#Paleoconservatism

[omegaphilosophia]

Types of Conservatism

Conservatism, like liberalism, encompasses a broad range of ideologies and perspectives. These types vary significantly across regions and historical contexts but generally emphasize tradition, social order, and skepticism toward rapid change. Here are some primary types of conservatism:

1. Traditional Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Traditional conservatism values established customs, institutions, and social hierarchies. It stresses the importance of cultural continuity, the wisdom of past generations, and a gradual approach to social change.

Historical Figures: Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott.

Key Elements: Respect for tradition, social stability, authority, and moral order.

2. Social Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Social conservatism emphasizes the preservation of traditional family structures, religious values, and moral standards. It often involves resistance to cultural changes seen as undermining societal cohesion or moral integrity.

Key Elements: Pro-family policies, emphasis on moral education, opposition to liberal social policies, and preservation of traditional gender roles.

3. Fiscal Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Fiscal conservatism prioritizes limited government spending, low taxes, and free-market capitalism. Fiscal conservatives advocate for reducing the national debt, minimizing public welfare programs, and maintaining a balanced budget.

Key Elements: Limited government intervention in the economy, support for a free-market system, privatization, and reduction in government spending.

4. Libertarian Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Libertarian conservatism combines a conservative approach to social issues with a strong emphasis on individual freedom and minimal government interference in personal and economic affairs.

Historical Figures: Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul.

Key Elements: Individual freedom, limited government, economic libertarianism, and personal responsibility.

5. Neoconservatism

Core Beliefs: Neoconservatism originally emerged from liberal roots, focusing on an assertive foreign policy to promote democracy and defend national interests. It combines conservative domestic values with an interventionist foreign policy.

Historical Figures: Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz.

Key Elements: Promotion of democracy abroad, support for military strength, a strong national defense, and foreign policy interventionism.

6. Paleoconservatism

Core Beliefs: Paleoconservatism emphasizes nativism, cultural preservation, and limited international involvement. It is skeptical of globalization and often advocates for a return to traditional values, strong borders, and limited immigration.

Historical Figures: Patrick Buchanan, Russell Kirk.

Key Elements: Nationalism, cultural preservation, isolationism, and opposition to globalism.

7. Religious Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Religious conservatism focuses on integrating religious principles, often rooted in Christianity, into public policy and society. This type of conservatism seeks to uphold religiously based moral standards in areas such as marriage, education, and bioethics.

Key Elements: Influence of religious values on politics, pro-life policies, advocacy for prayer in schools, and opposition to secularism.

8. Cultural Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Cultural conservatism emphasizes the preservation of a shared national or cultural identity. It supports policies and values that maintain cultural heritage and resist influences that could dilute or change traditional norms and practices.

Key Elements: Cultural nationalism, preservation of heritage and customs, and resistance to multiculturalism.

9. National Conservatism

Core Beliefs: National conservatism focuses on the importance of national sovereignty, patriotism, and a strong, centralized state to protect national interests. It often advocates for immigration control and protectionist economic policies.

Key Elements: National sovereignty, patriotism, economic protectionism, and restrictions on immigration.

10. One-Nation Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Originating in Britain, one-nation conservatism advocates for a balance between free markets and social welfare policies, aiming to unite different social classes under a shared national identity. It emphasizes social cohesion, support for public institutions, and moderate reforms to reduce inequality.

Historical Figures: Benjamin Disraeli.

Key Elements: Social welfare, unity across classes, economic moderation, and gradual reform to prevent class divisions.

11. Green Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Green conservatism emphasizes environmental conservation and stewardship within a conservative framework. It advocates for protecting natural resources through personal responsibility, market solutions, and sometimes government regulations that align with conservative values.

Key Elements: Environmental conservation, sustainable development, market-based ecological solutions, and conservation ethics.

12. Populist Conservatism

Core Beliefs: Populist conservatism appeals to ordinary citizens, often positioning itself against elite or establishment institutions. It is skeptical of big government, promotes nationalism, and typically advocates for policies that reflect the interests of "the common people."

Key Elements: Anti-elitism, populist rhetoric, economic protectionism, and skepticism toward establishment institutions.

Each form of conservatism addresses different aspects of society, from fiscal and economic policies to cultural preservation, environmental issues, and religious values. While united by a preference for tradition, stability, and a cautious approach to change, these conservative strands reflect a diverse array of beliefs on the role of government, culture, and social structure.

[collapsedsquid]

Prominent figures in the Off Leash crew are well known for their paleoconservative political views, but the private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly. Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad. The group’s overall bloodlust periodically proved to be too much for a few more judicious individual members, who in almost any other setting would be considered ultraconservatives but in the context of Off Leash sound like hippie peaceniks‎. One of the dissidents—a National Rifle Association firearms instructor who runs a weapons company—joked that he was worried about an “unsupervised” subgroup of especially enthusiastic military adventurers that formed to discuss topics too “hot” for WhatsApp, saying, “I imagine their ‘to be bombed’ list is over 49 countries and growing.”

No but you see paleoconservatism is about non-interventionism

[alphaman99]

Paleoconservatism, Civilization, and Europa

John Valdez  ·

Oh my...

[chrisabraham]

After witnessing the U.S. use 9/11 as a carte blanche to destabilize the Middle East, I shifted my political perspective. In the early 2000s, I transitioned from being a progressive liberal to a paleoconservative, largely due to its emphasis on non-interventionism.

Paleoconservatism advocates for restraint in foreign policy, traditional values, limited government, and national sovereignty. It often critiques the interventionist and globalist agendas of neoconservatives and neoliberals, favoring a cautious approach to preserving cultural heritage and national identity.

[kontextmaschine]

Hearing these assessments of Murray Rothbard and paleolibertarianism as a predecessor of modern right-populism makes some things I was noticing in the late '90s daily libertarian links roundup at free-market.net but didn't have referents for finally make sense, particularly Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo (noted as a disciple) at Antiwar.org. The distinct thing about the paleos it seemed to me was their monetarism, and with that site they were leading with a position – non-interventionist right-pacifism – that they did honestly hold, but seemed more importantly an open niche they could claim. Associating them with '90s white-Enough!ness… makes sense, though.

Makes it a little funny that was completely unrelated to how I came across Steve Sailer, which was actually his comments on Matt Yglesias' American Prospect blog

[the-funtime-autocrat]

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias.

John Derbyshire, "Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism" (2009).

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Maxime Bernier launches People's Party of Canada 

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OTTAWA -- Maxime Bernier has debuted the People's Party of Canada, the federal political party the former Tory MP is leading, with a promise to put "Canadian people first."

Bernier—who is keeping his seat in the House of Commons— launched his new party, party logo, and headquarters in Gatineau, Que. In French the party is called "Parti Populaire," and the acronym is PPC.

"Why this name? Because it is time that the government put Canadian people first when they make decisions and policies. It is time to put the power back into people's hands," Bernier told reporters at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa Friday morning.

In August, the once-Conservative Party leadership hopeful defected from the party to form his own more populist, libertarian version. Since then, Bernier said he’s not spoken with any of his longtime caucus members, saying he’s been too busy reaching out to the grassroots.

Among his political positions: supply management should go; "more diversity" is bad for Canada; and that the case for spending on foreign aid is "extremely weak."

On Friday, Bernier said his party’s values will include pushing for a smaller and less meddling government; championing individual freedoms; and denounced the corporate and lobby interests that he says hold too much power in federal politics.

He said that the "old parties" are not speaking for Canadians, and decried political correctness.

Bernier said he wants to have a debate about current immigration levels and making sure that newcomers share Canadian values, which he said including respecting diversity, the rule of law, and the equality of men and women.

"The people's party will respect the taxpayers, will respect our constitution… and respect our traditions, our history, and what makes Canada a unique place in the world."

His decision to form his own party came after ongoing tension between him and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who Bernier has slammed as a "more moderate" version of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Leading up to the announcement, Bernier has been using social media to reach out to his "Mad Max" supporters across the country, asking them to share what riding they are in and communicate with each other about building up and organizing teams in ridings throughout Canada.

Bernier said he's received thousands of messages from supporters who want "a real choice in October 2019" and said that he’s been in touch with hundreds of people who want to volunteer or run as candidates. He said his party intends to have 338 candidates running in October 2019.

While it will take weeks more before the party is registered with Elections Canada, Bernier said he's already received $140,000 in donations. He currently has two people on the payroll: Martin Masse, a long-time friend and adviser to Bernier who was collaborating with him on the now-stalled Bernier book about doing politics differently; and Maxime Hupe, who was at the helm of Bernier’s communications during the Tory leadership race.

Bernier said his challenge in the next few months is to prove that his party is a real alternative to Trudeau, and to continue to build on his policy planks, some of which are already posted on his new website.

The website includes a disclaimer that while the platform is still being finalized, the site is showcasing his policies from the leadership, and that "the PPC's platform will be mostly based on the same policies."

For example, in the foreign policy section the text reads: "As leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and Prime Minister, I will ensure our country’s foreign policy will be refocused on the security and prosperity of Canadians."

Bernier also wants to be invited to participate in the 2019 leaders’ debates.

"The politicians, they try to please everybody, and when you want to please everybody, you don’t please everybody, that’s not my way of doing politics. You like the ideas, you like the principles that we are fighting for? That’s OK. You don’t like it? That’s OK, don’t vote for me."

[magnoleigha]

[the-world-annealing]

If your ideal society is one without coercive enforcement mechanisms, it will be one without coercive enforcement mechanisms. Thus, arguing for those states comes with implicit claims about the type of life that humans will pursue in absence of such mechanisms.

Fascism, or authoritarian flavors of communism, or bare-bones liberalism, or an increasing number of 'libertarians' can just say "Many people might dislike our system, but My Side will be strong enough to beat them into submission, so who cares". That's not a shining endorsement of their desirability, but at least it stands on its own, it showcases that if a maoist system happens it'll be able to stay maoist for a good amount of time, and if you think maoism is good then that's a point in your favor.

But a right-anarchist who wants utterly free markets and a left-anarchist who wants egalitarian communes and an anarcho-syndicalist and a christian anarchist and an anprim all reject a centralized authority that can enforce its will upon society; they just differ in their belief about the human response to that lack of enforcement!

If these people weren't making implicit claims about human nature, you'd expect a lot more missing moods: "Society would be optimal if it were ungoverned and left to the market, but sadly people will instead prefer to cluster in tight-knit communities that eschew modern tech" is not a common opinion, even though different people will support either half!

So anyway, every time I see an ancom and an ancap argue, I can't help but wonder... is there a real, resolvable disagreement about politics going on here? Or do these people want the exact same enforcement mechanisms gone, and simply disagree about whether private property or democratic governments will survive that social change?

(I'm worried that 'getting rid of anything that lets the powerful enforce their will' is an overly reductionist view of anarchist revolutions, but 'we win the revolution and then everyone destroys their electronics' is still a claim about human nature in the absence of coercion, right? Anything that you view as an innate part of your victory must either be enforced on the unwilling or willingly accepted by most)

[collapsedsquid]

With @morlock-holmes and @discoursedrome talking about the weirdness and un-appealingness of this modern far-right conservatism, been thinking back to the history of US paleoconservatism in general.  There was the sense in the 90s that their anti-NAFTA anti-globalization stance made them the ones with “real popularity“ that was out-of-power only though their subversion by the neocons’s control of institutions and meant they feel optimistic about their future power, but they had a bunch of weird ideas about the “real american national tradition” (less catholic, more confederate, probably equally weird) that I think were never actually popular but nobody cared when the anti-globalization stuff had attention, and then they took a position that made their popularity take an absolutely nosedive on the right, they opposed the Iraq war and ate shit for 10 years.

Anyways I think this is a way to contextualize their relationship to Trump, Trump sanded off their rough edges and now he’s no longer front-and-center you have catholics and incels who could think they were popular learning that they are not.

[hazardous-waste-containment]

Do you have any good readings about fascist anti-imperialism in the US? You've mentioned it a couple times but I have a hard time understanding where it comes from. I get why fascists in Europe or elsewhere would resent US imperial power, but not so much why fascists in the US itself would reject it. Is it because empires are implicitly multicultural (albeit on an unequal basis)? Is it because US empire is so deeply tied to liberalism? Something else?

I’ve heard very good things about Insurgent Supremacists by Matthew Lyons but I have not read it yet. See also Lyons’ essay “Two Ways of Looking at Fascism,” Hamerquist and Sakai’s Confronting Fascism which Lyons draws on heavily, and Lyons’ article “Trump, Iran, and the right-wing anti-interventionists”.

As far as where it comes from, I don’t have a single all-encompassing answer and there are many dimensions to it, some very recent and/or distinctly American, others more generalized and dating back to the interwar era. I won’t be able to cover everything (Sakai has an elaborate Marxist theory of fascist anti-imperialism as a kind of lower-middle class revenge against globalization and deindustrialization, that I couldn’t fit in), but to highlight some key points:

First of all, I should clarify that not all fascists oppose multicultural empires as such: Mosley is a classic example of a fascist imperialist who fully endorsed the multicultural, multiracial composition of the British Empire; that said, this obviously wasn’t true of Nazism, and it especially isn’t relevant to American white nationalism.

In many ways fascist anti-Americanism in the U.S. and Europe works basically the same way; the rejection of everything the existing American state and its global hegemony stands for, or is seen as standing for: globalism, degeneracy, Zionism, the ‘melting pot’, and what Eurofascists have taken to calling ‘McDonaldisation’, the spread of a soulless and homogenizing consumerism that chews up national cultures and spits out Golden Arches. It’s not necessarily the U.S. in particular they have a problem with (though in the European context it’s easier to frame it that way, as an American invasion), but a certain poisonous neoliberal worldview seen as flowing primarily from the contemporary U.S. (and often ultimately out of Israel), whatever side of the Atlantic they’re on.

The other, interlocking, element which I already implied is antisemitism, the conspiracy theory among neo-Nazis everywhere (though in the U.S. it has a particular flavor of resistance to the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’) that global capitalism and the American empire are the work of a Jewish cabal. This leads many American white nationalists, such as Matthew Heimbach, to see Arab nationalists and Islamists as comrades in a common fight against Jewish occupation.

In the past I’ve called this an ‘anti-imperialism of fools’, fascists buying what U.S. propaganda is selling, so to speak. @soul-hammer made a meme that communicates this really succinctly, specifically wrt pinkwashing (who remembers that tumblr tradcath who made reference last year to the “homosexual American military”?):

American and Israeli propaganda assert that Israel speaks for Jews and that imperialist military interventions are carried out in their name, and antisemitic conspiracy theorists take it at face value.

In this context it’s significant that contemporary white nationalism grew in large part out of a revolutionary revision of paleoconservatism by people like Greg Johnson and Richard Spencer, and that there’s already a paleocon tradition of antisemitic conspiracy theories demonizing their neoconservative rivals as puppets of the ‘Israel Lobby’. This came to define the way that the alt-right positioned itself in relation to mainstream conservatism, so that aggressive, interventionist foreign policy in general is seen as 1) simply the military arm of broader ‘globalist’ world domination, and 2) a distraction from domestic racial issues. It wasn’t uncommon during the Trump years for alt-rightists to attribute Trump’s militarism in Syria or Iran to Jewish influence in the administration. Figures like Tucker Carlson echo the same themes without the overt antisemitism.

Though since I mentioned Spencer it’s worth noting that he’s actually a Zionist who sees Israel as a role model for a white ethnostate, albeit still accusing Jews of having outsized influence on American politics and taking a firmly anti-interventionist stance on foreign policy (which ties into his advocacy of a white empire in Europe as a bulwark against American power; then we get back into Eurofascist anti-Americanism and Spencer’s debt to the Identitarians, which isn’t what you asked about).

What’s really interesting is the recent emergence of an idiosyncratic Trumpian far-right, people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Witzke, that synthesizes paleocon anti-interventionism (e.g. on Ukraine) with evangelical Christian Zionism. This is weird and new (though I suppose presaged by Steve Bannon in the 2010s) and it isn’t directly relevant to fascism, so I won’t say too much about it here, but suffice to say it’s a major realignment of forces on the American right.

All of this said, fascist anti-imperialism in the U.S. obviously predates the alt-right; neo-Nazis already thought the Bush administration was controlled by Jews years before Counter-Currents or AlternativeRight popped up, and they thought Clinton was ushering in a globalist ‘New World Order’ years before that and so on. To bring in two last themes that hopefully get to the heart of the issue:

Pseudo-imperialism

So, I once saw a fascist website, can’t remember which, refer to American neoliberal imperialism as “pseudo-imperialism” and I thought it was really telling. While some fascisms have always been anti-imperialist (e.g. the Romanian Legionaries), there is a clear fascist tendency toward Empire as a sort of righteous spiritual crusade for civilisation and hierarchy. At the same time, they denounce international capitalism as ‘usury’, the abstract pursuit of profit for profit’s sake, corrupting and exploitative whereas a true Imperium is heroic and ennobling. This roughly corresponds to Moishe Postone’s insights about the way antisemitism functions in Nazi ideology.

The confused reaction fash have had to modern imperialism, then, seems logical enough: there’s nothing fairytale-heroic about dying in a forever war for an oil company, or about the endless march of McDonaldisation. Surely this isn’t true imperialism, it’s just nihilistic ‘usury’ at the greatest possible scale (they call the IMF the “International Usury Fund”). For an older example see Pedro Albizu Campos, who distinguished between traditional Hispanic empire (civilized and spiritual) versus the decadent and godless neocolonialism of the United States.

There’s actually a point in Mein Kampf in which Hitler sounds a bit ‘anti-imperialist’: he mocks Wilhelmine German colonialism in Africa, asking why so much money and energy were naïvely spent on civilizing an inferior race in some far-away country while Germans in Europe suffered under the Habsburg and Jewish yoke. It’s a critique of liberal empire that rhymes with right-wing anti-interventionism in the U.S., in which the question runs something like “Why are we off trying to ‘spread democracy’ in Iraq or Afghanistan while whites suffer under multiculturalism and immigration back home?”

History

Then there’s the history, unique to the U.S., which I know much less about than I should. One of the most innovative U.S. neo-fascist projects of the postwar years was Francis Parker Yockey’s call for a pan-European “Imperium” and a tactical alliance with the Soviet Union and Third World national liberation movements against Jewish-American decadence. His brand of Third Positionism didn’t really catch on at the time but in retrospect it laid the groundwork for decades of fascist anti-imperialism.

Coming from a wholly different place, there was also the Patriot movement that formed from disillusioned Vietnam vets in the 70s/80s/90s and saw Pax Americana as the sinister prelude to a totalitarian world-government that would persecute white Christians, basically fearing the loss of traditional culture, stable jobs, and national sovereignty to neoliberal globalization in a way that’s familiar to us in the era of Brexit and Trump. This is most of what Sakai talks about in The Shock of Recognition.

[alphaman99]

[theradical-outlook]

Review: The Fourth Political Theory

Review: The Fourth Political Theory

Alexander Dugin Nature and the Nation During the first 29 episodes I was calling the show ‘The Neofusionist Book Review’. I proposed neofusionism as the merging of naturalism– nature, and paleoconservatism– the nation.) In this episode, I look at Russian philosopher and geopolitical strategist Alexander Dugin’s vision of a new political order to replace both liberalism and its natural…

[romancoloratura]

Republican Ideals

“Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is useless to let go the reins and then expect her not to kick over the traces. You must keep her on a tight rein.... Women want total freedom or rather — to call things by their names — total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters.” ~ Cato the Elder

Cato the Elder, like many of the old Patrician stock, valued the way of the ancestors. The exemplified Roman was a farmer strong in civic virtue, ascetic, and would defend the state. Another politician of Patrician stock sympathetic to the virtues of rural life was Thomas Jefferson. Jeffersonian Democracy was the party of the everyday yeoman and the aristocratic planters. While thousands of years separate these two individuals, one can find many similarities in their outlooks. Both leaders were highly distrustful of foreign institutions from their origins (Greeks/British). Cato in his position as censor was keen on keeping out Greek religious cults and indulgent attitudes. Jefferson on the other hand was hawk-eyed on people who promoted the Westminster System and distrustful of the urban bourgeoisie and their indulgent tastes. As authors, both wrote on the history of their respective countries and their observations of life that turned philosophical. The similarities also go beyond their virtues. Both men today are remembered for their views on oppressed Groups. Cato is infamous for his views on women and their indulgence (Oppian Laws) and Jefferson's reputation is tarnished by slavery. Cato felt that women were below men and spoke of them as if they were subhuman. Jefferson himself owned women (Sally Hemmings) and slaves that numbered in the hundreds. One can infer there is a long line of conservative thought from Cato the Elder to more modern figures such as Jefferson. Both of their personal philosophies value social cohesion, a common culture, conventions, and continuity. These are the values that today are labeled under traditionalist conservatism and the most successful political heir would be paleoconservatism in the US.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Tucker (Carlson) recognizes Mexico is a hostile foreign power. He may have single-handedly saved Trump from ruining his Administration by launching a war on Iran. He also defended VDARE.com—by name—from Big Tech censorship, and warned about the danger to democracy from Big Tech. He’s directly attacked the Koch Brothers and explained to his viewers “why the Republican Party often seems completely out of sync with its own voters.” Tucker is preaching unwanted truths from within Conservatism Inc. I’m sure the top executives of the nonprofits clustered in Northern Virginia are furious he’s on the air. Certainly, any lowly staffer at any Conservatism Inc. organization who raised his arguments would be fired. Perhaps the most revealing exchange of the last year came a few months ago when Carlson spoke at the Turning Point USA conference. While Charlie Kirk desperately tried to convince the young crowd to support tax cuts for Big Tech, Carlson had them laughing at conservatism’s “inflexible theories.” He’s speaking to those “Market Skeptical Republicans” who constitute a huge part of the GOP base. He’s the voice of Americans who think there’s nothing wrong with defending our civic national identity. That’s the path forward for the American Right.

James Kirkpatrick, “The Heirs of MAGA--Who Will Lead Historic American Nation After Trump?” (July 12th 2019)

[argumate]

Bernie Sanders will probably not win, just because of the hostility of the party to him, but I’d place him as the most likely single candidate to win, not just for being the most popular politician in america but also for everyone else competing to be The Alternative To Sanders. (Clinton had that in the bag, whereas here you might see dynamics more similar to the 2016 Republican nomination where the whole clown car is competing to be The Establishment Candidate and nobody likes any of them)

Harris, Warren, Booker all seem like plausible winners. Biden has very good numbers in polls because of name recognition but there seems to be an almost universal consensus that he’s going to get #MeToo’d by like twenty credible victims as soon as he moves a muscle. Party bosses apparently hate Gilibrand but she doesn’t even have any street cred to show for it. That people are talking about O’Rourke at all is a measure of deep delusion in the kinds of liberal circles he’s being bruited in. Gabbard and whatever supporters she might get, on the other hand, presumably know she’s a joke candidate, though this is an odd election for her brand (generic protest votes will have a real option with Sanders, strong ideological interventionists who prefer the democrats will generally prefer Sanders anyway, and anyone more attracted to her own brand of paleoconservatism would presumably be more inclined towards Trump).

No opinions on the other people but idk maybe 25% bernie, 15% each harris/warrn/booker, 30% anyone else, i’m a couple drinks in so no guarantees that adds up and tbh making sure it added up would be fake precision anyway

solid thinking @oligopsalter​ aside from the bit about Biden getting #MeToo’d.