Paleoconservatism

Most of the people associated with this blog appear to be what are usually called paleoconservatives.  There is an extensive and systematic exposition here  of what paleoconservatism is.  I reproduce a few excerpts below with some comments of my own interspersed in red.  I have some sympathy with some of the things that paleos say but think that in general they are an example of that great outcast of British tradition: “The man who goes too far”.  Such a person is not far short of being a “bounder” or a “cad” in the British vocabulary of yore

“Paleoconservatism is the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture — an identity that is both collective and personal.

  This identity is missing from the psychological and emotional makeup of leftists of every stripe — including “neoconservatives”— and is now disavowed by mainline conservatives of the Republican variety, seemingly bent on eradicating as much of the primeval stain as they can from their consciousnesses while apologizing for the faint discoloration that remains.

Identity—like patriotism and loyalty, among other things—is a problem for conservatives to the extent they see it at odds with the concept of Economic Man, for whom the term has no significance unless preceded by the word “brand.” This is a caricature of conservatives.  ALL conservatives have some respect for the past, not excepting libertarian conservatives like myself.  Libertarians tend in fact to be great champions of America’s founding documents

For the left, the only valid human identity is economic status, which determines one’s political position in the context of the class war: Other identities (racial, ethnic, tribal, cultural, religious, national) are dangerous because they distract from all-important economic distinctions, and because they create enmity among groups who the dialectic has determined should be allies. The left, which (with the help of drugs and other deviant social behavior) in the 80’s created the crisis of homelessness, is and always has been homeless itself: men and women without a country, without a people, without a history—without God. But there is another reason why the left, especially in societies that retain so much as a vestige of their historic character, despises traditional identities. For leftists, these imply something enticing yet, for them, unattainable: a self-possession to be envied, a self-confidence to be resented, an assurance to be feared. What they perceive is not simply a threat to their political blueprint, to their vision of the future. It is an affront to themselves: their bogus identity, their false self-perception, their absurdly inflated sense of their own strength, most of which they owe to the bureaucratic institutions that protect their soft ineffectual selves the way a nautilus shelters a snail. This sense of affrontedness has produced a satanic hatred which, for the past 40 years, has been fueling a kind of public conspiracy—entirely unprecedented in the annals of history—whose end is the total deconstruction of a civilization by the elite responsible for its welfare and survival.

In this campaign of chaos and destruction, the chief and most effective tools have been the weakening of the Christian religion and Christian institutions, the promotion of multiculturalism—and virtually uncontrolled immigration from the Third World.

Given their strong sense of identification with the American Republic as well as, in many cases, family trees rooted in the fertile abundant soil of colonial America, it was inevitable that it should have been the paleoconservatives who sounded the alarm over immigration and carried the anti-immigration battle to the enemy, whose response (entirely in character for it) has been name-calling from a safe distance rather than hand-to-hand fighting in the field, plus redoubled bureaucratic and propagandistic efforts beyond the sidelines. Given, also, the distraction of the general population by sports, sex, the internet, and a booming economy, the paleos seem to be losing most of the battles, and the war. The numbers of first-generation immigrants are approaching critical mass, while a Gallup poll taken during the last election season showed that a majority of Americans no longer believes that immigration to their country ought to be curtailed.

Rather than employing the guillotine or the Red Army, for a century and a half, our ruling elite brought the country to a slow simmer through a steady process of centralization, while preserving the illusions of progress, prosperity, and moral decency. Each time the slow slouch toward Robespierre

  has progressed, it has done so draped in the language of traditional religion and Christianity. Lincoln excused the slaughter of a generation of Southern men by appealing to the myth that our one nation “under God” was originally “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” FDR, in his 1933 inaugural address, paved the way for the Jacobin New Deal program of Social Security with the following statement: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” In the 2000 presidential election, one candidate appealed to “John 16:3” while the other claimed Jesus was his favorite philosopher.

Not only would Lincoln not receive Confederate commissioners, he refused, for three crucial months, to call Congress. Alone, he illegally raised money, illegally raised troops, and started the war. To crush Northern opposition, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus for the duration of the war and rounded up some 20,000 political prisoners. (Mussolini arrested some 12,000 but convicted only 1,624.) When the chief justice of the Supreme Court declared the suspension blatantly unconstitutional and ordered the prisoners released, Lincoln ordered his arrest. This American Caesar shut down over 300 newspapers, arrested editors, and smashed presses. He broke up state legislatures; arrested Democratic candidates who urged an armistice; and used the military to elect Republicans (including himself, in 1864, by a margin of around 38,000 popular votes). He illegally created a “state” in West Virginia and imported a large army of foreign mercenaries. B.H. Liddell Hart traces the origin of modern total war to Lincoln’s decision to direct war against the civilian population. Sherman acknowledged that, by the rules of war taught at West Point, he was guilty of war crimes punishable by death. But who was to enforce those rules?

These actions are justified by nationalist historians as the energetic and extraordinary efforts of a great helmsman rising to the painful duty of preserving an indivisible Union. But Lincoln had inherited no such Union from the Framers. Rather, like Bismarck, he created one with a policy of blood and iron. What we call the “Civil War” was in fact America’s French Revolution, and Lincoln was the first Jacobin president. He claimed legitimacy for his actions with a “conservative” rhetoric, rooted in an historically false theory of the Constitution

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, June 1, 2005 at 10:12 AM in Conservatism
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