Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism
Encyclopedia
Starting in the 1980s, two factions in the American conservative movement began quarreling with one another: neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. Each argues that the other does not represent true conservatism
. Disputed issues include immigration, foreign wars and Middle East policy.
The phrase paleoconservative ("old conservative") was originally a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder used in the 1980s to differentiate traditional conservatives from neoconservatives and Straussians. Pat Buchanan calls neoconservatism "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology." The paleoconservatives argue that the "neocons" are illegitimate interlopers in the conservative movement.
The roots of this conflict predate both the paleocons or the neocons. In 1950, Lionel Trilling
said that liberalism is the "sole intellectual tradition" in the United States. He dismissed Old Right
conservatives as expressing "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." Three years later, Russell Kirk
's The Conservative Mind challenged this thesis.
The neoconservative movement, as it rose in the 1970s, articulated a different vision from the Old Right. While they were not opposed to the New Deal
, they thought the Great Society
and the New Left
went too far. Neoconservatives embraced an interventionist foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. They espoused especially strong support for Israel and still believe the United States should help ensure the security of the Jewish state.
In 1972, James Burnham
commented that the neoconservatives still clung to "what might be called the emotional gestalt of liberalism, the liberal sensitivity and temperament." He said they substituted abstractions about "compassion, kindliness, love and brotherhood" for indispensable civic virtues. These were "courage, duty, discipline, and especially self-discipline, loyalty, endurance, [and] yes, patriotism."
In a feature article called "The Democracy Boosters" in the March 24, 1989 issue of National Review, Claes G. Ryn
warned of the uncritical advocacy of democracy and abstract universalist principles among so-called conservatives, including Michael Novak, Allan Bloom, Ben Wattenberg, and Richard John Neuhaus. These sentiments, Ryn argued, were more akin to leftism than to conservatism. In the ensuing controversy Ryn was attacked at length in National Review by the democratic socialist Sidney Hook, as well as by others aligning themselves with the notion that America is called by history to advance its principles in the world. In 1991 Ryn argued in a book, The New Jacobinism, that neoconservatism bears a close resemblance to the ideas behind the French Revolution. The French Jacobins appointed France the agent of universal principles. The new Jacobins had selected the United States for the task of transforming the world. Ryn warned of the dangers of ideological imperialism.
The late Samuel T. Francis, a leading paleoconservative intellectual and a student of Burnham, wrote that during this time,
Paleo historian Thomas Woods
elaborates on the divergence in the conservative movement, and the ascent of the neoconservatives, and their distinguishing features from more traditional conservatives:
In discussing neoconservative distinctives on state power, Irving Kristol
wrote in 2003:
What made the neoconservative movement so potent was the number of influential intellectuals who attained positions of power in the government and media. Paul Gottfried argues that the neocons funded their efforts using funding originally intended to fight the New Deal
or the Great Society
. Kristol remarked that "one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."
By comparison, the paleocons were marginalized. Samuel Francis wrote,
Francis also argued that many on the Left misunderstood both the neocons and paleocons, as well as the conflict between the two. He said they disregarded the paleo's critiques and over-emphasized the influence of Leo Strauss
on the neocons:
Further, Francis also complained that the neocons never fought the left with anything more than elegant reprimand. If they saw serious criticism in return, they issued charges of anti-Semitism. He also said that if "the point is to wipe out Israel's enemies," such as in the Iraq invasion, "the [neocon] Likudniks don't care about American casualties very much."
Claes Ryn places neoconservatism in a larger historical and philosophical context. In America the Virtuous (2003) he argues that America's traditional civilization, specifically, its constitutionalism and liberty are rapidly eroding and that neoconservatives exemplify and aggravate this development. Their abstract moral principles, summarized as "virtue," constitute a break with older Western values. Though speaking in the name of America and patriotism and even conservatism, the neoconservatives are replacing attachment to America's older religious, moral, intellectual and cultural traditions with a form of universalism that has roots in leftist thinking. Neo-Jacobin imperialism threatens to produce interminable wars and poses a serious threat to American constitutionalism.
Historian Edward Shapiro, tracing the debate back to the 1960s, wrote that many neoconservatives saw their new political philosophy within a specifically Jewish context. This became an element in the dispute with the paleocons. He said that these neocons equated conservatism with country club exclusion, racism, and the "Protestant hinterlands." They also considered the Burkean social order as a "premodern social order revered by Edmund Burke
and the other pioneers of conservative thought, a world which had ostracized Jews to the fringes of society." He continued:
by the incoming Republican administration in 1981. Senator John East
proposed literary scholar Mel Bradford
, a former Dixiecrat
. Bradford withdrew himself from consideration after neoconservatives argued that his record of academic articles criticizing the actions and thought of Abraham Lincoln
ill-suited a Republican nominee. They circulated quotes of Bradford calling Lincoln "a dangerous man," and saying, "The image of Lincoln rose to be very dark" and "indeed almost sinister."
Historian Paul Young described Bradford's view of Lincoln as follows:
The neoconservative choice, William Bennett
, was nominated on November 13, 1981. Curiously, a few leaders, whom the paleocons would later oppose, supported Bradford: Dan Quayle
, William F. Buckley Jr., and Harry Jaffa. Former Bradford associate Thomas Landess says that today's neocons "are too busy running the world to tilt with Mel Bradford."
was elected second president of the John Birch Society upon the retirement of first president, Robert Welch. Shortly after, McDonald was reported killed when the passenger plane he had boarded to take him to the 30th year commemoration of the U.S.-S. Korea Mutual Defense Treaty, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, was shot down near Moneron Island
by the Soviets. Three months earlier, McDonald had appeared as the guest of Pat Buchanan's Crossfire T.V. show, on which Buchanan and journalist Tom Braden discussed with him the John Birch Society's position with regards to the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and conspiracy. Speaking of the Rockefellers, McDonald had written in the introduction of a book:
's journal Intercollegiate Review ran a "State of Conservatism" symposium. Some of the contributors complained about growing neoconservative dominance. Historian Clyde Wilson
wrote of being "crowded out by overwhelming numbers." Gregory Wolfe argued that true conservative scholars valued "order and organic community, class and natural aristocracy" and considered "Christian belief as the foundation of morality and law."
Soon after, a conservative group called the Philadelphia Society held a symposium on neoconservatism at its 1986 annual meeting. Among the critics was historian Stephen Tonsor (who does not accept the paleo label), who said:
Tonsor also argued that the movement divided "techniques from ends in an effort to maintain their cultural modernism while rejecting its social and political implications." He said it couldn't be done.
claims that neoconservative lobbying kept him from a professorship in classical political theory at The Catholic University of America
. David Frum
dismisses the allegation as "relentlessly solipsistic." Gottfried described the incident as follows:
The Catholic University of America does not distinguish between graduate and undergraduate professorships, and the appointment that Gottfried lost that had been approved by the Department of Politics was actually a one-year visiting position. That neocon agitation led to the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences blocking that appointment is nevertheless true.
Gottfried describes Israel as "an ethnic national state with a constitutional government that offers legal protection to non-Jewish minorities." He says the country "should remain predominantly Jewish and that the U.S. and Europe should remain predominantly Euro-American—and I support whatever is necessary to achieve these objectives." He also argues that "American and European Zionists" insist that Jews "have a special inviolable right to an ethnic state, while Euro-American gentiles are expected to practice multiculturalism." He explained his position in the interview:
. The title was "The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species." As Chronicles
editor Scott Richert describes it,
Midge Decter
, a member of the Heritage Foundation's Board of Trustees and the director of the Committee for the Free World (and neoconservative commentator Norman Podhoretz
's wife), called Kirk's line "a bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives." She claimed that Kirk "said people like my husband and me put the interest of Israel before the interest of the United States, that we have a dual loyalty." She had previously denounced Joseph Sobran and the Intercollegiate Review symposium as anti-Semitic as well. She told The New Republic
, "It's this notion of a Christian civilization. You have to be part of it or you’re not really fit to conserve anything. That's an old line and it's very ignorant."
Conversely, paleocon Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives." He called Decter's response untrue, "reckless" and "vitriolic." Furthermore, he argued that such a denunciation "always plays into the hands of the left, which is then able to repeat the charges and claim conservative endorsement of them."
fired Richard John Neuhaus
, who went on to launch the religious journal First Things
. One issue between them was that Neuhaus claimed that Chronicles, Rockford's magazine, tilted toward nativism
and was "insensitive to the classic language of anti-Semitism." Allan Carlson
, then Rockford's president, called the allegations "egregious and potentially damaging." Fourteen years later, Neuhaus called Chronicles "racist and anti-Semitic," joked about "Schadenfreude" and said he holds a "gala staff luncheon" every year to commemorate his termination.
Here's how John Judis
, a left-wing author and journalist, describes the incident:
's paleoconservative views soon became a point of dispute. The major controversy began with the August 26, 1990 The McLaughlin Group
television broadcast. He said that "there are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East—the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States"—and was accused of anti-Semitism.
from National Review
, who had criticized American supporters of Israel. One such comment was that the New York Times "really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update." Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz vehemently objected to such writing, saying they were "anti-Semitic in themselves," His wife, Midge Decter, told Sobran she felt "shock and disgust—and contempt—at the discovery that you are little more than a crude and naked anti-Semite."
Sobran himself claimed that founder William F. Buckley told him to "stop antagonizing the Zionist crowd," and Buckley accused him of libel and moral incapacitation. Buckley had previously said that an outsider "might reasonably conclude that those [Israel] columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism." Before his firing, Sobran discussed the issue in National Review, saying:
Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden fired Samuel Francis in September, 1995, after neoconservative Dinesh D'Souza
described his appearance at the 1994 American Renaissance
conference:
Pruden had cut back on Francis' column after the Times ran his June 27, 1995 essay criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention
for passing a resolution repudiating slavery. In it, Francis quoted Oswald Spengler
that "Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism." He argued that if the Baptists "dismiss the New Testament passages about slaves obeying their masters as irrelevant," then they might as well join the Bolsheviks.
was fired as the New York Posts
editorial page editor on September 4, 1997 after writing editorials critical of Haitian immigration and Puerto Rican statehood. About the latter, he had cited statistics that "half the island's 3.7 million inhabitants receive Food Stamps" and "59.4 percent of Puerto Rican children born on the U.S. mainland are born to unwed mothers." He concluded:
McConnell, an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, later remarked that "our society had developed an expected script of white Anglo contrition and apology... and that I had failed to follow it." He found himself replaced by John Podhoretz
, who denounced him as a "very dangerous" sort of conservative. About his former employer, he said:
Two years after the incident, McConnell said he had changed his mind about Pat Buchanan and joined his campaign as an adviser. He once dismissed his presidential hopes as "not worth discussing." Soon he helped found The American Conservative
.
, the rift within the conservative movement has deepened with the neoconservatives' ascent and the paleocons' marginalization. For example, there were no prominent paleocons in the Bush administration. Charles Krauthammer called paleoconservatism a "philosophical corpse" and "a mix of nativism, protectionism and isolationism."
On domestic affairs, The Weekly Standard
claimed that "the paleos' radical dissatisfaction with contemporary America could eventually veer into an anti-Americanism almost indistinguishable from the more familiar variety on the left." David Brooks, in the same magazine, claimed that the movement combines "high principle and bad-boy bravado," along with melding good ("longing for the old virtues") with bad ("race and sex roles"). He concluded that paleocons replace "the universalist ideas of the Founding" with "blood and soil." Brooks also described Pat Buchanan's campaign supporters as "people who thrived in the machine age" but who "are not going to thrive in the new economy."
Lew Rockwell
once illustrated the depth of paleo/neo schism with the story of an encounter between a paleocon and a neocon. The neocon complained that the paleocon made an "insensitive remark" about AIDS
and said, "How can you say that, when we all have so many close friends who have been struck down by this terrible disease?" The paleo replied, Close friends?' I don't know anyone who has AIDS. I don't know anyone who knows anyone who has AIDS." After that, the neocon stopped speaking to the paleocon.
of National Review
and Pat Buchanan of The American Conservative
exchanged harsh words just before the Iraq War began. Buchanan wrote that neocons influence the U.S. government toward the pursuit of global empire
and the benefit of pro-Israel hawks. Frum charged that paleocons have become unpatriotic, racist, and anti-Semitic. He also hinted that paleocons were subversives, claiming they "made common cause with" international Islamists and "deny and excuse terror." (Though a year later, National Review
founder William F. Buckley Jr. described The American Conservative as "highly literate" and "wonderfully well edited.")
In his article, Buchanan wrote:
Frum wrote that:
their way down the road to perdition," instead of creating a populist replacement that might preserve "some semblance of civilized order and liberty."
In addition, while paleos and neos quarrel over Middle East policy, Paul Gottfried argues domestic equality and the exportability of democracy are greater points of contention between them. He says the neocons' call for "permanent revolution" exists independently of their beliefs about Israel. He also said, "What bothers me is not what Israel is but the manner in which its well-wishers blatantly misrepresent it." Also, paleos, while not wanting the US tied to Israel too strongly, freely disagree with one another about certain Israeli leaders. Pat Buchanan supported Yitzhak Rabin
, while Gottfried, who criticizes "truculent [neoconservative] Zionism," admires Ariel Sharon
.
Note, however, that not everyone associated with American conservatism can be easily sorted into neo or paleo categories. Prominent examples are Claes Ryn, John Lukacs and George Carey, who are strongly critical of neoconservatism but do not share the paleocon fondness for sociobiology, positivist social science or populism. The division into two camps also ignores that it might be possible to support the war in Iraq, for pragmatic rather than ideological or ethnic reasons, and yet support economic nationalism and immigration reform. Note further that paleos and neos both oppose the New Left
, Marxism
and Soviet Communism
, especially Stalinism
, and do not necessarily disagree on every political and cultural matter.
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
. Disputed issues include immigration, foreign wars and Middle East policy.
A conflict of values
The roots of this conflict predate both the paleocons or the neocons. In 1950, Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
said that liberalism is the "sole intellectual tradition" in the United States. He dismissed Old Right
Old Right (United States)
The Old Right was a conservative faction in the United States that opposed both New Deal domestic programs and U.S. entry into World War II. Many members of this faction were associated with the Republicans of the interwar years led by Robert Taft, but some were Democrats...
conservatives as expressing "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." Three years later, Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
's The Conservative Mind challenged this thesis.
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
, they thought the Great Society
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice...
and the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
went too far. Neoconservatives embraced an interventionist foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. They espoused especially strong support for Israel and still believe the United States should help ensure the security of the Jewish state.
In 1972, James Burnham
James Burnham
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...
commented that the neoconservatives still clung to "what might be called the emotional gestalt of liberalism, the liberal sensitivity and temperament." He said they substituted abstractions about "compassion, kindliness, love and brotherhood" for indispensable civic virtues. These were "courage, duty, discipline, and especially self-discipline, loyalty, endurance, [and] yes, patriotism."
In a feature article called "The Democracy Boosters" in the March 24, 1989 issue of National Review, Claes G. Ryn
Claes G. Ryn
Dr. Claes Gösta Ryn is a Swedish-born, American academic and educator.-Background:Ryn was born and raised in Norrköping in Sweden. He attended the Latin Gymnasium, Norrköpings Högre Allmänna Läroverk' . He was an undergraduate and a doctoral student at Uppsala University...
warned of the uncritical advocacy of democracy and abstract universalist principles among so-called conservatives, including Michael Novak, Allan Bloom, Ben Wattenberg, and Richard John Neuhaus. These sentiments, Ryn argued, were more akin to leftism than to conservatism. In the ensuing controversy Ryn was attacked at length in National Review by the democratic socialist Sidney Hook, as well as by others aligning themselves with the notion that America is called by history to advance its principles in the world. In 1991 Ryn argued in a book, The New Jacobinism, that neoconservatism bears a close resemblance to the ideas behind the French Revolution. The French Jacobins appointed France the agent of universal principles. The new Jacobins had selected the United States for the task of transforming the world. Ryn warned of the dangers of ideological imperialism.
The late Samuel T. Francis, a leading paleoconservative intellectual and a student of Burnham, wrote that during this time,
Old conservatives who welcomed the neo-cons into their ranks soon found that their new allies often displayed the habit of telling them what was and what was not "permissible" to say and how to say it. Criticism of the New Left and domestic communism was fine, but what the neo-conservatives regarded as "McCarthyismMcCarthyismMcCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
"—calling for restoration of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, for example, or the FBI's domestic security functions—was not respectable. Criticizing affirmative action was also okay, but criticism of unconstitutional civil rights legislation, the civil rights movementCivil rights movementThe civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
, or Martin Luther King Jr. was not respectable. Old conservative heroes like Joseph McCarthyJoseph McCarthyJoseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
, Douglas MacArthurDouglas MacArthurGeneral of the Army Douglas MacArthur was an American general and field marshal of the Philippine Army. He was a Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the...
, Charles LindberghCharles LindberghCharles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist.Lindbergh, a 25-year-old U.S...
, Robert TaftRobert TaftRobert Alphonso Taft , of the Taft political family of Cincinnati, was a Republican United States Senator and a prominent conservative statesman...
, and even Barry GoldwaterBarry GoldwaterBarry Morris Goldwater was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. An articulate and charismatic figure during the first half of the 1960s, he was known as "Mr...
tended to disappear or earn scorn in neo-conservative journals, while Harry Truman, George MarshallGeorge MarshallGeorge Catlett Marshall was an American military leader, Chief of Staff of the Army, Secretary of State, and the third Secretary of Defense...
, Hubert HumphreyHubert HumphreyHubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. , served under President Lyndon B. Johnson as the 38th Vice President of the United States. Humphrey twice served as a United States Senator from Minnesota, and served as Democratic Majority Whip. He was a founder of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and...
, and Henry JacksonHenry JacksonHenry Jackson may refer to:* Henry Jackson , English classicist at Cambridge University* Henry Jackson , Massachusetts soldier in the American Revolutionary War* Henry Jackson Henry Jackson may refer to:* Henry Jackson (classicist) (1839–1921), English classicist at Cambridge University* Henry...
developed into idols before which conservatives were supposed to bend the knee. Almost none of the neo-conservatives showed any interest in American constitutional principles or federalistFederalistThe term federalist describes several political beliefs around the world. Also, it may refer to the concept of federalism or the type of government called a federation...
and states' rightsStates' rightsStates' rights in U.S. politics refers to political powers reserved for the U.S. state governments rather than the federal government. It is often considered a loaded term because of its use in opposition to federally mandated racial desegregation...
issues and arguments based on constitutionalism were muted in favor of the "empirical" arguments drawn from disciplines like sociology and political science in which neo-conservative academics tended to concentrate.
Paleo historian Thomas Woods
Thomas Woods
Thomas E. "Tom" Woods, Jr. is an American historian, economist, political analyst, and New York Times-bestselling author. He has written extensively on the subjects of American history, contemporary politics, and economic theory...
elaborates on the divergence in the conservative movement, and the ascent of the neoconservatives, and their distinguishing features from more traditional conservatives:
The conservative’s traditional sympathy for the American South and its people and heritage, evident in the works of such great American conservatives as Richard M. WeaverRichard M. WeaverRichard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid- 20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric...
and Russell KirkRussell KirkRussell Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement...
, began to disappear... [T]he neocons are heavily influenced by Woodrow WilsonWoodrow WilsonThomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
, with perhaps a hint of Theodore RooseveltTheodore RooseveltTheodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...
. ... They believe in an aggressive U.S. presence practically everywhere, and in the spread of democracyDemocracyDemocracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
around the world, by force if necessary. ... Neoconservatives tend to want more efficient government agencies; paleoconservatives want fewer government agencies. [Neoconservatives] generally admire President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his heavily interventionist New DealNew DealThe New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
policies. Neoconservatives have not exactly been known for their budget consciousness, and you won't hear them talking about making any serious inroads into the federal apparatus.
In discussing neoconservative distinctives on state power, Irving Kristol
Irving Kristol
Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism"...
wrote in 2003:
Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the HayekFriedrich HayekFriedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought...
ian notion that we are on "the road to serfdomThe Road to SerfdomThe Road to Serfdom is a book written by the Austrian-born economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek between 1940–1943, in which he "warned of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning," and in which he argues...
." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable... People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of de TocquevilleAlexis de TocquevilleAlexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...
, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.
What made the neoconservative movement so potent was the number of influential intellectuals who attained positions of power in the government and media. Paul Gottfried argues that the neocons funded their efforts using funding originally intended to fight the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
or the Great Society
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice...
. Kristol remarked that "one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."
By comparison, the paleocons were marginalized. Samuel Francis wrote,
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.
Francis also argued that many on the Left misunderstood both the neocons and paleocons, as well as the conflict between the two. He said they disregarded the paleo's critiques and over-emphasized the influence of Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss was a political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States...
on the neocons:
This silence about the paleocons was the result, in part, of the abysmal ignorance of the writers of most such articles but also of the hidden purpose that lurked beneath much of what they wrote. That purpose was not so much to "deconstruct" and "expose" the neocons as to define them as the real conservative opposition, the legitimate (though deplorable and vicious) "right" against which the polemics and political struggle of the left should be directed. The reason the left prefers the neocon "right" to a paleo alternative is, quite simply, that the neocons are essentially of the left themselves and, thus, provide a fake opposition against which the rest of the left can shadowbox and thereby perpetuate its own political and cultural hegemony unchallenged by any authentic right.
Further, Francis also complained that the neocons never fought the left with anything more than elegant reprimand. If they saw serious criticism in return, they issued charges of anti-Semitism. He also said that if "the point is to wipe out Israel's enemies," such as in the Iraq invasion, "the [neocon] Likudniks don't care about American casualties very much."
Claes Ryn places neoconservatism in a larger historical and philosophical context. In America the Virtuous (2003) he argues that America's traditional civilization, specifically, its constitutionalism and liberty are rapidly eroding and that neoconservatives exemplify and aggravate this development. Their abstract moral principles, summarized as "virtue," constitute a break with older Western values. Though speaking in the name of America and patriotism and even conservatism, the neoconservatives are replacing attachment to America's older religious, moral, intellectual and cultural traditions with a form of universalism that has roots in leftist thinking. Neo-Jacobin imperialism threatens to produce interminable wars and poses a serious threat to American constitutionalism.
Politics and Jewish identity
Some paleocons say they are honest conservatives who were bullied and smeared by a corrupt ideology tied to social democracy and globalism. Neoconservatism is neither an all-Jewish movement nor claims to represent all Jews.Historian Edward Shapiro, tracing the debate back to the 1960s, wrote that many neoconservatives saw their new political philosophy within a specifically Jewish context. This became an element in the dispute with the paleocons. He said that these neocons equated conservatism with country club exclusion, racism, and the "Protestant hinterlands." They also considered the Burkean social order as a "premodern social order revered by Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
and the other pioneers of conservative thought, a world which had ostracized Jews to the fringes of society." He continued:
"For the Jewish neoconservatives, children and grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe, this was far too narrow a view of American culture. They emphasized the pluralism and openness of America and claimed that Americanism was less a matter of biological descent and European culture than of civic values and political ideology. Just as the neoconservatives stressed the ideological content of American diplomacy and asserted that American political ideology had well-nigh universal applicability, so they underscored the plastic character of American identity. Anyone was potentially a good American just as long as he or she affirmed the fundamental American political precepts of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. The neoconservatives, the traditionalists responded, exaggerated the appeal of American political principles to the rest of the world, and they underestimated the powerful hold which culture has, or should have, on its citizens.
1981: National Endowment for the Humanities
The open rift is often traced back to a dispute over the directorship of the National Endowment for the HumanitiesNational Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
by the incoming Republican administration in 1981. Senator John East
John Porter East
John Porter East was a Republican U.S. senator from the state of North Carolina from 1981 until his suicide in 1986....
proposed literary scholar Mel Bradford
Mel Bradford
Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford was a conservative political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas....
, a former Dixiecrat
Dixiecrat
The States' Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived segregationist political party in the United States in 1948...
. Bradford withdrew himself from consideration after neoconservatives argued that his record of academic articles criticizing the actions and thought of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
ill-suited a Republican nominee. They circulated quotes of Bradford calling Lincoln "a dangerous man," and saying, "The image of Lincoln rose to be very dark" and "indeed almost sinister."
Historian Paul Young described Bradford's view of Lincoln as follows:
Bradford cast all of Lincoln's life in the most sinister of terms. He gave Lincoln no credit for any intellectual or moral progression from his pronouncements in the 1840s to the years of the Civil War. Rather, Bradford freely juxtaposed the young Lincoln's comments on race and slavery, whether on the political hustings or otherwise, with his later statements and actions in order to convict him of hypocrisy. Neither did Bradford afford any consideration to the expediencies of politics; no sin by Lincoln could ever be justified by an appeal to political necessity. Bradford's Lincoln was a paragon of venality: hypocritical, corrupt, racist, unscrupulous, and duplicitous in his rhetoric. He was motivated by his own ambitions and thirst for power, provoking sectional conflict in order to attain his goals. Lincoln was guilty of war crimes for denying medicine to the South, complicit in the underrationing of his own troops, given to locking up political opponents in a "Northern 'Gulag, and, in general, an apt model for the twentieth-century dictator. Noting the dyspeptic Edmund WilsonEdmund WilsonEdmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
's comparison of Lincoln to Bismarck and Lenin in Patriotic Gore (1962), Bradford added Hitler for good measure.
The neoconservative choice, William Bennett
William Bennett
William John "Bill" Bennett is an American conservative pundit, politician, and political theorist. He served as United States Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988. He also held the post of Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under George H. W...
, was nominated on November 13, 1981. Curiously, a few leaders, whom the paleocons would later oppose, supported Bradford: Dan Quayle
Dan Quayle
James Danforth "Dan" Quayle served as the 44th Vice President of the United States, serving with President George H. W. Bush . He served as a U.S. Representative and U.S. Senator from the state of Indiana....
, William F. Buckley Jr., and Harry Jaffa. Former Bradford associate Thomas Landess says that today's neocons "are too busy running the world to tilt with Mel Bradford."
1983
Democratic congressman from Georgia Larry McDonaldLarry McDonald
Lawrence Patton McDonald, M.D. was an American politician and a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing the seventh congressional district of Georgia as a Democrat...
was elected second president of the John Birch Society upon the retirement of first president, Robert Welch. Shortly after, McDonald was reported killed when the passenger plane he had boarded to take him to the 30th year commemoration of the U.S.-S. Korea Mutual Defense Treaty, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, was shot down near Moneron Island
Moneron Island
Moneron Island, is a Russian possession located off Sakhalin Island.-Description:Moneron has an area of about and a highest point of . It is approximately long by wide, and is located from Sakhalin's port of Nevelsk and about directly southwest of Sakhalin Island itself at the northeastern...
by the Soviets. Three months earlier, McDonald had appeared as the guest of Pat Buchanan's Crossfire T.V. show, on which Buchanan and journalist Tom Braden discussed with him the John Birch Society's position with regards to the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and conspiracy. Speaking of the Rockefellers, McDonald had written in the introduction of a book:
The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government, combining super-capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.
1986: Intercollegiate Review and Philadelphia Society
The real genesis of the paleocons came in 1986 when the paleoconservative Intercollegiate Studies InstituteIntercollegiate Studies Institute
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., or ', is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1953 as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists...
's journal Intercollegiate Review ran a "State of Conservatism" symposium. Some of the contributors complained about growing neoconservative dominance. Historian Clyde Wilson
Clyde N. Wilson
Clyde N. Wilson is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, U.S., a paleoconservative political commentator, a long-time contributing editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and Southern Partisan magazine, and an occasional contributor to National Review...
wrote of being "crowded out by overwhelming numbers." Gregory Wolfe argued that true conservative scholars valued "order and organic community, class and natural aristocracy" and considered "Christian belief as the foundation of morality and law."
Soon after, a conservative group called the Philadelphia Society held a symposium on neoconservatism at its 1986 annual meeting. Among the critics was historian Stephen Tonsor (who does not accept the paleo label), who said:
It has always struck me as odd, even perverse, that former Marxists have been permitted, yes invited, to play such a leading role in the Conservative movement of the twentieth century. It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.
Tonsor also argued that the movement divided "techniques from ends in an effort to maintain their cultural modernism while rejecting its social and political implications." He said it couldn't be done.
Neoconservatives are, as Irving Kristol remarked, "liberals who have been mugged by reality," but while they have been detached from their social and political myths they have not located themselves in a body of principle that makes life worth living, or that one would die defending.
1987: The Catholic University of America
Paul GottfriedPaul Gottfried
Paul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...
claims that neoconservative lobbying kept him from a professorship in classical political theory at The Catholic University of America
The Catholic University of America
The Catholic University of America is a private university located in Washington, D.C. in the United States. It is a pontifical university of the Catholic Church in the United States and the only institution of higher education founded by the U.S. Catholic bishops...
. David Frum
David Frum
David J. Frum is a Canadian American journalist active in both the United States and Canadian political arenas. A former economic speechwriter for President George W. Bush, he is also the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency...
dismisses the allegation as "relentlessly solipsistic." Gottfried described the incident as follows:
[In 1987,] neocons denounced me to the authorities at Catholic University of America, on the grounds that I was "not safe on Israel," their flagrantly illogical argument: I had denied that Imperial Germany was principally to blame for the outbreak of World War One. Somehow this proved that I had denied the Holocaust, at least by indirection (never mind that it was the wrong German war!), and therefore I had to be against the Israelis (many of whose ancestors fought for the Central Powers in World War One—as did my own, Austrian Jewish forbears). Nevertheless, I still lost a graduate professorship.
The Catholic University of America does not distinguish between graduate and undergraduate professorships, and the appointment that Gottfried lost that had been approved by the Department of Politics was actually a one-year visiting position. That neocon agitation led to the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences blocking that appointment is nevertheless true.
Gottfried describes Israel as "an ethnic national state with a constitutional government that offers legal protection to non-Jewish minorities." He says the country "should remain predominantly Jewish and that the U.S. and Europe should remain predominantly Euro-American—and I support whatever is necessary to achieve these objectives." He also argues that "American and European Zionists" insist that Jews "have a special inviolable right to an ethnic state, while Euro-American gentiles are expected to practice multiculturalism." He explained his position in the interview:
Clearly Jews outside of Israel have adopted a double standard about Jewish and gentile rights to national identity, but the Israeli government has not caused the problem. Israelis have not ordered Martin Peretz, Alan Dershowitz, and Abe Foxman to think and act in this hypocritical, malicious fashion. In my view, Jewish liberals and neocons who favor both a Jewish right to ethnocentricity and a Euro-American obligation to have open borders and to exchange their traditional identities for "human rights," have turned paleocons against Israel.
1988: The Heritage Foundation
Russell Kirk found himself in the fray on December 15, 1988, when he gave a lecture at The Heritage FoundationThe Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. Heritage's stated mission is to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong...
. The title was "The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species." As Chronicles
Chronicles (magazine)
Chronicles is a U.S. monthly magazine published by the Rockford Institute. Its full current name is Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. The magazine is known for promoting anti-globalism, anti-intervention and anti-immigration stances within conservative politics, and is considered one of...
editor Scott Richert describes it,
[One line] helped define the emerging struggle between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. "Not seldom has it seemed," Kirk declared, "as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States." A few years later, in another Heritage Foundation speech, Kirk repeated that line verbatim. In the wake of the Gulf War, which he had opposed, he clearly understood that those words carried even greater meaning.
Midge Decter
Midge Decter
-Biography:Midge Rosenthal Decter was born on July 25, 1927 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She attended the University of Minnesota, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and New York University....
, a member of the Heritage Foundation's Board of Trustees and the director of the Committee for the Free World (and neoconservative commentator Norman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz
Norman B. Podhoretz is an American neoconservative pundit and writer for Commentary magazine.-Early life:The son of Julius and Helen Podhoretz, Jewish immigrants from the Central European region of Galicia, Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn...
's wife), called Kirk's line "a bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives." She claimed that Kirk "said people like my husband and me put the interest of Israel before the interest of the United States, that we have a dual loyalty." She had previously denounced Joseph Sobran and the Intercollegiate Review symposium as anti-Semitic as well. She told The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, "It's this notion of a Christian civilization. You have to be part of it or you’re not really fit to conserve anything. That's an old line and it's very ignorant."
Conversely, paleocon Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives." He called Decter's response untrue, "reckless" and "vitriolic." Furthermore, he argued that such a denunciation "always plays into the hands of the left, which is then able to repeat the charges and claim conservative endorsement of them."
1989: The Rockford Institute
Another defining incident came on May 5, 1989, when the Rockford InstituteRockford Institute
Rockford Institute is a conservative think-tank associated with paleoconservatism, based in Rockford, Illinois. It is known for the John Randolph Club, and publishes Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture....
fired Richard John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus was a prominent Christian cleric and writer. Born in Canada, Neuhaus moved to the United States where he became a naturalized United States citizen...
, who went on to launch the religious journal First Things
First Things
First Things is an ecumenical journal focused on creating a "religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society". The journal is inter-denominational and inter-religious, representing a broad intellectual tradition of Christian and Jewish critique of contemporary society...
. One issue between them was that Neuhaus claimed that Chronicles, Rockford's magazine, tilted toward nativism
Nativism (politics)
Nativism favors the interests of certain established inhabitants of an area or nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants. It may also include the re-establishment or perpetuation of such individuals or their culture....
and was "insensitive to the classic language of anti-Semitism." Allan Carlson
Allan C. Carlson
Allan C. Carlson is a scholar and professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He is the president of the Howard Center, a director of the Family in America Studies Center, the International Secretary of the World Congress of Families and editor of the Family in America...
, then Rockford's president, called the allegations "egregious and potentially damaging." Fourteen years later, Neuhaus called Chronicles "racist and anti-Semitic," joked about "Schadenfreude" and said he holds a "gala staff luncheon" every year to commemorate his termination.
Here's how John Judis
John Judis
John B. Judis is an American journalist. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor to The American Prospect....
, a left-wing author and journalist, describes the incident:
Under the Rockford Institute's name and funding, Neuhaus published a regular newsletter out of his Center for Religion and Society in New York. But in March 1989, Neuhaus and Podhoretz took strong exception to two articles published in Rockford's glossy journal, Chronicles. In one of them, Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming called for stricter quotas to prevent the United States from "being dominated by Third World immigrants," and in the other, novelist Bill KauffmanBill KauffmanBill Kauffman is an American political writer generally aligned with the paleoconservative movement. He was born in Batavia, New York, and currently resides in Elba, New York, with his wife and daughter....
defended Gore VidalGore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
, who had earlier attacked Podhoretz for putting Israel's interests before America's. In a letter, Podhoretz wrote Neuhaus, "I know an enemy when I see one, and Chronicles has become just that so far as I am concerned."
In May the Rockford Institute made the next move by locking Neuhaus out of the center and confiscating his files. When Neuhaus left, three foundations linked to the neoconservatives, Olin, Smith Richardson, and Bradley, withdrew their funding for the Rockford Institute, costing an estimated $700,000 a year.
1990: The McLaughlin Group
Pat BuchananPat Buchanan
Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought...
's paleoconservative views soon became a point of dispute. The major controversy began with the August 26, 1990 The McLaughlin Group
The McLaughlin Group
The McLaughlin Group is a syndicated half-hour weekly public affairs television program in the United States, where a group of five pundits discuss current political issues in a round table format. It has been broadcast since 1982, and is currently sponsored by MetLife...
television broadcast. He said that "there are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East—the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States"—and was accused of anti-Semitism.
1993: National Review
A further event was the demotion and eventual firing in 1993 of Joseph SobranJoseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...
from National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
, who had criticized American supporters of Israel. One such comment was that the New York Times "really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update." Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz vehemently objected to such writing, saying they were "anti-Semitic in themselves," His wife, Midge Decter, told Sobran she felt "shock and disgust—and contempt—at the discovery that you are little more than a crude and naked anti-Semite."
Sobran himself claimed that founder William F. Buckley told him to "stop antagonizing the Zionist crowd," and Buckley accused him of libel and moral incapacitation. Buckley had previously said that an outsider "might reasonably conclude that those [Israel] columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism." Before his firing, Sobran discussed the issue in National Review, saying:
I'm responding to an obsession—a more or less official national obsession with a tiny, faraway socialist ethnocracyEthnocracyEthnocracy is a form of government where representatives of a particular ethnic group hold a number of government posts disproportionately large to the percentage of the total population that the particular ethnic group represents and use them to advance the position of their particular ethnic...
, which, I agree, ought to be a very minor concern of American policy-makers, but isn't. The orthodox view that Israel is a "reliable ally" is so brittle that a single maverick can ignite a frenzy. The reason, I repeat, is not that critics of Israel are so numerous, but that even one, as far as Israel's claque is concerned, is one too many. There is the terrible danger that the public may be more interested in what he has to say than in the party line the rest of the chorus is emitting.
1995: The Washington Times
The Washington TimesThe Washington Times
The Washington Times is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. It was founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, and until 2010 was owned by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate associated with the...
Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden fired Samuel Francis in September, 1995, after neoconservative Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh D'Souza is an author and public speaker and a former Robert and Karen Rishwain Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is currently the President of The King's College in New York City. D'Souza is a noted Christian apologist and conservative writer and speaker....
described his appearance at the 1994 American Renaissance
American Renaissance (magazine)
-Cancellation of 2010, 2011 conferences:In February 2010, following protests to hotel management of several hotels, which Jared Taylor claimed included some death threats, American Renaissance's biennial conference was canceled...
conference:
A lively controversialist, Francis began with some largely valid complaints about how the Southern heritage is demonized in mainstream culture. He went on, however, to attack the liberal principles of humanism and universalism for facilitating "the war against the white race." At one point he described country music megastar Garth Brooks as "repulsive" because "he has that stupid universalist song, in which we all intermarry." His fellow whites, he insisted, must "reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites ... The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."
Pruden had cut back on Francis' column after the Times ran his June 27, 1995 essay criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention
Southern Baptist Convention
The Southern Baptist Convention is a United States-based Christian denomination. It is the world's largest Baptist denomination and the largest Protestant body in the United States, with over 16 million members...
for passing a resolution repudiating slavery. In it, Francis quoted Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West , published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations...
that "Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism." He argued that if the Baptists "dismiss the New Testament passages about slaves obeying their masters as irrelevant," then they might as well join the Bolsheviks.
1997: The New York Post
Paleoconservative Scott McConnellScott McConnell
Scott McConnell is an American journalist best known as a founding editor of The American Conservative.In 1968, as a student at a New Hampshire boarding school, McConnell canvassed for Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. After receiving a Ph.D in history at Columbia University, McConnell returned...
was fired as the New York Posts
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
editorial page editor on September 4, 1997 after writing editorials critical of Haitian immigration and Puerto Rican statehood. About the latter, he had cited statistics that "half the island's 3.7 million inhabitants receive Food Stamps" and "59.4 percent of Puerto Rican children born on the U.S. mainland are born to unwed mothers." He concluded:
We believe that the looming vote on Puerto Rico's status is yet another sign of how the congressional GOP has lost its way. The current leadership seems more interested in trying to placate the liberal Washington establishment—or hatching schemes it imagines are popular with minority voters—than in protecting the interests of the voters who elected it. This is a feckless way to guide America's destiny.
McConnell, an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, later remarked that "our society had developed an expected script of white Anglo contrition and apology... and that I had failed to follow it." He found himself replaced by John Podhoretz
John Podhoretz
John Podhoretz is an American neoconservative columnist for the New York Post, the editor of Commentary magazine, the author of several books on politics, and a former presidential speechwriter.-Life and career:...
, who denounced him as a "very dangerous" sort of conservative. About his former employer, he said:
When push comes to shove, Rupert Murdoch does not want any difference of opinion with the Hispanic community. So if you have to put on one side appeasing a growing demographic and on the other side a conservative principle having to do with the language and traditions of the United States, he falls clearly on the first side.
Two years after the incident, McConnell said he had changed his mind about Pat Buchanan and joined his campaign as an adviser. He once dismissed his presidential hopes as "not worth discussing." Soon he helped found The American Conservative
The American Conservative
The American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
.
The ongoing battle
Since the end of the Cold WarCold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, the rift within the conservative movement has deepened with the neoconservatives' ascent and the paleocons' marginalization. For example, there were no prominent paleocons in the Bush administration. Charles Krauthammer called paleoconservatism a "philosophical corpse" and "a mix of nativism, protectionism and isolationism."
On domestic affairs, The Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard is an American neoconservative opinion magazine published 48 times per year. Its founding publisher, News Corporation, debuted the title September 18, 1995. Currently edited by founder William Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Standard has been described as a "redoubt of...
claimed that "the paleos' radical dissatisfaction with contemporary America could eventually veer into an anti-Americanism almost indistinguishable from the more familiar variety on the left." David Brooks, in the same magazine, claimed that the movement combines "high principle and bad-boy bravado," along with melding good ("longing for the old virtues") with bad ("race and sex roles"). He concluded that paleocons replace "the universalist ideas of the Founding" with "blood and soil." Brooks also described Pat Buchanan's campaign supporters as "people who thrived in the machine age" but who "are not going to thrive in the new economy."
Lew Rockwell
Lew Rockwell
Llewellyn Harrison "Lew" Rockwell, Jr. is an American libertarian political commentator, activist, proponent of the Austrian School of economics, and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.-Life and work:...
once illustrated the depth of paleo/neo schism with the story of an encounter between a paleocon and a neocon. The neocon complained that the paleocon made an "insensitive remark" about AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
and said, "How can you say that, when we all have so many close friends who have been struck down by this terrible disease?" The paleo replied, Close friends?' I don't know anyone who has AIDS. I don't know anyone who knows anyone who has AIDS." After that, the neocon stopped speaking to the paleocon.
March 2003: A crossfire in print
David FrumDavid Frum
David J. Frum is a Canadian American journalist active in both the United States and Canadian political arenas. A former economic speechwriter for President George W. Bush, he is also the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency...
of National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
and Pat Buchanan of The American Conservative
The American Conservative
The American Conservative is a monthly U.S. opinion magazine published by Ron Unz. Its first editor was Scott McConnell, his successors being Kara Hopkins and the present incumbent, Daniel McCarthy....
exchanged harsh words just before the Iraq War began. Buchanan wrote that neocons influence the U.S. government toward the pursuit of global empire
Empire
The term empire derives from the Latin imperium . Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples united and ruled either by a monarch or an oligarchy....
and the benefit of pro-Israel hawks. Frum charged that paleocons have become unpatriotic, racist, and anti-Semitic. He also hinted that paleocons were subversives, claiming they "made common cause with" international Islamists and "deny and excuse terror." (Though a year later, National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
founder William F. Buckley Jr. described The American Conservative as "highly literate" and "wonderfully well edited.")
In his article, Buchanan wrote:
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of CivilizationsClash of CivilizationsThe Clash of Civilizations is a theory, proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world....
against which Harvard professor Samuel HuntingtonSamuel P. HuntingtonSamuel Phillips Huntington was an influential American political scientist who wrote highly-regarded books in a half-dozen sub-fields of political science, starting in 1957...
has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedyTragedy (event)A tragedy is an event in which one or more losses, usually of human life, occurs that is viewed as mournful. Such an event is said to be tragic....
and a disasterDisasterA disaster is a natural or man-made hazard that has come to fruition, resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment...
for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, "Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight."
Frum wrote that:
Having quickly decided that the War on Terror was a Jewish war, the paleos equally swiftly concluded that they wanted no part of it. It's odd: 9/11 actually vindicated some of the things that the paleos had been arguing, particularly about immigration and national cohesion. But the paleos were in no mood to press their case. Instead, they plunged into apologetics for the enemy and wishful defeatism.
Beyond paleo and neo
Paleocon Clyde Wilson speculates that their critique of this "nasty little cabal" might be "belated and repetitive—a diversion from more fundamental problems," namely "a fatal defect of national character." He says the neocons are courtiers who saw "the chance presented by the vast gaping vacuum of ideas and principles that is the Republican Party." He concludes that Middle America is too willing to "clamber aboard" a GOP bandwagon "and hosannaHosanna
Hosanna is a liturgical word in Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism, it is always used in its original Hebrew form, Hoshana.- Etymology :The word hosanna is etymologically derived from the Hebrew , ...
their way down the road to perdition," instead of creating a populist replacement that might preserve "some semblance of civilized order and liberty."
In addition, while paleos and neos quarrel over Middle East policy, Paul Gottfried argues domestic equality and the exportability of democracy are greater points of contention between them. He says the neocons' call for "permanent revolution" exists independently of their beliefs about Israel. He also said, "What bothers me is not what Israel is but the manner in which its well-wishers blatantly misrepresent it." Also, paleos, while not wanting the US tied to Israel too strongly, freely disagree with one another about certain Israeli leaders. Pat Buchanan supported Yitzhak Rabin
Yitzhak Rabin
' was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–77 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995....
, while Gottfried, who criticizes "truculent [neoconservative] Zionism," admires Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon is an Israeli statesman and retired general, who served as Israel’s 11th Prime Minister. He has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006....
.
Note, however, that not everyone associated with American conservatism can be easily sorted into neo or paleo categories. Prominent examples are Claes Ryn, John Lukacs and George Carey, who are strongly critical of neoconservatism but do not share the paleocon fondness for sociobiology, positivist social science or populism. The division into two camps also ignores that it might be possible to support the war in Iraq, for pragmatic rather than ideological or ethnic reasons, and yet support economic nationalism and immigration reform. Note further that paleos and neos both oppose the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
, Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
and Soviet Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, especially Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
, and do not necessarily disagree on every political and cultural matter.
Paleoconservative criticism of neoconservatism
- Paul GottfriedPaul GottfriedPaul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...
: What’s In A Name? The Curious Case Of "Neoconservative" - Conservatives, Neoconservatives, Paleoconservatives: What Next? by Paul Gottfried.
- Claes G. RynClaes G. RynDr. Claes Gösta Ryn is a Swedish-born, American academic and educator.-Background:Ryn was born and raised in Norrköping in Sweden. He attended the Latin Gymnasium, Norrköpings Högre Allmänna Läroverk' . He was an undergraduate and a doctoral student at Uppsala University...
, America the Virtuous (2003) - Claes G. RynClaes G. RynDr. Claes Gösta Ryn is a Swedish-born, American academic and educator.-Background:Ryn was born and raised in Norrköping in Sweden. He attended the Latin Gymnasium, Norrköpings Högre Allmänna Läroverk' . He was an undergraduate and a doctoral student at Uppsala University...
, "The Ideology of American Empire". Orbis 47 (2003), 383–397. A longer and more scholarly traditional conservative critique. - Zmirak, J.P., "America the Abstraction," A conservative critique of neoconservatism.
- Why do NeoCons hate France? Why real conservatives should be pro-France.
- Nation or Notion? by Patrick J. Buchanan
- Strauss & the Straussians by Paul Gottfried.
- Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher as Conspirator by Claes G Ryn.