Paul Gottfried writes: Neoconservative publicists and media personalities in the US, particularly George Will and Bill Kristol, identify their “conservatism” domestically with being loyal establishmentarians. But since the American center, particularly on all social issues, has been veering leftward for decades, this repugnance for the non-establishment Right hardly indicates a conservative orientation. What it suggests is a willingness to go with the leftist flow in return for bipartisan support for a neoconservative foreign policy. Neoconservatives can easily live with a left-of-center government (prominent neoconservatives, including Murdoch, were close to the Hillary Clinton for president camp in 2008) as long as it backs a neoconservative direction in international relations. The neoconservative powerbroker Bill Kristol has already put Republicans on notice that he will back the Democratic candidate for president, if he doesn’t get his movement’s choice for a Republican presidential candidate.
To their credit, the paleoconservatives defended what remained of a real Right for several decades, and they carried out this thankless task in the face of professional threats. The traditional Right was suspicious of the direction that the civil rights movement was already taking in the 1960s, and they have consistently opposed the feminist and gay crusades with a powerful but generally ignored arsenal of arguments. Paleoconservatives have taken stands against the liberal internationalist foreign policy advocated by the neoconservatives and more broadly, the Republican Party. Critics on the right have resisted this approach because they are deeply skeptical of what Burke mocked as the “armed doctrine” of global revolutionaries. Paleoconservatives also stress the resemblance between the present call for world revolution and the Marxist internationalist vision. The real Right (if I may use this phrase) totally rejects any call by the fake Right for a global democratic revolution. They challenge the view that our transformed America represents such a lofty state of moral enlightenment that we are entitled to cram our progressive values down the throats of the unwilling.
Unlike the neoconservatives and the corporate interests that fund the GOP, all paleoconservatives are immigration restrictionists, oppose birthright citizenship, and underline the difficulty of integrating newcomers from very different cultures. They also maintain that until the US can recover from its devastating commitment to multiculturalism and political correctness, we shouldn’t even try to “Americanize” more immigrants—or indoctrinate with our own aberrations those who are already here. But the differences between the sides go even deeper. Whereas the neoconservatives view most of the rest of the world as being in desperate need of what late modern America has become, paleoconservatives by contrast long for an earlier time, before we became a leftist-neoconservative paradise.
Between the two visions of America, there is a clear line of demarcation. One side regards what is best in the American experience as coming to pass in the present age; whereas the other side considers the country derailed politically culturally and socially and looks for ways mostly in the past that were not taken. Typical of neoconservative heroes are Martin Luther King, Harry Truman, the Churchill who fought the (for the neoconservatives) hated Germans in two World Wars, and Abraham Lincoln, as a precursor of the post-World War Two civil rights movement. Paleoconservative heroes include antebellum Southern statesman John C. Calhoun,5 exponent of limited and distributed federal power Senator Robert Taft,6 man of letters Russell Kirk,7 social theorist Robert Nisbet,8 political theorist and critic Richard M. Weaver,9 literary intellectual Mel Bradford,10 and the Southern Agrarian critics of modern industrial society.11 Those who are often cited by contemporary paleoconseravtives include other writers such as Peter Brimelow,12 John Derbyshire,13 James Kalb14 and others.
Although one can occasionally hear a paleoconservative saying something nice about Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, those political figures are more likely to be praised by neoconservatives, who admire their global democratic tropes and liberal internationalist foreign policy. An inextinguishable enmity between the two sides developed in the first year of the Reagan administration, when a venerated paleoconservative literary scholar M.E. Bradford was passed over for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities.15 The position went to a neoconservative pick, who came out of the moderate Left, William Bennett, after a relentless campaign of character assassination undertaken by neoconservative journalists. Bradford’s negative comments about Abraham Lincoln and his known sympathy for the Confederacy (for which his ancestors had fought) were cited by Irving Kristol, George Will and others closely linked to the neoconservative camp to depict Bradford as a (what else?) “racist”.
Paleoconservatism has lost cohesiveness as well as resources, but this movement has been displaced rather than totally eradicated. In the 1990s, efforts were made to forge an alliance between paleoconservatives and socially traditionalist libertarians (then known as paleolibertarians). The unifying personality in these efforts was the economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard, who tried to build bridges to traditionalist groups, in the face of growing neoconservative power. After the death of Rothbard in January 1995, this bridge-building foundered because of squabbling between the two camps, and it has never been seriously resumed. Moreover, the paleolibertarians and their talking partners went off in different directions, one toward the almost exclusive discussion of economic questions and the avoidance of foreign entanglement, while their onetime negotiating partners at the Rockford Institute and Chronicles magazine remained in tune with the changing enthusiasms of the institute’s head. Defenses of the Southern secessionists in 1861, Serb and Pan-Slavic nationalism, and militant (often emphatically anti-Protestant) Catholic traditionalism all belong to the peculiar mixture of positions that the reader encounters in Chronicles.
An even more significant direction in which some in the paleoconservative camp have wandered is toward identitarian politics.16 The “Disaligned Right”17 in the US has taken over selectively paleoconservative concerns and absorbed them into their own ideological configuration. Already in 1986, as I pointed out in an essay for Policy Review written at that time,18 sociobiology became a major interest among some of the younger right-wing warriors as they battled against the neoconservative ascendancy. Support for national and cultural particularity against the neoconservative’s glorification of human rights and egalitarian politics had led at least some paleoconservatives into stressing innate differences among different groups based on non-voluntary criteria. Similar arguments were also marshalled against government social engineering, which it was argued was an effort to change human nature through political coercion.19 Since the 1980s, however, this focus among most of the now older paleoconservatives has disappeared. This has occurred largely because of the Left’s escalating war against any discussions of human nature that is not centered on the view that all people are the naturally the same everywhere. Any deviation from this myth, we are told, must result in reactionary repression and the endangerment of minorities; it is therefore just, or so one would believe from listening to our elites, that those who take up forbidden subjects should be punished professionally and socially. Our eyes and eyes must be protected from dangerously divisive ideas.20
But some on the American right have pushed sociobiological issues even harder in the teeth of leftist persecution. Despite the fact that these preoccupations are not my own (I may be too old to change my paleoconservative colors), those of this persuasion have baited the Left and the neoconservatives with fearless determination. They have also been relentless in going after immigration expansionists and exposing the efforts of large corporations to flood this country with an uneducated Third World labor force. Although isolated and vilified by the “conservative” as well as conventional leftist media, those who push “biodiversity,” as they like to call it, from the right cannot be put off by ostracism and intimidation. Indeed by now its rhetoric has filtered through into the columns of Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and other syndicated columnists. For all their exaggerations, indiscretions, and lack of interest in those things that interest me, these mostly young people who focus on innate human differences may represent a genuine movement of the Right. Needless to say, I won’t bet on their coming to power very soon. And I doubt these partisans will get neoconservative funding or media exposure on a Republican channel.
