and abortion 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.
Differing views exist on the specific question of evolution vs. intelligent design. Fleming says intelligent design is "a boneheaded piece of pseudo-science, almost as simplistic as the naive materialism that Darwinists teach." Pat Buchanan says that "science itself points to intelligent design", such that the existence of natural laws, such as in gravity, physics or chemistry, implies "the existence of a lawmaker." Steve Sailer
Steve Sailer
Steven Ernest Sailer is an American journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative, a blogger, a VDARE.com columnist, and a former correspondent for UPI. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports.-Personal life:Sailer grew up...
has argued that leftists downplay the "politically incorrect" implications of evolution. Sailer writes, for instance, that Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
dances around the real implications of kin selection
Kin selection
Kin selection refers to apparent strategies in evolution that favor the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. Charles Darwin was the first to discuss the concept of group/kin selection...
theory:
[ Pierre L. van den Berghe's concept of] "ethnic nepotism" [lead him to] to sociobiology and its bedrock finding: the late William D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection and inclusive fitness—the more genes we share with another individual, the more altruistic we feel toward him. There are no clear boundaries between extended family, tribe, ethnic group, or race. So van den Berghe coined the term "ethnic nepotismEthnic nepotismEthnic nepotism describes a human tendency for in-group bias or in-group favouritism applied by nepotism for people with the same ethnicity.- The theory :...
" to describe the human tendency to favor "our people." Ethnocentrism, clannishness, xenophobia, nationalism, and racism are the almost inevitable flip sides of ethnic nepotism... [The] genetic basis for ethnic nepotism with each racial group is roughly as strong on average as the etymologically classic case of nepotism among close kin—the uncle-nephew bond. Ethnic nepotism isn't a metaphor. It's a reality. And we'd better accept it—whether Richard Dawkins thinks it would be good for his career or not.
Eschewing Platonic definitions of race, Sailer argues that a race is better thought of in terms of common ancestry. He argues:
A race is simply an extremely extended family.... [A]s you extend the boundaries of the extended family farther and farther out, you typically find that they start turning in upon themselves. Most families down through history have married almost exclusively within some sort of population that's more restricted than the entire human species. Thus, while traits unique to a family fade with time (forward or backward) and outward to more distant relatives, a racial group's biological traits can remain quite stable over fairly long periods.
Neoconservatism
Pat Buchanan calls neoconservatism "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology." The paleoconservatives argue that the "neocons" are illegitimate interlopers in the conservative movement. In 1986, historian Stephen Tonsor, who rejects the label paleoconservative", said:
It has always struck me as odd, even perverse, that former Marxists have been permitted, yes invited, to play such a leading role in the Conservative movement of the twentieth century. It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.
Prominent people
- Virginia AbernethyVirginia AbernethyVirginia Deane Abernethy is an American professor of psychiatry and anthropology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College, an M.B.A. from Vanderbilt University, and Ph.D. from Harvard University...
- Chuck BaldwinChuck BaldwinCharles Obadiah "Chuck" Baldwin is an American politician and founder-pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida. He was the presidential nominee of the Constitution Party for the 2008 U.S. presidential election and had previously been its nominee for U.S. vice president in 2004...
- Mel BradfordMel BradfordMelvin E. "Mel" Bradford was a conservative political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas....
- Peter BrimelowPeter BrimelowPeter Brimelow is a British American financial journalist, author, and founder of VDARE. Brimelow has been the editor of many publications, including Forbes, the Financial Post, and National Review...
- Pat BuchananPat BuchananPatrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought...
- Bob ConleyBob ConleyRobert M. "Bob" Conley is an American pilot, engineer, and politician. He was the 2008 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator from South Carolina; he ran against and lost to Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham....
- John DerbyshireJohn DerbyshireJohn Derbyshire is a British-American writer. His columns in National Review and cover a broad range of political-cultural topics, including immigration, China, history, mathematics, and race. Derbyshire's 1996 novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, was a New York Times "Notable Book of the...
- John James Duncan, Jr.John James Duncan, Jr.John James "Jimmy" Duncan, Jr. is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 1988. He is a member of the Republican Party. The district is based in Knoxville.-Early life, education, and legal career:...
- James Edwards
- Thomas Fleming
- Samuel T. Francis
- Virgil GoodeVirgil GoodeVirgil Hamlin Goode, Jr. , is an American politician, last serving as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. He represented the 5th congressional district of Virginia from 1997 to 2009...
- Paul GottfriedPaul GottfriedPaul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...
- Michael HillLeague of the SouthThe League of the South is a Southern nationalist organization, headquartered in Killen, Alabama, which states that its ultimate goal is "a free and independent Southern republic." The group defines the Southern United States as the states that made up the former Confederacy...
- Alex JonesAlex JonesAlex or Alexander Jones may refer to:*Alex Jones , U.S. radio host and filmmaker*Alex Jones , Major League Baseball pitcher from 1889 to 1903...
- Walter B. JonesWalter B. JonesWalter Beaman Jones, Jr. is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 1995. He is a member of the Republican Party. The district encompasses the Outer Banks and areas near the Pamlico Sound. Jones' father was Walter B. Jones, Sr., a Democratic Party congressman from the neighboring 1st district...
- Russell KirkRussell KirkRussell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
- E. Christian Kopff
- Donald W. LivingstonDonald LivingstonDonald Livingston is an American philosophy professor based at Emory University with an expertise in the writings of David Hume. Livingston received his doctorate at Washington University in 1965. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and is on the editorial board of Hume...
- Wayne LuttonThe Social Contract PressThe Social Contract Press is an American publisher. It is a proponent of immigration reduction and population control, with an emphasis on issues such as culture and the environment...
- Robert NovakRobert NovakRobert David Sanders "Bob" Novak was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator. After working for two newspapers before serving for the U.S. Army in the Korean War, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and then for...
- Paul Craig RobertsPaul Craig RobertsPaul Craig Roberts is an American economist and a columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as a co-founder of Reaganomics. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and...
- Claes G. RynClaes G. RynDr. Claes Gösta Ryn is a Swedish-born, American academic and educator.-Background:Ryn was born and raised in Norrköping in Sweden. He attended the Latin Gymnasium, Norrköpings Högre Allmänna Läroverk' . He was an undergraduate and a doctoral student at Uppsala University...
- Steve SailerSteve SailerSteven Ernest Sailer is an American journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative, a blogger, a VDARE.com columnist, and a former correspondent for UPI. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports.-Personal life:Sailer grew up...
- Roger ScrutonRoger ScrutonRoger Vernon Scruton is a conservative English philosopher and writer. He is the author of over 30 books, including Art and Imagination , Sexual Desire , The Aesthetics of Music , and A Political Philosophy: Arguments For Conservatism...
- Joseph SobranJoseph SobranMichael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...
- Tom TancredoTom TancredoThomas Gerard "Tom" Tancredo is an American politician from Colorado, who represented the state's sixth congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, as a Republican...
- Chilton Williamson
- Clyde Wilson
Organizations
- Abbeville Institute
- American Cause
- John Randolph ClubJohn Randolph ClubThe John Randolph Club is a paleoconservative social and political organization founded in the 1980s and operated by the Rockford Institute. It is named after John Randolph of Roanoke , a 19th century U.S...
- Rockford InstituteRockford InstituteRockford Institute is a conservative think-tank associated with paleoconservatism, based in Rockford, Illinois. It is known for the John Randolph Club, and publishes Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture....
- Robert A. Taft Club
Periodicals
- The American ConservativeThe American ConservativeThe American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
- The Distributist Review
- Chronicles (magazine)Chronicles (magazine)Chronicles is a U.S. monthly magazine published by the Rockford Institute. Its full current name is Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. The magazine is known for promoting anti-globalism, anti-intervention and anti-immigration stances within conservative politics, and is considered one of...
- Liberty WatchLiberty WatchLiberty Watch: The Magazine was a libertarian publication based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Founded in March 2005, the magazine released its first issue in April 2005 with a cover story on the property-tax debate of the 2005 state legislature. Since then, Liberty Watch has featured several U.S...
- Middle American NewsMiddle American NewsMiddle American News is a monthly paleoconservative newspaper published by the Middle American Institute in Raleigh, North Carolina, known for its anti-globalist stances and criticism of mass immigration....
- The New American
- Right Now!
- Quarterly ReviewQuarterly ReviewThe Quarterly Review was a literary and political periodical founded in March 1809 by the well known London publishing house John Murray. It ceased publication in 1967.-Early years:...
Broadcasting
- The American View
- Ron Smith ShowRon Smith (radio host)Ron Smith is an American talk radio show host on WBAL in Baltimore, Maryland. His show now airs weekdays from 9 to noon ET. It formerly aired from 3 to 6 pm ET....
- Chuck Baldwin LiveChuck BaldwinCharles Obadiah "Chuck" Baldwin is an American politician and founder-pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida. He was the presidential nominee of the Constitution Party for the 2008 U.S. presidential election and had previously been its nominee for U.S. vice president in 2004...
See also
- PaleolibertarianismPaleolibertarianismPaleolibertarianism is a school of thought within American libertarianism associated with the late economist Murray Rothbard, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It is based on a combination of right-libertarianism in politics and cultural conservatism in social thought...
- Cultural conservatismCultural conservatismCultural conservatism is described as the preservation of the heritage of one nation, or of a shared culture that is not defined by national boundaries. Other variants of cultural conservatism are concerned with culture attached to a given language such as Arabic.The shared culture may be as...
- Criticism of multiculturalismCriticism of multiculturalismCriticism of multiculturalism questions the multicultural ideal of the co-existence of distinct ethnic cultures within one nation-state. Multiculturalism is a particular subject of debate in certain European nations that were once associated with a single, homogeneous, national cultural identity...
- Traditionalist conservatismTraditionalist ConservatismTraditionalist conservatism, also known as "traditional conservatism," "traditionalism," "Burkean conservatism", "classical conservatism" and , "Toryism", describes a political philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, tradition, hierarchy and...
About the right
- "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., "Statement of Principles," published at various journals, Feb. 14, 2004.
- Kirk, Russell. The Politics of Prudence, 1993. ISBN 1-882926-01-3
- Nisbet, Robert, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, 2001. ISBN 0-7658-0862-5
Critiques of neoconservatism
- Response to Norman Podhoretz, by Patrick J. Buchanan, letter to The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
dated November 5, 1999. - "Whose War?", by Patrick J. Buchanan, The American ConservativeThe American ConservativeThe American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
, March 24, 2003. - "Neo-Con Invasion", by Samuel T. Francis. The New American, August 5, 1996
- "Notes on Neoconservatism", by Paul GottfriedPaul GottfriedPaul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...
, World and I, September 1986. - "What's In A Name? The Curious Case Of Neoconservative", by Paul GottfriedPaul GottfriedPaul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...
, VDare.com. - "The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species", by Russell KirkRussell KirkRussell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
. Heritage Foundation, Heritage lecture 178, December 15, 1988. - "Among the Neocons", by Scott McConnell, The American ConservativeThe American ConservativeThe American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
, 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 ReviewNational ReviewNational Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
, June 20, 1986.
Immigration
- Brimelow, Peter, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration DisasterAlien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration DisasterAlien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster is a 1995 national bestseller book by Peter Brimelow. It criticizes US immigration policy after 1965 from a conservative perspective...
, 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., "Nation or Notion?," syndicated op-ed, Oct. 4, 2006.
- 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 SchlaflyPhyllis SchlaflyPhyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly is a Constitutional lawyer and an American politically conservative activist and author who founded the Eagle Forum. She is known for her opposition to modern feminism ideas and for her campaign against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment...
, Phyllis Schlafly Report, November 2005. - Streitz, Paul, "America First: Why Americans Must End Free Trade, Stop Outsourcing and Close Our Open Borders", 2006, ISBN 0-9713498-9-4.
- Williamson, Chilton, The Immigration Mystique: America's False Conscience, 1996. ISBN 0-465-03286-9
Non-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. LindWilliam S. LindWilliam S. Lind is an American expert on military affairs and a pundit on cultural conservatism.-Education:Lind graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 and from Princeton University in 1971, where he received a Master's Degree in history.-Military expertise:Alongside several U.S. officers, Lind...
, Antiwar.com. - 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, The American ConservativeThe American ConservativeThe American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
, January 13, 2003.
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.
- 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
- Roberts, Paul Craig, "The Missing Case for Free Trade", VDARE.com, March 15, 2004.
- "Who Will Save America?", by Paul Craig RobertsPaul Craig RobertsPaul Craig Roberts is an American economist and a columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as a co-founder of Reaganomics. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and...
, CounterPunchCounterpunchCounterpunch can refer to:* Counterpunch , a punch in boxing* CounterPunch, a bi-weekly political newsletter* Counterpunch , a type of punch used in traditional typography* Punch-Counterpunch, a Transformers character...
, February 6, 2006. - Roepke, Wilhelm. The Social Crisis of Our Time, 1991. ISBN 1-56000-580-7
- Sailer, Steve, "Fragmented Future: Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones," American Conservative, Jan. 15, 2007.
- Sailer, Steve, "The Reality of Race," VDare, May 25, 2000.
- Woods, Thomas E. Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History , 2004. ISBN 0-89526-047-6
Critical views
- "Pat Buchanan In His Own Words", unbylined FAIR press release dated February 26, 1996.
- "Buchanan's White Whale", by Lawrence AusterLawrence AusterLawrence Auster is an American traditionalist conservative blogger and essayist.-Personal life:Auster grew up in New Jersey. He attended Columbia University for two years, later finishing a B.A. in English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He moved to Manhattan in 1978, and still resides...
, Frontpagemag.com, March 19, 2004. - "The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism", by Hans-Hermann HoppeHans-Hermann HoppeHans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian School economist of the anarcho-capitalist tradition, and a Professor Emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.-Academic career:...
, Mises Institute, March 2005. - "Buchanan and Market", by Jeffrey A. Tucker, Lew Rockwell.com, March 23, 2002.