A Paleoconservative ReturnA new anthology documents the history and writings of an American conservative tradition.
Henry George
May 3, 2023
A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition, edited by Paul Gottfried, Lexington Books, 210 pages.
The rise of Donald Trump was both a symptom and an accelerator of divides within the American right, as the candidate and president stampeded through the pieties of Conservatism, Inc. The debate about what he represented continues: an aberration from true, principled conservatism of free markets, low taxes, free trade, and intervention abroad or the reapplication of old right-wing ideas in a new time, of foreign policy restraint, lower immigration, and economic nationalism?
A so-called New Right looks to take this vision forward in a more sophisticated and militant way in the face of an increasingly radicalized Democratic left. But a new anthology on paleoconservatism, prepared by political philosopher Paul Gottfried, reminds us that these debates and conflicts were presaged decades ago, by the emergence of the paleoconservatives and their subsequent swift ejection from Con., Inc. In light of the 20th anniversary this year of the Iraq war disaster—a disaster the paleocons warned of, were derided for as “unpatriotic conservatives," and were proved right over—there is much here from which the American right can still learn.
The word “paleoconservative” conjures images of Cold War fights between the newly ascendant neoconservatives in the 1970s and ’80s and those who hewed to an older conception of American conservatism. Gottfried was there from the beginning, and indeed coined the term itself in his and Thomas Fleming’s 1988 book The Conservative Movement, to differentiate between the two worldviews. What is paleoconservatism? As Gottfried stresses in his introduction to this book, there is a diversity of thought and belief within the paleocon section of the American right, ranging from Hamiltonian Federalists to Jeffersonian Anti-Federalists, Mid-Western populists to sceptics of mass democracy.
Despite this diversity, paleoconservatism coheres around the “shared idea of the good society, which is organic and cohesive. All paleoconservatives are deeply suspicious of our late modern administrative state, which they view as a threat to traditional social relations and as a vehicle for unwanted social transformation.” Moreover, “what is true … for all paleoconservatives is a belief in a fixed human nature, a conviction that leads them to be skeptical of attempts to reconstruct inherited social and gender roles.”
This is in sharp contrast to neoconservatism, which constituted a defense by disillusioned Trotskyists turned managerial liberals of a mid-20th-century consensus—as laid down by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Richard Hofstadter, and others—against a more revolutionary New Left. Any conservatism attached to the neocons derived only from their defense of an established managerial liberalism against something even more radical. Their support from the 1990s to today for intervention abroad, welfarism at home, mass immigration, and free trade, all in service to turning the old America into what they saw as truly democratic, marked them out as adherents of an “armed doctrine” of revolution rather than any recognizable conservative philosophy.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-paleoconservative-return/
