paleoconservatism

paleoconservatism, movement within American conservatism that seeks, among other goals, to preserve the country’s Anglo-Saxon and Christian heritage; to drastically limit and decentralize the powers of the federal government; to promote respect for traditional regional cultures, especially that of the Old South; to severely restrict immigration, especially from non-Western and developing countries; to bolster the American economy through protectionism (while maintaining free market capitalism at home); to greatly scale back, if not eliminate entirely, the welfare state initiated in the 1930s by U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt and continued after World War II; and to disengage the United States from foreign political, economic, and military alliances and international institutions (see isolationism). Paleoconservatives also tend to espouse attitudes historically associated with (but by no means limited to) largely rural and agrarian regions of the United States. Such perspectives have included reverence for the traditional family, respect for established social hierarchies and traditional gender roles, resentment of government interference in regional ways of life (e.g., for the purpose of enforcing civil rights), adherence to Christian moral principles, and skepticism of universal democracy and equality. Since the 1980s, for example, paleoconservatives have vociferously opposed multiculturalism, identity politics, and the social ideal of diversity as grave threats to America’s ethnic and cultural identity.

The paleoconservative movement emerged in the 1980s as a conscious attempt to revive the conservatism of the so-called Old Right, which had dominated the Republican Party in the early 20th century and whose members had opposed Roosevelt’s statism and the country’s anticipated involvement in World War II. Following the end of the war, many Old Right isolationists acquiesced in the country’s military and diplomatic efforts to contain the spread of Soviet communism, in effect aligning themselves (albeit uncomfortably) with a new Cold War conservatism that rejected isolationism and de-emphasized domestic antistatism in favor of defending democracy around the globe.

Beginning in the 1970s, the influence of the Old Right was further reduced by the rise of neoconservatism, a movement born among right-leaning liberals who were disillusioned with liberalism and deplored what they viewed as the leftist radicalism and amorality of the 1960s. Neoconservatives shared some of the goals and values of paleoconservatives but prioritized an interventionist foreign policy dedicated to promoting democratic and capitalist forms of government abroad, particularly in the developing world. Notably, neoconservatives were also pro-immigration and generally supportive of some form of welfare state (to ameliorate potentially destabilizing inequalities created by free market capitalism), seeking only to make existing social welfare programs more efficient. In the 1970s neoconservatives, social conservatives, and economic libertarians formed a loose coalition—characterized by some observers as the “New Right”—that appealed broadly to conservative Democrats as well as to mainstream Republicans and helped to propel Ronald Reagan to victory in the U.S. presidential election of 1980. During this period and through the remainder of the Reagan era (the 1980s), more-traditional conservatives whose viewpoints harkened back to the Old Right remained resentful of neoconservatives for supposedly having co-opted and diluted American conservatism with a false brand of anticommunist “welfare statism.” The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) encouraged the “paleoconservatives,” as they were then identified by the conservative intellectuals Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, to forcefully articulate their opposition to neoconservatism and to advocate new policies inspired by the Old Right’s ideological battles with New Deal Democrats. Neoconservatives, for their part, revisited long-standing accusations that the paleoconservative celebration of America’s Christian heritage and opposition to immigration from developing countries were indicative of the movement’s underlying antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia.

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The influence of paleoconservatism within the American right arguably reached a high point at the end of the 20th century in Pat Buchanan’s unsuccessful attempts to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996 and in his failed campaign for president as the nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. Buchanan, a conservative journalist and former special assistant to Richard Nixon, advocated curbs on free trade and a temporary moratorium on immigration. He also decried the feminist and gay rights movements and criticized the United States for having assumed the role of “global policeman” and for allowing Israel to exert an undue influence (in his view) on U.S. foreign policy.

Following the 2000 presidential election, the paleoconservative movement dissipated. While some scholars now regard paleoconservatism as all but dead, others have argued that it was partially revived, or recognizably transformed, in the rise of the “alt-right” (alternative right)—a loose association of relatively young white nationalists, white supremacists, extreme libertarians, and neo-Nazis that later included QAnon followers and members of the Proud Boys—in the 2010s and in the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–21), whose positions on immigration, civil rights, protectionism, and America’s role as guardian of world democracy were reminiscent of paleoconservative positions on those issues.