The fusionism of the fractious.
The fusionism of the fractious.
W hat is paleoconservatism? The name is meant to suggest a substance predating its rival “neoconservatism.” And though many who have traveled under the paleo name have harked to various figures of the pre–World War II “Old Right,” the term comes out of the 1980s, coined by Thomas Fleming, then the editor of Chronicles magazine, and Paul Gottfried, a professor of humanities and successor to Fleming at the same magazine. A new collection of essays edited by Gottfried attempts to give the history, shape, and variety of paleoconservative thought, and it mostly succeeds. Paleoconservatism: An Anthology is a useful introduction to this broad, multifarious school.
Paul Gottfried is a proudly irascible figure who likely views National Review the way that Trotsky came to view Stalin. A prolific academic writer on the topics of Marxism and fascism, Gottfried is a scabrous critic of the mainstream Right, which he saw as seeking a role as an acceptable opposition to a hegemonic American Left. He is an obsessive hater of Jonah Goldberg in particular. And, like many paleoconservatives, he seems committed to thinning the ranks of paleocons, to constantly distinguishing himself and this unmerry band from everyone else. He has a tendency to characterize writers and political figures as more than a few degrees to the left of where they themselves and most of the rest of the world perceives them. In his introduction to the volume, Gottfried characterizes Jacob Siegel, who wrote a sympathetic profile of Gottfried, as one of those “on the left” who grudgingly respect paleoconservatives. In fact, Siegel is a second-generation conservative whose views probably place him to the right of his neoconservative father, the late Fred Siegel. Gottfried similarly mischaracterizes Ross Douthat as “conventionally center-left.”
It also should be noted that a few years ago Gottfried was a collaborator with Richard Spencer, the attention-getting white nationalist who inspired Sieg Heils after Trump’s election to the presidency. Spencer has since developed an improbable set of passions for supporting Ukrainian nationalism, the EU, and the Biden administration, nothing that would particularly interest Gottfried. But being lumped with fascist-cosplayers was a particularly sad detour for the Jewish Gottfried, whose own family barely escaped Hungary before liquidation by the Nazis.
I suspect that the last thing Gottfried and several of the contributors to this volume want is praise from anyone at National Review, even someone like me who has read and profited from their work. But I feel compelled to defend the book and the subject from a recent review in Law and Liberty by Michael Lucchese before venturing my own more tempered assessment.
Lucchese’s assessment relentlessly oversimplifies paleoconservatism and its mainstream rivals in the conservative movement, doing injustice to both along the way.
Lucchese centers his read of the collection almost entirely on the figure of Samuel Francis, the former political editor of Chronicles, who died in 2005. There is one essay dedicated to the subject, an admiringly faithful but incomplete analysis of Francis’s more materialist political analysis by Pedro Gonzalez (recently the subject of a Breitbart exposé detailing his history of racially offensive private messages). And Francis gets a few mentions in other essays, mostly as a foil to Gottfried’s quite different analysis of political questions.
From this error, the whole review suffers. Lucchese takes Francis’s class-based analysis and concludes that paleoconservatism in total is “better understood as a right-wing form of Marxism,” one that is “wildly opposed to the original Reaganite three-legged stool of free markets, social conservatism, and a strong foreign policy.” He concludes that “there is nothing conservative about today’s paleoconservatism.” And “the authors attempt to chart a new course for American conservatism, turning the movement away from constitutionalism and towards a less-restrained politics.”
By contrast, Lucchese writes:
The conservative movement’s forebears would have soundly rejected Right-Wing Marxism. William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan were stridently opposed to the progressive establishment. But they did not believe they needed to stoke a new class conflict to defend what is best about our country. They preferred Washington and the American Revolution to Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
Such broad and extravagant claims depend entirely on Lucchese’s faith that the vast majority of readers will not consult the contents of the volume itself.
Allow me to fill out the picture. There is no praise of Leninism or the Russian Revolution in this volume. And there are several essays praising the American Constitution. While modern critics tend to charge the paleocons and New Right with wanting to seize the administrative state for their own ends rather than destroy it, Gottfried’s collection includes several essays that make the charge the opposite way. An essay by William Watkins Jr. on “Jeffersonian Constitutionalism” takes the radical Old-Right position that the New Deal must be repealed in its entirety and repeats familiar paleocon accusations that the mainstream Right has made its peace with FDR’s legacy.
Another essay on paleoconservative jurisprudence holds that “our law and Constitution embody a set of timeless truths set forth by the ancients and expressed brilliantly in the English Common Law tradition.” Again, not exactly a Leninist sentiment. In that chapter, Stephen Presser champions the analysis of Clarence Thomas above all others as the beau ideal of paleoconservative legal thinking. And if one takes the view expressed earlier that paleoconservative is more in the Jeffersonian than Federalist tradition, that fits. But, as I was reading, I thought one could make a case for Justice Samuel Alito on this score, especially in his dissent against Westboro Baptist Church in Snyder v. Phelps.
Gottfried intelligently includes an essay by Alexander Riley that represents paleoconservatism’s unique fascination with the emerging science of sociobiology. Having witnessed the Left use psychology and other social sciences to derationalize traditional social life — the authority of fathers, the health of the two-parent family — paleoconservatives began turning toward sociobiology as a source for getting moderns to buy into the political authority to our immutable human nature. If American elites could not believe in the biblical or mythical accounts of male headship of a home, perhaps they would listen to evolutionary science and anthropology. Riley gamely tries the modern, egalitarian, and blank-slate premises that underlie the traditional social sciences and finds them inadequate when compared to our inherited nature as social creatures who appreciate hierarchy, order, and conflict. This presents a far richer vein of inquiry for the future than the recent revival of a shopworn vitalism among the New Right on Twitter.
As for Francis, while many of his peers agreed with his general theory that a Buchananite-type candidacy could radicalize a bloc of voters against the managerial elite, he was a singular figure among paleoconservatives for his relentlessly materialist and class-based analysis of politics. What Lucchese doesn’t mention is that this particular aspect of Francis’s thought was inherited almost entirely from James Burnham, the former communist hired by Bill Buckley to be senior editor of National Review. Burnham filled his NR columns with this Marxist-flavored class analysis. Buckley often disagreed with Burnham, and Burnham’s analysis could lead him to silly conclusions at times, but the founder of this magazine was not as sniffy about material political analysis as his latter-day defenders.
The recent rereading of Francis began in 2016, because Trump won with the political message and coalitional politics that Francis had failed to impress upon Pat Buchanan in the 1990s. Trump won a more secular and less traditionally conservative culture-war campaign premised to some degree on Francis’s ideas about the dispossession of Middle America through policies of free trade, mass immigration, and globalist foreign policy.
Lucchese takes issue with Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters for boosting Francis by recommending the collection of essays Beautiful Losers. As a collection of essays, it is Francis’s least controversial and probably the most profitable to read for those who have no interest in paleoconservatism as such. In one essay, he criticizes George Will’s Statecraft as Soulcraft for being too statist and Tory to be properly conservative and American. Late in life, George Will repudiated his views and basically adopted Francis’s critique of them. Francis’s most dazzling essay contemplates the failure of Henry Clay’s democratic faith in compromise to prevent the Civil War.
Gottfried’s volume, and Lucchese’s review, pass over Francis’s forays into a more explicitly racist theorizing, or white-civilizationist politics, some of which he conducted under a pen name, writing in the journal American Renaissance. Francis tried to come up with some kind of civilizational substance for “whiteness” and found himself borrowing from the declinist author Oswald Spengler, dilating at length on the supposed “Faustian soul” of Aryans. Francis was not content at being merely politically incorrect, or lampooning racial shibboleths. He genuinely wanted whites to develop a racial consciousness that would license them to dominate other races and talked of a “white reconquest” of the United States.
On this, I agree with the analysis offered by Matthew Rose in A World after Liberalism, his book on figures of the alternative Right: Francis’s materialism, his alienation from Christianity, led him to a racial politics of mythologizing whiteness that profoundly offends the universalist moral commitments of almost all white people, and terrifies everyone else besides. In a profound way, as Rose concludes, Francis made himself an outsider to the civilization he wanted to defend.
So what are we to make of paleoconservatism at the end of this volume and over the last four decades in which it has burbled like a cauldron in American political thought?
Gottfried’s introduction attributes paleoconservatism’s marginality to a 1990 meeting of William F. Buckley, Richard John Neuhaus, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, and Ed Feulner, at which it was supposedly agreed to stifle the obstreperous paleos. “Never was a gathering blessed with such successes,” Gottfried writes.
Here I expected to follow the far Right’s constantly reiterated complaint about conservatives, one that has found countless expressions among paleos over the years: Conservatives conserve nothing. They are not hard men, but soft and privileged. They can accomplish nothing. And yet, for all their ineptitude, they infallibly succeed at smothering the reactionaries who know precisely how to achieve and wield power.
Somehow mainstream conservatism is completely enfeebled against the Left but omnipotent against the Right. The reactionary claims to be competent to stand against the Left’s freight train but cannot move the honking ass of conservatism out of his path. This is the dynamic that drives radical-Right thinkers like Curtis Yarvin to theorize that the only power worth having is the power to acquire absolute power, a power that he supposes currently exists somewhere in the New York Times offices.
While Gottfried does imagine that the Left’s successes might have been slowed had they seen people like himself as their true opposition, he credibly places blame on the paleos themselves. He credits neoconservatives as being skilled at “maintaining internal unity” and then recounts how paleoconservatives and paleo-libertarians had a vicious habit of bickering and infighting.
I’ve come to see the characteristic paleo trait as a prophetic willingness — eagerness — to stand outside. When the consensus is rotten, this is, of course useful. But I think Gottfried himself would admit that many thinkers who traded under the paleo label experienced some marginality and then pursued quixotic or self-destructive intellectual passions that had little connection to any kind of traditional conservatism and could only appeal to the already marginal.
But this characteristic paleo-cussedness is evident throughout the book, as in Gottfried’s tendentious categorizations of others. Or, as an example, the aforementioned Watkins contribution mentions two National Review essays that rail against John C. Calhoun and harrumphs, “So much for Jeffersonian constitutionalism on what now describes itself as the respectable Right!”
This is cherry-picking. Watkins could have extended his search and found in the same recent past of National Review a short essay of mine on the anti-Federalist Luther Martin. There he’d have found an appreciative if not dogmatically loyal representation of the Jeffersonian argument that the Federalists intended the Constitution to diminish Americans’ loyalty to their states and transfer it to a growing central government.
Taken as a whole, paleoconservatism is at least as much of a hodgepodge as the so-called “establishment conservatism” it despises and envies. There are paleocons and paleo-libertarians. Their political cooperation was itself a kind of fusionism of the radicals.
But there is much contradiction in paleoconservatism. Despite its deep interest in ethnic particularity, the paleocons are, like their mainstream rivals, led more by Catholics and Jews than by the heirs of America’s founding stock. The paleo intellectuals championed a Southern tradition, but the movement’s political theorists looked to mobilize the Catholic Rust Belt. The intellectuals championed Jeffersonianism and John Randolph of Roanoke in their journals, but in their pamphlets for Buchanan, they were Hamiltonian protectionists. They claimed to speak for a mass of Middle American radicals but took to heart political causes utterly obscure to their supposed social base: causes like Serbian nationalism or the literary merits of Walker Percy.
Gottfried envisions a future in which paleocon ideas continue to resurface as future generations of the Right explore alternatives. That is necessary for a movement that made and kept so few alliances along the way. And this long-term influence was inevitable, as the consensus around free trade, mass immigration, and further political integration has fallen apart. If no cause is truly defeated, then the causes of trade protectionism, immigration restrictionism, and against promiscuous interventionism were bound to rise again after hitting a nadir in the 1990s and 2000s. Paleocons were the custodians of these abandoned traditions and policies for a time. When the consensus that paleos railed against finally began to crack up, it was Donald Trump who mainstreamed their ideas in his blunderbuss way, not the paleos themselves. That must be counted as some kind of failure too.
It is notable that even in a recent history of American conservatism written by the neoconservative Matthew Continetti, the paleo prince, Pat Buchanan, is as central a figure as William F. Buckley. While the paleos complained about being exiled, passed over, purged, and eliminated, Buchanan himself remained a fixture on television, radio, and in newspapers. How did he remain so influential if the mainstream of Left and Right were, as paleos allege, so fixated on persecuting those of his political persuasion? The answer is simple. Like Buckley, he was a good friend, was witty company among his opponents, and looked like he was having a good time doing it. When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that, if I wanted to have friends in this life, I should avoid spitting on them while eating and cut my fingernails.