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Paleoconservatism

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Introduction

Paleoconservatism is a neologism created by those following within that movement to distinguish their so-called "traditional" values from the neoconservatives. While the “paleo” in paleoconservatism leaves the impression that it arose earlier than other conservatisms, the suggestion is misleading. It is mainly a reaction to Neoconservatism. And as such is pretty new movement and political philosophy.  Although Neoconservatism was born in 1965, in the pages of Irving Kristol’s journal the Public Interest, it was not until editor Norman Podhoretz used Commentary in June 1970 to state his opposition to the New Left that the movement began to attract attention (Commentary in American Life by Murray Friedman , Temple University Press, 2005 )

Most neoconservatives are Jewish and are often closely related by blood or long friendships. Indeed, as its adherents are the best-known Jewish conservatives, neoconservatism might fairly be described as the conservatism of the Jews—those few Jews who become prominent on the Right almost invariably identify with it. Recalling their early struggles against fascist and communist totalitarianism, the neoconservatives continue to view external opponents of the United States as threats not simply to American interests but to civilization itself. They also remain intellectuals, not politicians, and are most comfortable as thinkers and writers who, unlike candidates for office, can express their views without reservation. Those who have served in government—with the exception of Moynihan—have done so as appointees and have developed impressive bureaucratic skills that they have used effectively in high-level positions. In one important way, however, neoconservatism has changed. The left-wing experiences that marked the youths of many older neoconservatives do not characterize the current generation—some came from the relatively conservative Jackson wing of the 1970s Democratic Party, but most of the new generation have been conservatives their entire adult lives.

However, paleoconservatism should not be seen as a simple resurrection of these earlier themes. It fuses notions associated with the anti-war, anti-empire, isolationist traditions with other strains and concepts drawn from both the social sciences and different conservative traditions. They are reconfigured so as to form a theoretically developed and structured world view informed by a particular representation of American ethnicity, elite theory, and notions of republicanism derived from southern conservatism. In other words this is an ideology, much like Neoconservatism is.  And as such a competing ideology.  

Many prominent paleoconservatives publish their views in The American Conservative, the leading publication exposing paleoconservative ideology. Buchanan, leading spokesman of paleoconservatism has adopted the slogan "America First” as part of a conscious attempt to evoke pre-war sentiments about keeping the United States out of “foreign wars.”

"Today we call for a new patriotism, where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first, for a new nationalism where in every negotiation, be it arms control or trade, the American side seeks advantage or victory for the United States." With these words, columnist, television personality, and former presidential speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan announced his candidacy for president in a New Hampshire hotel conference room. He had prefigured his slogan in an article the previous year for the National Interest: "America First--and Second, and Third." ...

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America First was Buchanan's gambit, his bid to mobilize conservatives now that the old call to slash the federal government no longer resounded successfully. With it he hoped to attract America's nationalist hard core, people who felt aggrieved and abused not so much by foreigners as by alien elements within their own country--to unite conservatism and populism together in an ideology that could impose itself on the country more effectively than Reagan's business-oriented conservatism had ever succeeded in doing. It was not Buchanan's gambit alone, of course. Over the five years since he had quit his White House staff job in 1987, an intellectual coterie had assembled around Buchanan, made up of writers and activists who had broken off from the main mass of conservatism over the course of the 1980s, disgusted with President Reagan's weak-willed acceptance of a Martin Luther King holiday and sanctions against South Africa, with President Bush's knuckling under to the 1991 civil rights laws and his upping legal immigration levels by 200,000 a year. They complained that their conservative movement--the conservative movement of Robert Alfonso Taft and Barry Goldwater--had been hijacked. "Before true conservatives can ever take back their country," Buchanan had written in May 1991, "they are first going to have to take back their movement." From whom? From "the neoconservatives . . . the ex-liberals, socialists and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent." As one of the conservatives who would later back the Buchanan campaign lamented, "We have simply been crowded out by overwhelming numbers. The offensives of radicalism have driven vast herds of liberals across the borders into our territories. These refugees speak in our name, but the language they speak is the same one they always spoke." 1

Paleoconservatism also has  a marked hostility to the “east coast establishment", echoing Huey Long’s attacks on the wealthy and Father Charles Coughlin's pleas on behalf of the local community against what he saw as the arrogance and self-interested indifference of metropolitan financial interests. They are suspicious about big finance, especially TBTF banks.

Paleoconservatism also shares the sense of exclusion from the government apparatus by neoconservatives, who now dominate the Washington political scene, and especially the Department of State. Along with Neoconservatism, they reject neoliberal globalization and multiculturalism (three horseman of Neoliberal Apocalypse):

Although Scotchie does not put it quite this way, contemporary paleoconservatism developed as a reaction against three trends in the American Right during the Reagan administration. First, it reacted against the bid for dominance by the neoconservatives, former liberals who insisted not only that their version of conservative ideology and rhetoric prevail over those of older conservatives, but also that their team should get the rewards of office and patronage and that the other team of the older Right receive virtually nothing.

The politics of this conflict, as those involved in it will recall, was often vicious and personal, the most notorious case being the backstabbing treatment of the late M.E. Bradford by his neoconservative rivals over the appointment to the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981. The bitterness of the NEH controversy was due not to the neocons pushing their own nominee, the totally unknown and laughably under-qualified William Bennett but to their complete lack of hesitation in smearing, lying about, and undermining Bradford at every opportunity.

Scotchie deals briefly with the Bradford controversy, but I have to say, as one closely involved in supporting Bradford at the time, that he does not dwell sufficiently on the sheer evil and meanness of neoconservative conduct in it. But he also notes the firing, calculated vilification, or effective ostracism of several paleos or paleo fellow travelers by the neocon cabal in the following years as well as the deliberate campaign to strip the Rockford Institute of funding by neoconservative-controlled foundations.

Most paleoconservatives are against immigration, neoclassical economics (which is pseudoscience anyway, so any rational person is against it ;-) and any military intervention by the US anywhere. They have little regard for any benefits of an egalitarian society. Their economic views are more likely to tend toward New Deal than modern neoliberalism, although there is a contingent of  Austrian scholars within paleoconservative movement. 

The most notable living paleoconservative is Patrick Buchanan, who recently (welcomed Donald Trump foreign policy views):

With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton's lost emails. Not funny, and close to "treasonous," came the shocked cry. Trump then told the New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need not trigger a U.S. military response.

Even more shocking. By suggesting the U.S. might not honor its NATO commitment, under Article 5, to fight Russia for Estonia, our foreign policy elites declaimed, Trump has undermined the security architecture that has kept the peace for 65 years. More interesting, however, was the reaction of Middle America. Or, to be more exact, the nonreaction. Americans seem neither shocked nor horrified. What does this suggest?

Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast and Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled. We got a hint of this in 2013. Barack Obama, claiming his "red line" against any use of poison gas in Syria had been crossed, found he had no public backing for air and missile strikes on the Assad regime. The country rose up as one and told him to forget it. He did. We have been at war since 2001. And as one looks on the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and adds up the thousands dead and wounded and trillions sunk and lost, can anyone say our War Party has served us well?

On bringing Estonia into NATO, no Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing so insane a war guarantee. Eisenhower refused to intervene to save the Hungarian rebels. JFK refused to halt the building of the Berlin Wall. LBJ did nothing to impede the Warsaw Pact's crushing of the Prague Spring. Reagan never considered moving militarily to halt the smashing of Solidarity.

Were all these presidents cringing isolationists? Rather, they were realists who recognized that, though we prayed the captive nations would one day be free, we were not going to risk a world war, or a nuclear war, to achieve it. Period. In 1991, President Bush told Ukrainians that any declaration of independence from Moscow would be an act of "suicidal nationalism."

Today, Beltway hawks want to bring Ukraine into NATO. This would mean that America would go to war with Russia, if necessary, to preserve an independence Bush I regarded as "suicidal."

Have we lost our minds?

The first NATO supreme commander, General Eisenhower, said that if U.S. troops were still in Europe in 10 years, NATO would be a failure. In 1961, he urged JFK to start pulling U.S. troops out, lest Europeans become military dependencies of the United States. Was Ike not right? Even Barack Obama today riffs about the "free riders" on America's defense. Is it really so outrageous for Trump to ask how long the U.S. is to be responsible for defending rich Europeans who refuse to conscript the soldiers or pay the cost of their own defense, when Eisenhower was asking that same question 55 years ago?

In 1997, geostrategist George Kennan warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe "would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era." He predicted a fierce nationalistic Russian response. Was Kennan not right? NATO and Russia are today building up forces in the eastern Baltic where no vital U.S. interests exist, and where we have never fought before - for that very reason. There is no evidence Russia intends to march into Estonia, and no reason for her to do so. But if she did, how would NATO expel Russian troops without air and missile strikes that would devastate that tiny country? And if we killed Russians inside Russia, are we confident Moscow would not resort to tactical atomic weapons to prevail? After all, Russia cannot back up any further. We are right in her face.

On this issue Trump seems to be speaking for the silent majority and certainly raising issues that need to be debated.

Needed now is diplomacy. The trade-off: Russia ensures the independence of the Baltic republics that she let go. And NATO gets out of Russia's face. Should Russia dishonor its commitment, economic sanctions are the answer, not another European war.

Daniel Larison  is probably the second important paleoconservative thinker. Antiwar.com founder and editor Justin Raimondo is probably the third. Also important is Phyllis Schlafly.

Paleoconservatism claims its roots in the "Old Right", a loose grouping of people, many of them former liberals, who emerged during the Great Depression and World War II as opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic and foreign policy. As the Cold War got underway after WWII, these people remained isolationist and opposed the Cold War, grouping post-war foreign and domestic policy together as two sides of the same coin, the "welfare-warfare state."

Early examples include journalists John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Albert Jay Nock, revisionist historians Harry Elmer Barnes (one of the first major Holocaust deniers) and George Morgenstern (who claimed that FDR had dragged America into WWII by deliberately goading the Japanese to attack), libertarian Murray Rothbard, and U.S. Senator Robert A. Taft.

With militant anti-communism in vogue on the American right, they found themselves marginalized within the conservative movement and shut out from outlets like William F. Buckley's National Review, their continued isolationism getting them accused of being "useful idiots" for Moscow.

However, they continued as an outside tendency through such groups as Leonard Read's Foundation for Economic Education and an emerging Austrian school of economics led by Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, who later became libertarian icons. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that isolationism re-emerged on the right (outside of the libertarians, who had become a distinct movement from conservatism), led by people like Pat Buchanan who had been interventionist during the Cold War. 

Promotions of local manufacturing and tariffs

From The Paleo Persuasion The American Conservative

Politically, the leadership of the Right evolved from Robert Taft in the 1940s and ’50s, who, as Scotchie writes, “cared more … about the survival of the shoe-making industry in America than whether American consumers could someday buy $125 sneakers made by twenty-five cents an hour labor in Indonesia,” to Newt Gingrich, who babbled about a laptop computer for every school child and doted credulously on the most bizarre New Age banalities. Culturally and intellectually, the Right moved from the radical conservative cultural criticism of men like Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and Bernard I. Bell to the post-Reagan triumphalism that chortled over the “end of history” and the arrival of the world democratic imperium.

Rejection of neoliberal interventionism and wars

Anti war position make Paleoconservatism is similar to libertarianism. They reject neoconservatism with its Trotskyite "Permanent war" mentality. Paloconservatism anti-war postion like is the case with libertarians as well is based on Non-Interventionism:

Libertarianism and war are not compatible. One reason why should be obvious: In war, governments commit legalized mass murder. In modern warfare especially, war is not just waged among voluntary combatants, but kills, maims, and otherwise harms innocent people. Then, of course, wars must be funded through taxes, which are extracted from U.S. citizens by force—a form of legalized theft, as far as libertarians are concerned. And, historically, the United States has used conscription—legalized slavery—to force people to fight and die. In addition, an interventionist foreign policy makes civilians targets for retaliation, so governments indirectly cause more violence against their own people when they become involved in other countries’ affairs. In addition, war is always accompanied by many other new restrictions on liberty, many of which are sold as supposedly temporary wartime measures but then never go away.

In the article The Paleo Persuasion Samuel Francis wrote ( The American Conservative, December 16, 2002): 

While some (Scotchie mentions Pat Buchanan and me) were anti-communist interventionists during the Cold War, all have come to reject the reckless military interventionism and globalism of its aftermath. A critical point of development was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S. and conservative response to it. Paleos and those who soon identified with them almost spontaneously rejected U.S. military intervention against Iraq. It was a moment, falling only a year after the neoconservative onslaught on the Rockford Institute, that solidified the paleoconservative identity.

“The US, as paleos have claimed for decades, was only meant to be a constitutional republic, not an empire—as Buchanan’s 1999 foreign policy tome A Republic, Not an Empire nostalgically states,” Scotchie explains. “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 the tenth amendment aren’t friends…. Empires and small government aren’t compatible, either.

If anti-interventionism and a commitment to the Old Republic defined by strict-construction constitutionalism and highly localized and independent social and political institutions defined one major dimension of paleoconservatism, its antipathy to the mass immigration that began to flood the country in the 1980s defined another. Indeed, it was ostensibly and mainly Chronicles’ declaration of opposition to immigration that incited the neoconservative attack on Rockford and its subsequent defunding. Scotchie devotes a special but short chapter to paleoconservative thought on immigration and makes clear that to paleos, America was an extension of Western civilization. It was intended by the Founding Fathers to be an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic nation also influenced by Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. Large-scale immigration from non-Western nations would, as Fleming (and most other paleos) maintained, forever spoil a distinct American civilization.

The implication of this passage is that paleoconservatives, unlike libertarians, most neoconservatives, and many contemporary mainstream conservatives, do not consider America to be an “idea,” a “proposition,” or a “creed.” It is instead a concrete and particular culture, rooted in a particular historical experience, a set of particular institutions as well as particular beliefs and values, and a particular ethnic-racial identity, and, cut off from those roots, it cannot survive. Indeed, it is not surviving now, for all the glint and glitter of empire.

While Scotchie is quite clear and well-informed about the paleos’ thought on immigration and its meaning, he fails to discuss at all their views on race. This is unfortunate, as not a few of them have been accused of simple-minded “racism,” “white supremacy,” and other ill-defined bugaboos. I, for one, like to think that what they believe about race, while definitely not in the liberal-neocon mainstream, is rather more nuanced and considerably more sophisticated than their enemies (and not a few of their friends) want to think.

If Scotchie’s book has any great flaw, it is that it is simply too short. Paleoconservatism is worth a much longer and deeper look than his volume can give, though Scotchie himself is both so thoroughly familiar with his subject and so sympathetic to it that he could have produced a much more extended treatment. He might also have revealed more of the personalities of the leading paleoconservative writers, interviewed them, and discussed several writers he omits, for example, Claes Ryn of Catholic University or E. Christian Kopff of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and he might have explored why the Chronicles school has not been more successful at defining the American Right.

Have the paleos indeed failed, and if they have, is the neocon stab-in-the-back theory the only reason? Are there perhaps either large historical trends or even mere personality differences among the paleos that made their own crack-up eventually inevitable, and can such trends or conflicts be overcome? Or are the paleos really only dinosaurs, whining nostalgically for a world they have lost and unable or cantankerously unwilling to adapt to the Shining Imperial City on the Hill the neoconservatives claim to be constructing? Scotchie might have explored these questions and problems more extensively than he did, and one hopes he will do so in a bigger book in the future, but what he has given us in the meantime is an essential and valuable contribution to American intellectual history in the last decade of the last century
 

Paleoconservatives are strongly critical of neoliberalism

In a 1988 lecture, Russell Kirk quoted a letter that showed, he said, how hot the bitterness burned: "I believe," wrote his correspondent, "that the chief enemy of American conservatism has not been the Marxists, nor even the socialist liberals in the Democratic Party, but the Neo-conservatives, who have sabotaged the movement from within and exploited it for their own selfish purposes." 2

Paleoconservatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They are also strongly critical of neoconservatives and their sympathizers in print media, talk radio and cable TV news.[26] 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 conservatism.[27] They do not wish to be closely identified with the U.S. Republican Party.[26] Rather, they seek the renewal of "small 'r'" republican society in the context of the Western heritage, customs and civilization.[28] Joseph Scotchie wrote:

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

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

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 Raspail,[135] and British conservatives such as Enoch Powell,[136] Peter Hitchens,[137] Antony Flew (whom the Rockford Institute awarded the Ingersoll Prize),[138] John Betjeman,[139] and Roger Scruton[140] as well as Scruton's Salisbury Review and Derek Turner's Quarterly Review,[141] as well as Australia's Sydney Traditionalist Forum[142] all 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.’[143]

Note the One Nation movement in 1990s Australia,[144] Germany's Junge Freiheit,[145] and Italy's Lega Nord.[146]  Also paleoconservatism has some analogies with the Russian dissidents such as Andrei Navrozov[147] and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.[148]

Anti-immigration sentiments: save our jobs

Paleoconservative attitudes toward the issue of illegal immigration to the United States and the problem of multiculturalism and assimilation on American soil are mostly negative.  They view these phenomena as a significant threat to the American way of life. Their words are filled with anxiety for the future of American society, which is instilled with the positive meaning of the idea of open borders, and which is becoming permeated with alien cultures and losing its own cultural identity. Starting with an explanation of the essence of the American nation’s homogeneity, this article presents the threats which come with the ‘mixing’ of cultures and liberal immigration as well as phenomena directly linked to such immigration, namely the problem of terrorism and Islam.

Most Americans at least professed to be unalarmed about this gradual transformation of the country. They claimed that America was a nation founded upon a "proposition"; anyone who assented to the American proposition could become an American (Dead Right, by David Frum):

To Buchanan and his friends, this universalism was just sentimental flim-flam. American civilization was the product of a particular people. To preserve that civilization, it was necessary to preserve the people that had created it. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had not created America; the Declaration and the Constitution were created by Americans. Bolivar wrote constitutions every bit as noble as that composed in Philadelphia; it was the Anglo-American character that made the Philadelphia constitution a success and the Caracas constitution a failure. History had demonstrated that non- British Isles immigrants from Europe had made good enough citizens, but why run the awful risk of cultural suicide...

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His conservatism was a nationalist conservatism above all--a conservatism that attached far more importance to cultural and security issues than to maximizing growth and efficiency. Buchanan was slow to absorb all the implications of his nationalism. In his 1988 memoir, he still thought that "among the great American achievements of the twentieth century is free Asia, democratic and capitalist." "To squander that in an absurd 'trade war' because we cannot compete with Korean cars or Japanese computer chips would be an act of almost terminal stupidity for the West." 9 He also confessed that he had inwardly believed, at the time they took place, that the civil rights movement's civil disobedience campaigns were justified by natural law, even though he would later write editorials for the Globe-Democrat attacking them. But his thinking was jogged along by a new set of friends: the writers who published in Chronicles magazine.

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Sympathy for the economic plight of blue-collar workers in New Hampshire was not just bleeding-heart sentimentalism: it propelled Buchanan toward accepting an active federal responsibility for promoting industry--and protecting it from foreign competition. Buchanan's standard stump speech told an anecdote about a visit to a lumber mill on the Canadian border. Shaking hands with the workers, the candidate found himself face to face with a burly giant of a man. The man stood silent for a moment, staring at the floor, and then looked up to say only, "Save our jobs." As a story, it is as kitschy as Steinbeck at his most gooey, but it led to a serious point:

I see Mr. Bush, and excuse me, some of my conservative friends, by their willingness to allow the ruthless destruction of so many of the industries vital to our defenses, as engaged in the unilateral disarmament of our country. I can't understand it. On the grounds of national interest, I favor policies that won't let certain defense-related industries go under.

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Do we want to keep the textile manufacturing base in the United States? Do we want to keep GM and Chrysler and Ford? Do we want to keep Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas? . . . We have got to address the fact that the Asian countries and European countries are practising a form of protectionism and adversarial trade. They are capturing markets by undercutting and dumping and by targeted trade, and they have been doing this to make their countries No. 1. 12

 The Economist stringer who followed Buchanan to Mississippi reported that

Mr. Buchanan has greater ideas still for the nationalist state than merely dishing out credits to any industry (oil and gas, aerospace, textiles, ship-building) that suffers from foreign competition. For instance, he privately admits he is tempted by the idea of paying for those credits--and much more--by. throwing up a wall of tariffs around the American economy.

Buchanan understood that many conservatives saw trade not as an economic issue, but as an issue of sovereignty and group loyalty. Protectionism is a way for conservatives to show solidarity with their fellow-Americans, especially blue-collar fellow-Americans, without explicitly endorsing the redistribution of wealth. Which is why so many would-be populists of the Right have been drawn to the protectionist cause. Barry Goldwater had been one of just eight senators to vote against the 1962 law that gave President Kennedy the authority to engage in the Kennedy round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations. Pat Robertson campaigned as a protectionist in 1988. So did George Wallace, in both 1968 and 1972. Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail whiz who in his heyday had his stethoscope pressed as close to the chest of the American conservative as anyone, argued as long ago as 1983 that "the official trade policy of the United States should be 'fair trade'--that is, no imports produced with slave labor, no imports from foreign plants built by the U.S. taxpayer and no imports from countries which don't allow our products into their country." 15

And in November 1991, just before the beginning of campaigning in New Hampshire, a group of conservative activists called a press conference in Washington to announce their repudiation of free trade. Among them was Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, the stablest of the new right-wing organizations that had come to life in the late 1970s, and one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation. "We are here," Weyrich said, "to warn the Republican Party that they had better take this issue seriously."

Weyrich was not just blowing hot air. While the congressional Republican Party overwhelmingly endorsed the North American Free Trade Agreement, the endorsement was not quite unanimous. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms voted against NAFTA as did his protégé Senator Lauch Faircloth. And many of the Republicans who voted in favor of the treaty were swung not by the ambiguous pact's free-trade aspects but by its protectionist subthemes. Suggestively, the manager of the Republican pro-NAFTA forces in the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, is by no means a believer in free trade. In conversation, he praises Henry Cabot Lodge and the protectionist Republicans of the 1920s, and warns that in the absence of trade controls, world industrial wages will be determined by the pay scale of South China. 17

Rejection of Israel first crowd

WELL DONE MR. TRUMP!!! Israel-First, Neocons to join Hillary, all America’s enemies in one party Non-Intervention.com

The disloyal Israel-First/Neoconservative (IF/NC) crowd seems to be having a collective and hopefully fatal seizure over Mr. Trump’s pledge to be strictly even-handed and neutral in the ongoing war between Israel and the Arabs — a war both sides clearly intend to fight to the death.

Now, many past presidential candidates have said much the same thing, but they have always added that silly, ahistorical mantra that the United States will defend Israel’s “right to exist”. But Trump did not add that mantra of the brain-dead, and so has markedly distressed the Israel-Firsters and Neocons. Indeed, they always have opposed Trump because, it seems, they sense that he will always put America first and let those individuals, nations, and groups irrelevant to the republic’s security and economic prosperity swing in the wind. I think — or at least hope — they are right.

What makes the current Israel First/Neocon seizure so hearteningly severe are not only Trump’s words and apparent America-First foreign policy inclinations, but the fact that he is getting so very many votes. “Could it possibly be,” ponder the likes of Bill Kristol, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, Michael Bloomberg, Peter King, Elliott Abrams, Eric Edelman, Michael Chertoff, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Bolton, “that Americans are not genuinely happy, proud, and eager to have their fellow citizens and soldier-children dying uselessly in wars motivated in large part by the U.S. interventionism we advocate and by America’s subservience to a country that does nothing but degrade the republic’s security and drain its treasury?” “Could it be,” the IF/NC’ers are wondering, “that Trump and the increasing number of voters supporting him know that we Israel-Firsters and Neocons have played them for fools, corrupted their political system and media, and done our best to keep their kids dying in wars meant to serve a foreign nation’s interests at the cost of their own?” Well, it is too soon to tell, but the words of the Israel Firsters and Neocons and their fierce hatred of Trump surely suggest that they fear their war-causing disloyalty has been identified and — at long last — their jig is about up.

Facing the next-to-last last ditch, the disloyal are nearly frantic in their support for Senator Marco Rubio. And why not? Rubio is a thorough-going IF/NC, and — as he has little money of his own — is on the payroll, according to the media, of two pro-Israel, Jewish-American billionaires. Rubio also has denounced the Founders’ approach to foreign policy, expressing his belief that the IF/NC approach to U.S. foreign policy — that is, America at war everywhere, all the time, to protect Israel — is superior to John Quincy Adams’ republic-preserving advice that the United States must never go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.”

But Rubio, after his Super Tuesday shellacking, is circling the drain until the Florida primary sends him barreling toward the sewer, and the Neocons and Israel Firsters, as Jacob Heilbrunn has written in the National Interest, have only one place to go, and that is to Hillary Clinton, who already has few of both detestable species on her team, but, the media says, only one pro-Israel, Jewish-American billionaire.

Mr. Heilbrunn’s excellent article notes that the IF/NC was originally based in the Democratic Party and so in a sense would be going home if they side with Clinton. That they were once aligned with the Democrats is clearly true, but being aligned with is much different than being part of, and I would argue that the IF/NC have never been anything but a one-issue party of their own.

Their party — best identified as the Disloyal Party or perhaps just as Copperheads — has never had any goal other than protecting the interests of Israel and keeping the United States steadily involved in the Israel-Arab war by promoting and purchasing a U.S. foreign policy that results in wars to install “democracy” abroad, but which are, in reality, only wars that are intended to annihilate Israel’s enemies, while unnecessarily making Israel’s enemies America’s. Can any clear thinking person really believe, for example, that “Foundation for Defense of Democracies” is anything but an IF/NC tool for fomenting war against Muslims in order to protect what they describe as “the only democracy” in the Middle East?

The use of the democracy angle by the IF/NC crowd is amply demonstrated in a recent article by one of its leading lights, Max Boot, titled “The GOP’s Apologists for Tyrants”. In this piece, Mr. Boot denounces Republican presidential candidates Trump, Cruz, and Kasich for “their support for dictators” and their clear lack of enthusiasm for unnecessary overseas democracy mongering and interventionist wars. Mr. Boot lauds the usual Copperhead line and insists that overthrowing Saddam, Gaddafi, and others was the correct thing to do. The only problem, he says, is that the U.S. government did not go far enough in waging those useless and massively counterproductive wars. Only the Israel First-owned Marco Rubio, Boot declares, refuses to “embrace genocidal tyrants”, which means the Copperheads were betting that they could count on Rubio for more war.

Well, Mr. Boot, no, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich are not seeking to “embrace genocidal tyrants”, but rather are looking out for America first. They know that neither Saddam nor Gaddafi was ever a serious national-security threat to the United States; indeed, both were key and extraordinarily lethal allies — and ones we did not have to pay — in the war against the Islamists.

Saddam kept Iraq’s door locked tight and so prevented the Islamists located east of Iraq from moving westward in large numbers, and he made the Iranians little more than marginal players in the Levant. How are things looking in that area now, Mr. Boot? Gaddafi kept the Islamists at bay in much of North Africa and murdered or incarcerated every Islamist that Libya’s military and security services could get their hands on, but IF/NC wanted a pro-democracy war in Libya and got it. How are affairs in the Maghreb going these days, Mr. Boot?

And do not forget, Mr. Boot, that you and your IF/NC sidekicks insisted that the U.S. government go democracy mongering in the Middle East in the name of the Arab Spring, and then you supported the military coup in Egypt that destroyed a democratically elected regime. Now, Mr. Boot, how is all of that working out? Finally, what about that clever IF/NC plan to build a new, pro-Western democracy in Afghanistan, how is that doing? Could you check on the progress of democracy there and get back to me?

What I think Mr. Trump is saying, Mr. Boot, is that it is too bad/so sad that there are murderous dictators loose in the world, but as long as they pose no life-and-death threat to the United States there is no reason for America to militarily intervene and give them — as the saying goes — the boot. After all, if the dictators are not killing Americans and/or threatening genuine U.S. national interests, who cares? Humans are hard-wired for war, so let them fight. The U.S. government exists only to defend the republic, its commerce, and its citizens and their liberties; it is under precisely zero obligation — legal, moral, or one dreamed up by disloyal U.S. citizens — to defend any set of foreigners against the murderous machinations of the dictators who rule them or the enemies who threaten them.

The wars that disloyal IF/NC Copperheads like you champion, Mr. Boot, have invariably been greatly counterproductive for U.S. national security, the national debt, and, especially, for those you and your colleagues care the least about; namely, the parents, wives, husbands, and children who suffered the loss or maiming of their loved ones in the military while they were fighting in the unnecessary wars you and your kind demand that America fight for only one reason, to make the world safe for Israel.

So, Mr. Boot, if you and the rest of your wretched and disloyal IF/NC associates want to go to the Democratic Party and side with IF/NC’er Hillary Clinton, please go immediately and trumpet your departure from the roof tops. After all, what could be more appropriate than today’s Copperheads — a kind of snake that sneaks and strikes without warning — joining the Democratic Party, the original incubator and home of the Civil War’s Copperheads? In the decade before that war, Massachusetts’s Senator Charles Sumner was speaking when he saw one of his pro-slavery foes enter the Senate Chamber and walk toward his seat. Sumner stopped and asked, I paraphrase here, the other senators to witness that a slug was slithering across the chamber’s floor looking for a chair to adhere to. For the Republican Party, the movement of the entire IF/NC crowd to the Democratic Party would be a Godsend, a veritable slithering slug migration that would find no shortage of fellow slugs waiting for them in Hillary’s camp, and there probably would be enough chairs for all of them to adhere to.

There is, then, nothing that could strengthen the Republican Party more and attract more voters to its side than to be shed of you, Mr. Boot, and your disloyal fellow Copperheads. Be gone, good riddance, and praise God for cutting out the festering IF/NC malignancy from the Republican Party so that it can once again stand for something more than endless war and Israel First.

 

Anti-Federalism, the stress of decentralization and local governance

The paleoconservative emphasis upon localism is reflected in their search for international co-think- ers. They have constructed ties with those who think in terms of small-scale, decentralized and localist structures structured around shared com- mon ethnic roots, rather than those who seek to construct a centralized state apparatus. Italy has been of particular interest. Chronicles rejects the commercial conservatism of Forza Italia and the quasi-fascism of Alleanza Nazionale. It looks instead towards the Lega Nord, its leader, Umberto Bossi, and its demands for a confederate state. It has similarly associ- ated itself with the Bosnian Serbs' efforts to create an autonomous republic, and opposed the attempts to es- tablish Bosnia as a viable multiethnic state. The hostility of the European right to American mass culture may however prevent closer collaboration.

Anti-Federalism 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.[54] In an international context, this view would be known as federalism and paleocons often look to John C. Calhoun for inspiration.[55]

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.[56]

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."[57]

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.[58]

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, busing and curriculum standards would be settled on a local basis.[59] 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."[60]

Focus of family and moral values

Like most conservatives, paleoconservatives  believe that hard work, self-discipline, and adherence to religious faith were the means by which a virtuous life was earned and a moral order was established and maintained (The Paleo Persuasion The American Conservative):

Third, paleoconservatism emerged also as a reaction against what was taking place in American culture itself in the 1980s and ’90s, trends that the mainstream Right warmly embraced. Not only the increasing secularism, hedonism, and carnal and material self-indulgence of the dominant culture but also its shallowness and artificiality, its proclivity to being manipulated by media and political elites, its passivity in the face of more and more usurpation of social and civic functions by big government, big business, and big media, and the happy chatter from the contemporary political Right that celebrated this transformation and identified public morality almost exclusively with flag-waving, prayer in schools, invoking saccharine and platitude about “family values,” and constant ranting about any and all movies that contained sex.

The paleoconservative vews on the subject are well expressed in By Samuel Goldman  review of  the book It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, Mary Eberstadt, Harper (\The American Conservative June 10, 2016 ):

On April 27, 1979, Jerry Falwell addressed thousands of conservative Christians from the steps of the Capitol. Asserting that the “vast majority” of Americans were opposed to pornography, abortion, and homosexuality, he announced the establishment of a new organization to promote “pro-family, pro-life, and pro-morality” policies. In a statement before the rally, Falwell explained the motive behind what he called the Moral Majority: “We’ve had enough and we want America cleaned up.”

Times have changed. Formerly confident in their numbers and clout, conservative Christians are now on the defensive. Falwell dreamed of cleaning up America. Nearly two generations later, his heirs are reduced to pleading for exemptions from sweeping anti-discrimination policies. Although popular with voters in some states, these pleas have not survived national scrutiny—even where Republicans hold power. In Indiana, a law that might have allowed bakers and photographers to decline service to gay weddings endured just a few months before it was “fixed” by the legislature. In Georgia, a similar bill was vetoed by the governor under intense pressure from big business.

The cultural transformation has been even more dramatic than the political one. Especially among highly educated people, beliefs that gender has a physiological basis or that procreation is a central purpose of marriage are proceeding from outré to unacceptable. In an ironic reversal, conservative Christians have adopted an idiom of concealment from a minority they once demonized: until recently, it was gays who spoke of being “in the closet.” Now they are joined by followers of traditional orthodoxy.

Mary Eberstadt is horrified by this development. In It’s Dangerous to Believe, she describes religious traditionalists as targets of a distinctly modern brand of intolerance that mirrors the history of religious fanaticism.

To support this interpretation, Eberstadt offers a parade of horribles drawn from around the English-speaking world. The incidents she cites range from the ouster of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla to penalties imposed on teachers who defended Catholic doctrines on sexuality to the withdrawal of recognition from religious clubs at several universities. Eberstadt acknowledges that her examples are “disparate.” But she insists that they add up to a “widespread and growing effort to shame, punish, and ostracize people because of what they believe.”

There is nothing inherently novel about such campaigns, which have occurred with some frequency since the emergence of Biblical religion. What’s different is the issue at stake. This is not a dispute about the nature of God, proper form of worship, or correct rendering of revelation. Instead, “every act committed in the name of this new intolerance has a single, common denominator, which is the protection of the perceived prerogatives of the sexual revolution at all costs. The new intolerance is a wholly owned subsidiary of that revolution. No revolution, no new intolerance.”

Eberstadt offers a compelling analysis of the ideology that developed to justify the sexual revolution. Rather than a libertarian demand to leave people alone, it functions as an ersatz theology with its own its dogmas, theory of history, and canon of saints and martyrs. This parallel structure may be rooted in a process of secularization, as religious concepts were drained of their religious meaning. More likely, it reflects a basic human inclination to form systems, to make sense of the world.

Whatever its source, the internal coherence of moral progressivism explains the bitterness with which it responds to challenges. Critics of the new dispensation aren’t harmless dissenters. They are heretics whose denial of the truth threatens the possibility of a virtuous community.

In this respect, Eberstadt argues, the guardians of the sexual revolution can be understood as successors to the Puritans. Contrary to their reputation in some quarters as defenders of religious liberty, the Puritans were mostly interested in the freedom to do things their way. Error, concluded the divines of New England, had no rights. That is why they were so bitterly opposed to allowing members of other denominations to dwell among them.

When it came to Baptists and Catholics, this suspicion was not altogether irrational. But the Puritans’ fear of subversion did not stop with actual rivals. The logic of their theology turned them against adversaries that did not even exist. The witch trials were no aberration but a consequence of systematic intolerance.

Eberstadt contends that a similar logic is being turned against religious traditionalists today. The Moral Majority posed a plausible challenge to the sexual revolution. Today’s dissenters from the sexual revolution, by contrast, are symbolic sacrifices at the altar of progress. According to Eberstadt, “the notion that the religious counterculture” can enforce its vision of righteousness on a majority is “downright absurd.” In her judgment, it is because they have so little real influence that recalcitrant bakers or photographers have to be publicly shamed by progressives.

Eberstadt’s description of the bewildered faithful, caught up in rapid social change, is deeply affecting. She is an acute critic of the way some Christian institutions have distanced themselves from their own teachings at the expense of low-level employees, who didn’t get the memo about what’s now politically acceptable in time. Eberstadt also discusses shocking incidents in which the mere expression of religious beliefs has led to denial of educational and job opportunities. This is prejudice pure and simple. One hopes liberals and progressives will accept her call to reject it—particularly in institutions of higher learning whose leaders speak ceaselessly of their commitment to diversity.    

Yet many of the cases Eberstadt discusses are more complicated than the Manichean struggle she depicts. More than attacks on unpopular ideas, they are disputes about the discharge of political office or participation in government programs.

Take the hapless Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County, Ky. What provoked Davis’s more thoughtful critics was not the refusal in itself. Instead, it was her expectation that she could reject the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges while keeping her job. This was not the conventional understanding of conscientious objection that allows believers to avoid otherwise compulsory duties—most prominently, military service. Instead, it looked like an attempt by a sworn public servant to have it both ways by choosing which responsibilities of her office she was willing to discharge.

After several months of wrangling, the state of Kentucky reached a compromise that removes county clerks’ names from the marriage licenses they issue. This seems a reasonable policy that protects the rights and dignity of all involved. It was necessary, however, because the connection between traditional religious belief and civil authority is not as dead as Eberstadt suggests.

The challenges to the Obamacare contraception mandate recently argued before the Supreme Court also defy Eberstadt’s depiction of a war on traditional belief. Rather than targets of an “ideological power play,” for-profit corporations such as Hobby Lobby and religious institutions like the Little Sisters of the Poor were collateral damage of a massive expansion of the administrative state. The underlying problem here is not the pseudo-theology of the sexual revolution but the cooptation of private enterprises and associations to supply a public benefit.  

Eberstadt is too quick to attribute controversies about the political role of religion to irrational animus on the part of progressives. She also tends to reduce religion to Christianity and Christianity to its more traditionalist currents. This reduction makes it easier to treat religious belief as such as the target of hostility from a monolithic secular consensus.

But the American religious scene is more varied than Eberstadt acknowledges. In addition to the conservative Christians on whom she focuses, many believers have made their peace with the sexual revolution and the world it has made—or at least figured out how to live alongside it. That includes American Jews, including many who hold politically incorrect views on sexuality.

Why do Jews escape the opprobrium to which traditionalist Catholics or Baptists are subjected? Partly because they have never been more than a tiny minority, but also because they make few claims on political and cultural authority. Apart from a few neighborhoods in and around New York City, no one fears that religious Jews will attempt to dictate how they live their own lives. As a result, they are able to avoid most forms of interference with their communities.

There is a lesson here for the Christian traditionalists for whom Eberstadt speaks. They are more likely to win space to live according to their consciences to the extent that they are able to convince a majority that includes more liberal Christians and non-Christian believers, as well as outright secularists, that they are not simply biding their time until they are able to storm the public square. In addition, they will have to develop institutions of community life that are relatively low-visibility and that can survive without many forms of official support. The price of inclusion in an increasingly pluralistic society may be some degree of voluntary exclusion from the dominant culture.    

There is no doubt that this will be a hard bargain for adherents of traditions that enjoyed such immense authority until recently. As Eberstadt points out, however, it will also be difficult for progressives who resemble Falwell in their moral majoritarianism. The basis for coexistence must be a shared understanding that the Christian America for which some long and that others fear isn’t coming back—not only because it was Christian but also because it involved a level of consensus that is no longer available to us. There are opportunities for believers and nonbelievers alike in this absence.

Samuel Goldman is an assistant professor of political science and director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at George Washington University.

 


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