Paleoconservative worldview

The ideology of Paleoconservatism is mainly seen as conservative and libertarian. It is anti-communist, anti-authoritarian right winged that stresses tradition, civil society and classical federalism, along with familial, 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.”

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

Cultural wars

The humane society

Paleoconservatives esteem the principles of subsidiarity and localism in recognizing that one may be an Ohioan, Texan or Virginian as surely as they are an American. They usually embrace federalism and are typically staunch supporters of states' rights. They tend to be critical of overreaching federal power usurping state and local authority. For example, Thomas Fleming opposed efforts to federalize the Terri Schiavo case in 2005 — and said President Bush was hypocritical to position himself as a pro-life spokesman. On the other hand, even though some have argued that the Supreme Court came down on the side of local decision-making, Scott Richert, executive editor of Chronicles, denounced Kelo v. City of New London as an exercise in federal power that substantially removed traditional common-law restraints on state and local governments:

The Fifth Amendment does point to one important aspect of the common-law understanding of eminent domain that bound all governments in America—local, state, and federal. Property could be taken only for “public use,” and this is where the foes of the Incorporation Doctrine who have greeted Kelo with enthusiasm are sorely mistaken. In the process of removing federal-court oversight of state and local eminent-domain proceedings, the Supreme Court has expanded the concept of eminent domain to include circumstances that the common law would have flatly rejected—and, in so doing, has expanded the power of local and state governments to tyrannical levels. Post-Kelo, every governmental body can redistribute any property within its boundaries as it sees fit—as long as it can argue that the new owner will put it to better economic use than the previous one had. And who will judge whether the governmental body has proved its argument? According to Kelo, that judgment is left up to the governmental body itself, not the courts.

Many paleoconservatives are sympathetic to the critiques of economist Wilhelm Roepke and sociologist Robert Nisbet. Roepke was critical of political and economic centralization, and "the cult of the colossal." Roepke recognized the interplay between the political and economic order, and held that a decentralized political federal polity was conducive to the ideal economic order most compatible with the human condition.

Nisbet posited that the contemporary preoccupation with community was a result of the displacement of the intermediary institutions between the individual and the state whether the family, neighborhood, guild, church, or voluntary and civic associations. The corps intermediaries—that is the intermediary institutions between the individual and the state—served as the only effective restraint against the centripetal forces of centralized political and economic power. The displacement of these institutions so vital to civil society and the accompanying obsession with community was precipitated by the activities and structure of the modern state.

Nisbet held that the centralized state has dissolved the natural bonds and allegiances of civil society. In totalitarian movements in Europe, there was actually a conscious effort by the state to dissolve those allegiances. Much of the later twentieth century social pathologies, dependency, poverty, and rampant crime perhaps owe to authentic community being ground in the millstone of central state authority. As a result, paleoconservatives hope to restore authentic community by devolving power and authority back to the corp intermediaries while curtailing state power.

Culture wars

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

Last month, during a week at CNN in New York, I rode nightly up Eighth Avenue in a cab. It was like passing through a different world. We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second, and want only to get clear of it.

A year later, Buchanan delivered a keynote address at the 1992 Republican National Convention, which spoke of a culture war in the United States. "There is a religious war going on", he said, "in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." In addition to criticizing "environmental extremists" and "radical feminism", he said:

The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat—that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.

A month later, Buchanan elaborated that this conflict was about power over society's definition of right and wrong. He named abortion, sexual preference and popular culture as major fronts – and mentioned other controversies, including clashes over the Confederate Flag, Christmas and taxpayer-funded art. He also said that the negative attention his talk of a culture war received was itself evidence of America’s polarization.

In a 2004 column, Buchanan said the culture war had reignited and that Americans no longer inhabited the same moral universe. He gave such examples as gay civil unions, the "crudity of the MTV crowd", and the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. He argued that "a radical Left aided by a cultural elite that detests Christianity and finds Christian moral tenets reactionary and repressive is hell-bent on pushing its amoral values and imposing its ideology on our nation."

Samuel Francis expanded the notion of culture war, advising Buchanan to defend "such social particularisms—tribalisms, if you will—as class, cult, kinship, community, race, ethnicity, and nationality, each of which are legitimate and important parts of the politico-cultural complex.” He elaborated:

The way to win Middle Americans is to communicate to them that you, as a candidate and a public leader, understand that they and their way of life are under siege, that the ruling class of the country in alliance with its underclass is besieging them, and that you are willing to ally with them against their enemies.

The perils of pop culture

In addition, paleocons are typically concerned about the culture-eroding effects of popular culture. Thomas Fleming chortles that “protesting the message of a Hollywood movie is like protesting a Marxist's economics.” Samuel Francis complained that corporate "garbage", protected by bureaucratic market controls, kicked traditional and regional music, poetry and art out of the mainstream. For example, chain bookstores “offer exactly the same stock in every city in the country, almost none of which would have complied with the conventional and moderate obscenity laws of the 1950s.” He said that pop culture, beyond being crude and mass-produced, promotes a multicultural, managerial ideology.

For example, Francis argued that Star Trek represents “global democratic capitalism gone galactic." It shows what the “cultural elite” would do if it could turn much of the universe into a totalitarian “Federation.” He said the show's plots are “transparent allegorical representations of whatever social crisis preoccupies the real cultural elite”, such as “racism,” “sexism” and “the obsolete customs and sometimes obnoxious beliefs and habits of 20th century man.” He argued that the decades-long popularity of the franchise shows the power of this myth.

Censorship and social control

As part of this conflict, paleoconservatives say that elites use censorship and social control, to shield certain left-wing ideas, especially feminism and multiculturalism, from public criticism. Sometimes this is called "political correctness." In this way, they argue that many mass media, public sector and academia elites enforce these dogmas as representatives of a New Class, which is isolated from (and fearful of) Middle America.

Joseph Sobran speaks of an ideology of alienism, which is the opposite of nativism. He defines it as “a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossesed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to ‘build a new society’ by destroying the basic institutions of the native.” He explains:

[The "alienist animus" is] the willfully estranged attitude toward the general society typical of modern intellectuals and found, in various ways, among some so-called minority groups.... The language abounds in words signifying the hatreds, fears, and suspicions of cultural insiders toward outsiders. We are all acquainted with racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, nativism, and the like; these words have a certain hothouse quality about them, suggesting their recent invention to serve particular needs. Even older words such as prejudice, bias, bigotry, discrimination, and hatred itself have taken on the same anti-majoritarian connotations, although it is humanly probable that there is hostility of at least equal intensity in the opposite direction. We have no specific vocabulary at all to suggest this reciprocal possibility.

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

Furthermore, Paul Gottfried argues that the Left substitutes political correctness, multiculturalism and the welfare state for the old vision of industrialized socialism. These policies are a "politics of guilt" that gives supporters legitimacy, prestige and a sense of moral superiority. Paleocons also argue that neoconservatives also benefit from PC, which they claim to oppose, because they share most of the Left's core values. Gottfried says this mindset is more about political style than writing style. Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen summarized and quoted his interpretation thus:

Liberalism survived as a series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and totalized by its opposition to anti-liberal critics. According to Gottfried: "By the end of the twentieth century, liberalism has become a pillar of whatever liberal democracy the United States and its imitators are thought to embody", while the "consolidation of the managerial state and the imposition of its pluralist ideology" had become "the defining features of contemporary Western life." More precisely, managerial liberalism has given way to a managerial democracy within which liberal principles, such as freedom of speech and association, are readily set aside whenever political expediency requires it.

The managerial state

Social Democracy

The managerial worldview

One distinctive of paleoconservatives is their critique of modern social democracy, or the managerial state, which they see as a manifestation of Western decline. Theorists like Samuel Francis and Paul Gottfried say this is an ongoing regime that remains in power, regardless of what political party holds power. Francis, following James Burnham, said that under this historical process, “law is replaced by administrative decree, federalism is replaced by executive autocracy, and a limited government replaced by an unlimited state.” It acts in the name of abstract goals, such as equality or positive rights, and uses its claim of moral superiority, power of taxation and wealth redistribution to keep itself in power.

Gottfried, in "After Liberalism", defines this worldview as a "series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and it maintains its power by pointing its finger accusingly at antiliberals." He calls it a new theocratic religion. In this view, when the managerial regime cannot get democratic support for its policies, it resorts to social engineering, via programs, court decisions and regulations. This includes mass welfarism, positive rights, laws punishing "racism", "sexism" and "homophobia", and centralized control of public education. While paleocons often criticize neoconservatism, they still see these opponents as just one of many power blocs that support this managerialism.

Further information: [[:Managerial state]]

Middle American revolution

Paleocons disagree over whether the exact nature of the “managerial state” and whether it is reversible. Francis and Gottfried, who debated each other, argued that this regime is here indefinitely. Francis advocated transforming the managerial state into a new regime that supports the right’s demographic and cultural goals and institutions. He argued that “Middle America,” a vanguard of "working-class social conservatives" and "the still-structured middle class", provide a social base for resistance. Likewise, Murray Rothbard said paleolibertarians should promote a bourgeois middle class revolt against social democracy.

Bill Kauffman, a former advisor to neoconservative Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, says an anti-progressive "reactionary radical" spirit exists in Middle America. Localist and anti-progressive, it defies the boundaries of left and right, embodying diverse people from Charles Lindbergh, Dorothy Day, Millard Fillmore, Grant Wood and Eugene McCarthy. He says this “lies far from the center: in local communities, in neighborhoods, in small farms and small towns—the classic cradle of populism.”

To fight the existing order, paleocons often call for a “Middle American revolution” in the United States, a popular rejection of the existing elite and its values. They often call for a “New Right,” one that sought to reach ordinary citizens who were disenfranchised by the elite in the media, government and academia. Samuel Francis argued that this new coalition would support the “values and goals” of this “increasingly alienated and threatened strata.” It should then assert leadership and rally Middle America “in radical opposition to the regime."

Pat Buchanan's 1992 GOP convention speech spoke of people who "don't read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they came from the same schoolyards and playgrounds and towns as we did. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart." The phrase "conservatives of the heart" became part of his repertoire, as did another, "peasants with pitchforks."

William S. Lind developed a different strategy, called cultural conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, as a culture war battle plan. It argues that traditional culture is the foundation of conservative thought. Lind therefore urges the Right to create new institutions of education, media, entertainment, and high culture that reinforce Western culture. The goal is that these entities will restore traditional culture to predominance.

Conversely, political scientist Claes Ryn argues that “the old Western civilization” is “too badly damaged” and “cannot return.” – and that there is “no realistic prospect” for reversing present trends toward “the centralization and homogenization of life.” He says that “a resurgent spirit of civilization” will apply parts of the Western tradition to new circumstances, while retaining positive elements of the modern world. So he argues that Westerners should not wait for society to change around them, but instead improve themselves and concentrate on their individual and concrete responsibilities, while treating one’s neighbors rightly. This, mixed with “a renewed dedication to learning and the arts,” are part of what he calls a necessary new moral realism.

Economic debate

The welfare-warfare state

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

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

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

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

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

Here is how Fleming described his relations with libertarian Murray Rothbard:

We struck a bargain from the beginning: Although I believe that the commonwealth is a natural and necessary part of human social life, I nevertheless agreed with Murray that about 90 percent of what modern states do is evil and destructive. "When we get to the last ten percent", I said, "it will be time for us to quarrel." The offer stands open to any libertarian who wants to work with us for the common good (if that phrase is not too "socialistic").

While on some issues paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians are indistinguishable, this sphere makes the distinction more visible. Paleolib Lew Rockwell once ribbed his paleocon colleagues for "denouncing chain stores, TV dinners, and dead Austrian economists." Conversely, Thomas Fleming said that Rockwell "thinks he cannot defend economic liberty without supporting the multi-national take-over of our economy or defending McDonalds cuisine."

Anti-globalization

Many paleoconservatives hold conceptions of trade policy that many call protectionist — in particular, applying revenue tariffs to foreign-made products — and other views that critics call mercantilist. For example, Samuel Francis argued that big business should serve the interests of Middle America. "What Middle Americans need", he said, "is a political formula and a public myth that synthesizes the attention to material-economic interests offered by the left and the defense of concrete and national identity offered by the right." He argued that defense of capitalism is not a conservative issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laissez-faire

Main article: Paleolibertarianism

Followers of the late Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell who embrace paleolibertarianism, and who, being culturally conservative, espouse many of the same themes of paleoconservatives, are also wholly committed to laissez-faire economics. Conversely, many paleocons favor laissez-faire and free trade. While they say America has economic ills, they do not attack foreign competition. Instead, they point to the benefits of free trade, economies of scale, comparative advantage, and specialization of labor.

Many blame America's economic problems on over-regulation, especially bad fiscal, tax and monetary policy, and accept the Austrian theory of trade cycle. Nonetheless, they concurrently reject treaties such as the WTO, GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA, and FTAA. Lew Rockwell summarizes this position:

NAFTA is imperialist. It preaches to other countries about what kinds of laws and regulations they should have-the social democratic mixed economy that is impoverishing us. NAFTA is, of course, not the free trade of Jefferson, Randolph, Taylor and Calhoun. It is trade for the few and not the many, for the particular interests and not the general interests.

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

Foreign wars

Anti-intervention

Against "entangling alliances"

In relations with other nations, paleoconservatives are more willing to question the logic of globalism and globalization, along with immigration policy and the lack of enforcement against undocumented immigrants — and they characteristically embrace an anti-interventionist foreign policy. Pat Buchanan once wrote that "we love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like 'new world order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers." Columnist David Aaronovitch (The Times of London) remarked that paleocons "want out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan, out of everywhere and bring up the drawbridge."

Many paleocons support a foreign policy based upon non-interventionism, which some call isolationism. American "isolationists" of the 20th Century opposed political and military commitments, or alliances with, foreign powers (or for that matter international bodies), particularly those in Europe. They find support in the wisdom of the founding fathers and a subsequent generation of antebellum statesmen.

George Washington had declared, "It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world." John Quincy Adams avowed, "[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

About Washington, Bill Kauffman once remarked, "This pacific counsel is today derided as 'isolationism,' fit only for indurated knuckle-draggers. American isolationists — who oppose killing foreigners — are tagged xenophobes, while those ordering the missile launches and inviting suicide attacks are the humane internationalists. Go figure." He also said of the first president's policy, "I rather doubt that he'd have made an exception for Israel."

Taki Theodoracopulos said he did not call for isolation, but that "we cannot go around in alien cultures imposing democracy." Here's how fellow American Conservative co-founder Pat Buchanan made the case in a 1999 speech to the Cato Institute:

Friends, America today faces a choice of destinies: Are we to be a republic or an empire? Will we be the peacemaker of the world, or its policeman, who goes about night-sticking the trouble-makers of the world, until we, too, find ourselves in a bloody brawl we cannot handle. Let us use this transient moment of American preeminence to encourage and assist other countries to stand on their own feet and begin to provide for their own defense.

Claes Ryn complains that American interventionism follows a “new Jacobinism.” This reference to the French Revolution describes what he calls “the idea that societies ought to be radically remade and that those who know what needs to be done should dominate others for their benefit. This “ideology of virtuous empire” invokes universal principles like “democracy,” equality,” and “freedom.”

Thomas Fleming speaks of American intervention in strong terms. He defended Jacques Chirac’s refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq. “I respect and admire the French,” he said, “who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs.” During the 1990s, he actively opposed US actions in the Balkans. "We are the evil empire", he once wrote. "Our war in Kosovo is the latest chapter in a century of American imperialism that includes Vietnam, the Gulf War and our shameful, secret war America."

As for the term "isolationist,” Joseph Sobran says the term is used to marginalize war opponents and create a false atmosphere of "gung-ho unanimity." He says it “suggests a churlish provincialism, a refusal to face the outside world; presumably showering that world with bombs is the cosmopolitan approach.” Instead, he argues that the war proponent bears a heavy burden of proof.

Just war

Paleoconservatism is not pacifism, however, nor does it mean opposition to all wars. Thomas Fleming argues that the principles of just war are not obvious to contemporary leaders. Quoting Thomas Aquinas that peace is the object of a just war, he says:

The criteria for just war are sometimes presented as a list of arbitrary commandments with no obvious relation to each other. However, the theoretical criteria can be resolved into three questions that, perhaps, even liberals should be able to grasp. In contemplating any proposed war, we must consider the "justice" of the causes of the war, the "methods" to be employed, and the ‘consequences’’ that can be expected.(emphasis his)

Paul Gottfried argues that a conservative war includes defense of one's homeland from foreign invaders, but not a "permanent revolution" to "destabilize traditional societies and impose American modernity."

Arguably a war might claim a conservative foundation even where the civilian population is not consistently spared, laws of proportionality are not properly observed, and even where just cause is not entirely evident. What makes the launching of a war “conservative,” from a strictly historical prospective, is the declared intention of those who embark on the struggle to achieve recognizably conservative ends. Attempts to preserve a customary way of life against outside threats, and to resist violence directed against persons and property fit the definition of a conservative war.

Rebuilding the Old Right

Paul Gottfried says that the paleocons resurrected political alignments from the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Moreover, he says that for veteran paleocons, the current "struggle for democracy" smacks of Marxism. It serves as "a harmful diversion from dismantling the managerial regime at home,"

In the 1930s, paleo predecessors, the Old Right joined with the anti-interventionist left, including Charles Beard, to oppose U.S. entry into any European war. Similarly, they saw no interest worth protecting in Asia. So in the 1930s, for the United States to commit itself to the Dutch East Indies and Singapore, it served as a back door to war, and it antagonized the Japanese. Paleoconservatives often esteem the America First principles of 1940 as being commensurate with those of the founding fathers as embodied in the Neutrality Act of 1794.

Paleocon Bill Kauffman remains critical of World War II. He says it "destroyed agrarianism as an active force in American intellectual life just as it fortified the urban citadels of power and money,” causing “the great exodus of rural Southerners, black and white, to the industrial cities.” Also, after the war, he says "the American Middle West and all its Middle American manifestations became inexplicable."

During the Cold War, some anti-interventionists supported overseas commitments as necessary to the defense of the United States against communist aggression. Yet Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) and the Old Right opposed NATO, almost from the impetus, and this was a central issue in the contest between Taft and Dwight Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination. But Taft lost; his death in 1953 deprived the Old Right of its most powerful leader.

The deaths in 1951 of publisher William Randolph Hearst — and in 1955 of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick — cost the movement its most critical media outlets. The new conservatism of National Review treated isolationism as a foolish anachronism. The anti-interventionist position was not widely heard outside of libertarian circles (and the writings of leftist Gore Vidal) until the 1990s. During the Cold War, however, a new species of anti-Wilsonian foreign policy theory did appear that centered on the nation state: the classical realism of German scholar Hans Morgenthau and others.

In his 1995 book Isolationism Reconfigured, Eric Nordlinger observed that there "is virtually no disagreement about isolationism having served the country exceptionally well throughout the nineteenth century" and he further surmises "the strategic vision of historical and contemporary isolationism is one of quiet strength and national autonomy." In the eyes of paleocons, foreign interventionism is demonstrably counter-productive, and the "United States is strategically immune in being insulated, invulnerable, impermeable, and impervious and thus has few security reasons to become engaged politically and militarily."

Many paleocons may echo old republican concerns about large standing armies. Most conceptualize a foreign policy based on strategic independence, armed neutrality, and non-interventionism. Paleocons are not dogmatic with one another about the practical points of foreign policy, however.

Fourth generation warfare

William S. Lind interjects the idea of fourth-generation warfare, arguing that Iraq War and the fight against al-Qaeda are radically different from most of America's conflicts.

Fourth Generation war is the greatest change since the Peace of Westphalia, because it marks the end of the state’s monopoly on war. Once again, as before 1648, many different entities, not states, are fighting war. They use many different means, including "terrorism" and immigration, not just formal armies. Differences between cultures, not just states, become paramount, and other cultures will not fight the way we fight. All over the world, state militaries are fighting non-state opponents, and almost always, the state is losing. State militaries were designed to fight other state militaries like themselves, and against non-state enemies most of their equipment, tactics and training are useless or counterproductive.

Thus Lind claims that the U.S. is bogged down fighting al-Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents because it planned these fights using an outdated worldview. Washington military planners did not fully understand that these new enemies fight without clear ties to existing nation-states. A big part of this problem is because American military and industrial still operate as if they are preparing to fight conflicts like the two World Wars. Lind warns that this century may see weak forces defeat the strong.

Srdja Trifkovic as a Serb's nationalist argues for a War on Terror, which he says differs from a War on Terrorism. He says that the Bush administration, the neoconservatives and others confuse the enemy ("militant Islam") with the technique of terrorism. He says Western nations neglect a "fifth column" among Muslim immigrants who seek Islamic revolution.

Immigration reform

Cultural unity

Where immigration allows foreigners into a nation, it then becomes a domestic policy concern. Cultural cohesiveness and some degree of cultural homogeneity are important factors for paleoconservatives. Thomas Fleming compares nations to extended families, saying that immigration policy is the most “significant means of determining the future of our nation, and we owe it our children not to squander their birthright in spasms of imprudent charity.”

While paleocons often celebrate differences and vibrant regional cultures in the United States, they also oppose multiculturalism and mass Third World immigration. They see non-European immigration as being averse to their interests because it threatens to displace the historic European cultural unity of the United States. In this vein, the aphorism E Pluribus Unum has been co-opted into a mantra for diversity and multiculturalism. Samuel Francis once remarked that:

Just as the Christians turned pagan temples into churches and pagan holidays into Christian holidays, multiculturalism is replacing an old culture with a new one. It is the expression of a deep-seated hatred of this culture in its religious, racial and moral expressions."

These paleoconservatives look back to a different tradition, such as the one suggested by John Jay in Federalist #2, that emphasizes cultural homogeneity:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs... This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

Likewise, in modern times, the 1949 warning of British observer T.S. Eliot has elicited the attention of paleoconservatives:

The real revolution in that country was not what is called the Revolution, but is a consequence of the Civil War; after which arose a plutocratic elite; after which the expansion and material development of the country was accelerated; after which was swollen that stream of mixed immigration, bringing (or rather multiplying) the danger of development into a caste system which has not yet been quite dispelled. For the sociologist, the evidence from America is not yet ripe.

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

Ethnicity and demographics

Balkanization

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

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

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

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

Immigration and terror

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

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

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

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

Racial consciousness

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

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

Paleocons who advocate racial consciousness generally oppose affirmative action and all government intrusion on racial issues. In accordance with paleoconservative ideology, which champions local cultures, they support the identity and integrity of European-Americans or white Americans, strongly opposing the aspects of political correctness that promote "white guilt". Francis condemns any effort by the state to forcibly integrate the races, saying that the state has no right to do this any more than they have the right to forcibly separate the races through segregation.

The limits of racial politics

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

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

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

Fleming distinguished paleoconservatism from white nationalism:

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

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

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