Thank you for this. I am often uncomfortable with the overwrought romantic Catholicism found in many the writings of many paleos and I am glad to hear the “WASP” tradition being affirmed.

American Catholics have been Waspified long before Vatican II, and it’s to our benefit.  There are things to learn from Northern European societies--the rule of law, opposition to nepotism, the concept of a “loyal opposition,” Anglo-American freedoms--that find their origins in but do not necessarily depend upon the Protestant expression of Christianity. 

OK, enough ecumenism for one night!

What ever happened to the Old Right Credo, “Republican government by libertarian means towards conservative ends?”

While this formula may lead to vigorous and healthy debate about what policies actually embody it, it still differentiates the Old Right from the Neocons, Libertarians (whose means and ends are a priori “liberty"), as well as various species of liberal collectivist, and progessive.

One problem I have with some paleo-conservatives and many neocons as well is their insistence that Libertarianism seeks to turn society upside down because they favor “reducing government”.  Well yet again the problem with that line of thinking is that government is the main source of culture and that it is needed in large doses to maintain order.  This ignores, of course, societies like medieval Iceland & the Swiss confederacies, and also ignores men like Thomas Jefferson, JRR Tolkien and Lord Acton, men who hated government and political authority and yet were lovers of the great arts and culture that they held in high regard.

Fascinating summary, and I, too, thank you for it. Interestingly, my heritage is one
that partakes both deeply in Scots-Irish/English and Old South traditions, but also is
traditional Catholic. And it is here that I think some additional comments are needed.

Certainly, Catholics and Catholicism had little to do with the creation of the First American Republic,
and despite the indirect influences via England and English custom (that had survived
the Reformation and Glorious Revolution), I think we must accept that fact. Nevertheless,
almost from the beginning there was a Catholic presence, that grew incrementally as the
young nation grew---Louisiana brought in Catholic majority populations; the Irish immigrations
of the 1840s brought in millions more. These new citizens accepted the original framework
of the new nation, as that framework through its constitutional acceptance of what I
would call “subsidiarity” and “local self-government” provided a level of leeway and
autarky that did not, it appeared, impinge on religious AND societal practice. As Catholics
were never a majority, and as the general and agreed-upon moral and social “standards”
accepted by the Protestant majority were more or less acceptable, if not ideal, the
American nation developed with a degree of limited pluralism. Although the Church has
always taught that there is one true Faith, and that error has no intrinsic natural
right, still in the American situation---the “hypothesis of Pope Leo XIII---as existed
for much of the 19th century, such a framework was “permissable,” and even, given the
circumstances, admirable, always bearing in mind that for Catholics is was NOT an idea
situation either in theory or in practice.

This agreed-upon “public orthodoxy” began to break down in the 20th century. More,
Catholics became an increasingly larger portion of the American population. I think
that one can say that with the Griswold decision (1962) and Roe v Wade, not to mention
earlier Supreme Court decisions (Everson, Brown v. Board of Education, etc.); with
the deconstruction of the old Democratic Party coalition, the triumph of the counter-
culture “new morality” in the 1960s, and other signposts, that the modus vivendi that
more or less kept a lid on the US, pretty much came off.

John Courtney Murray’s idea, best illustrated in his pre-Vatican II tome, WE HOLD
THESE TRUTHS, that the American and pluralist model, of diverse groups, different races,
and different cultures, with different religious views, should somehow replace the
traditionally taught Catholic model of religious unity that recognized the univocity
of Truth, was actually dead on arrival in the early 1960s....but it has taken until
now to understand just how wrong that model was.

The American nation today is held together by the nostalgic memory of how things once were (or at least
how we perceive them to have been), by appeals to “constitutionalism” and a return to
“first principles,” and, perhaps more significantly, by the balancing out of sub-groups
and interests, of regions and races, clases of folks and lobbies with their snoots at the
table. Of the regions, the South, my own region, has the largest collective memory and
consciousness, but even that has been grievously weakened by immigration and the “treason”
of the commercial classes (those that Robert Lewis Dabney and the Southern Agrarians
railed against).

For traditionalist conservatives, it seems to me, a whole series of questions arise, some
of which Christopher Roach has raised. If we call ourselves “conservatives,” just what
is it that we wish to “conserve”?  One of my former mentors, the late Fritz Wilhelmsen,
made a good case for discarding the term “conservative” altogether, preferring the
application “radical traditionalist” in its place. I tend to agree.

Given the irreparable breakdown in “public orthodoxy,” I think all bets are off. Maybe
newly invigorated traditional Catholics and the remaining Southern traditionalists, with
historical hindsight, can do a better job in the future, if Providence permits.

Mr. Roach, your last paragraph is a tour de force.  I have tucked it away in my “great quotes” folder.  Thank you.

“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages”

-Burke-
“Reflections on the Revolution in France”

Much like Rousseau, Burke celebrated the cult of community over the individual. His post “reflections” period had no relevance to our founders. His paranoid reaction to the French revolution brought criticism from his American contemporaries. He was an idealouge and statist of first magnitutde. Is it any wonder todays conservatives are in disarray.

The paradox presented by Mr. Roach goes un-noticed by the choir soaking in his sermon. This marks the fault line between the “classical liberal” leaning Libertarians and today’s Paleo-cons. “East is east and west is west...”

Sorry, but stop rewriting history to suit current needs. Neoconservatives were very Catholic heavy in the 1960 and 1970s and the shift occured over domestic policy. Go pick up a copy of “The Public Interest” from the 1960s.

Neo-conservatives, conservatives, liberals, paleo-conservatives, etc etc etc in this 10 minute event horizon age are the kinds of navel-gazing organizational agitprop that produced one of the more idiotic things to spring from El Deeciderosa’s lips: “Compassionate Conservative”.

Marx asserted that Religion is the opiate of the masses, the Soviets and Communist Chinese proved that their systems were the Vodka of the masses and the Distilled-democracy Corporate Globalism of this era of Democracy at gunpoint have proven that our current system is the Methamphetamines of the masses. Saint Augustine has plunged a shiv into the back of Saint Patrick and tells him he loves it.

The crowded world demands obedience and if it doesn’t get it, it shoots first and fails to ask any questions later. Speed and impatience rule the day and discourse is as dead as latin.

The nation state has failed us and turned us over to the tutelage of the Corporatists who are nothing so much as Medieval Feudalists and in this atmosphere, it matters not a hit whether one calls himself a neo-radical-Jainist Vegan or a Conservative Post-Republican big Government Champion........there is a market for anything as long as the people trade discernment for comfort and the sweetly prosaic smells of the herd.

Talking about Taft or Burke these days may be interesting and somewhat helpful but it is about as illuminating of the current crisis as is talking about Nathan Bedford Forrest.

After all, with the current “leadership” it’s more about extolling the virtues of what one isn’t than it is discerning what might be of use across the broad spectrum....while remaining grounded in a pragmatic understanding of what worked in the past. The speed of everything in this cheapened life of hyper mobility is ensuring that we’ll continue our careening in reverse.

Mr. Sabin avers:

“Talking about Taft or Burke these days may be interesting and somewhat helpful but it is about as illuminating of the current crisis as is talking about Nathan Bedford Forrest.”

I would tend to agree with Sabin that we have yet to confront the dilema of our present situation. We are however coming closer as we plumb the depths of the past parade of western political movements.

Mr. roach seems well on his way to invigorating his followers to embrace a form of Hegelian mystical metaphysics. Raising the state to an exhalted position in the developement of community.

Mr.Roach must have stopped his education at Burke as have many other conservatives, forgetting or out right dismissing the fact that modern conservativism continued to take its present form from additional classical liberals such as Herbert Spencer.

I’m curious if “The Man Versus the State” figures anywhere into Mr. Roach’s brand of conservativism.

“In the beginning, neoconservatives were chiefly made up of liberal, Jewish defectors from the Democratic Party who rejected its embrace of the New Left at the tail end of the Vietnam War.”

Perhaps, but a more plausible explanation is the sequence of events when the international left started supporting the Palestinians followed immediately by and the birth of the neocons.

Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html

1. Roach’s last paragraph could well have been lifted from Carl Schmitt’s Politische Romantik, 1919 (though—note my subjunctive—I’m not accusing Roach of so lifting).  Schmitt—a mostly a Hobbeian, and definitely an anti-conservative—has a further political affiliation from 1931-1945.  “Paleoconservatism” now has the same affiliation.  Which means neither Neo- nor Paleoconservatism is conservatism. 

2. Boyd Cathy’s catholicism doesn’t have Nostra Aetate and Mit Brennender Sorge in it.  Which shows that cafeteria catholicism isn’t just a liberal attraction.

I am writing this necessarily short note on a Turkish keyboard to express my agreement with Christopher. His comments about the romantic reactionary character of a now failed paleoconservative reaction to the neoconservative lockhold on the Right and to the social and cultural degradation of Western societies has troubled me for some time. If the neocons have celebrated our liberal democratic progress and called for exporting it with bayonets,the Old Right seems to have sunk into some kind of pale imitation of nineteenth=century reactionary romanticism. While I am not as critical of this tendency in its own time as Schmitt was,I also believe like Marx that history can go from drama to farce as it repeats itself.

A worthwhile essay. Thank you, Mr. Roach.

@Sid,
You and I have gone round and round over Mit Brennender Sorge and
Nostra Aetate. I will stand on the constant and consistent teachings of
the Church in those matters (NOT a “cafeteria” reading and interpretation
that has more to do with a modernist “wishing it were so” view that
you manifest).

It is NOT my desire to re-open those interminable controversies of
of earlier this year (January and previously), so for those interested, I refer
them to the Taki Archives for abundant debate and details.

“the moral leadership of the WASP elite “

Imagine we lived in the Roman Empire and substitute “moral leadership of the pagan elite.”
I don’t think that the Christians accepted the *moral* leadership of even the most
naturally virtuous pagans, nor should Catholics look for *moral* leadership to a group
that does not accept the full truth of the whole Gospel.  Read the City of God—even
the best Roman heroes were in the City of Man.  Moral leadership properly belongs with
the Catholic Church, which is why America will suffer from systemic flaws of an *unnecessary*
sort so long as its natural WAS elites still append the P to their acronym.  I don’t
want to say goodbye to the WAS elite, just convert them to being WASCs (white Anglo-
Saxon Catholics).  Read James Kurth (himself Protestant) on the “Protestant Declension”
to see how the deterioration of morals in this country is the result of Protestant
heresy being the religion of our “moral leaders.”

“Paleoconservatism” knows that the West’s very foundation is White culture, but, how odd, it hardly mentions race. Paleoconservatism thinks that it can win the Culture War by being “nice” to the negroes and the Jews. Fat chance. That is a racial war for all the marbles. You can’t wage it half-way.

As others have pointed out, much of the american history his Protestant, but you might want to ask the Native Americans of North America if the Catholic Missionaries in the west or the Protestants who came from the east were better or more like Neo-conservatives.

Same with “Public Schools” where all children learned that the bible only had 66 books, along with english, math, and the other subjects.  Of course Catholics responded by forming their own school system.

Conservatism ought to conserve what is good - and reject what is bad - like slavery and abortion.  Imagine if Bush sent the few abortionists to Gitmo as “unitary executive”.  The problem with that is that what must be restored and then conserved is the rule of law, not the contradictory whims of three branches of corrupt people.

Clinton wasn’t convicted so it proved politics over law.  Bush and Co. won’t be held accountable to a dead letter.

Conservatism used to be about preserving those things that encouraged the better angels of our nature.

It has devolved into rationalizing acting like brutes because it is pragmatic and convenient.

And in that I often see paleos and libertarians tend toward the latter too.  The language is high church but the intent and results would be low brow.

Caper,

Before you blithely scorn Protestants as heretics or suggest that the Catholic Church has a monopoly on moral authority, I’d suggest you recall the despicable way the Church has handled its many sexual abuse scandals.  I say this not to attack Catholicism (for which, as an Anglican, I have a gread deal of respect), but to point out that every institution has its flaws, and moral authority is a complicated matter.

Let’s not refight the wars of the 17th Century.  We have much bigger fish to fry.

Good essay, but paragraphs on parade needs editor.  If a paragraph has lines of 50 letters across and ten lines deep it has 500 letters.  If its 20 lines deep, its 1000 letters. 

Think of an army battalion or regiment in Red Square.  You don’t want a paragraph to have more letters than a formation in Red Square has men.

This is a great defination of “paleo-conservativism”...I agree with almost all of it.

The only difference I have with it is the embrace of “laissez faire” free market utopianism, and the whole fraud of “free trade”, which is more about looting America’s economic sovereignty and selling it to global corporate monopolies and international financecapitalists.

Paleoconservativism should include the concept of a state run industrial policy, outlined
in Ravi Batra’s book, “The Myth of Free Trade” published in 1992, which attacked the policies of Bush1 and Clinton/Democrat Party’s embarace of globalization. It should also include the concept of “energy independence"which includes encouraging and subsidizing domestic alternatives to the oil economy.

All of these things require a form of central state interventionism, and an activist federal government as regards foreign attempts to dump product, and transfer their own employment domestic agenda to the US economy.

Another comment is that the cold war was really a global war of containment with Soviet Communist imperialism and Mao’s Communist expansionism. All stripes of conservatives were united by this concern. It does NOT apply to

Ravia Batra?!?  The author of the Great Depression of the 1990s?  The fact that this guy still has a job is a scandal. That said, I think paleconservatives have always been a bit more “bit tent” as far as the free market/pro-worker industrial policy question.  Even small government libertarians prioritize culture and the nation and its integrity above abstract concern for the economy, and their concern for free markets is as much moral and cultural as it is concerned with economic efficiency.

As for our Protestant founders, I’ll have more to say on this, but as a Thomist I believe even Pagans can get most of natural morality suitable for social life correct using natural reason, and while I think America’s Protestant culture had certain defects, it also had many virtues, employed natural reason to achieve a very sound moral consensus, the group as a whole embraced what C.S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity.” It presented a congenial and tolerant environment for Catholics, and, this was no small achievement considering the recent religious wars on the Continent.

Mr. R sed: “Ravia Batra?!?  The author of the Great Depression of the 1990s?  The fact that this guy still has a job is a scandal. That said, I think paleconservatives have always been a bit more “bit tent” as far as the free market/pro-worker industrial policy question.  Even small government libertarians prioritize culture and the nation and its integrity above abstract concern for the economy, and their concern for free markets is as much moral and cultural as it is concerned with economic efficiency.”

Well Pat Buchanan gave a thumbs up to this book. Even you would have a hard time to ignore the fact that the
the Ronald Reagan Bubble (financed by deficit spending) was followed by the Bush1 Bust? Or the Clinton Internet Bubble was followed by the Bush1 Bust?

YOu’d have to be even more pressed to forstall Batra’s predicted “depression”, the federal
government had to resort to a series of so-called “anti-free market” policies, such as a huge growth in trade deficits,---and <cough, sputter, fume> increased taxes---mostly through the regressive Social Security Payroll
taxes.

What’s funny about self-proclaimed “conservatives” is that they seem to ignore the fact ththe Reagan Years were relatively pathetic economic growth, even when compared to the detested Carter years.

But it’s hard even for you to ignore the fact that the so-called “free market” conservaties
have been boasting about in the last 20 years is really a ponzi scheme based on the willingness
of the Asians and the Chinese to exchange computer gizmos and Walmart junk for American
petro-dollars, which they lend back to the federal government to pay for the Iraq War,
and charge us interest for their effort. Have we had economic growth, or just fiat money
inflation?

Ponzi schemes more like it. “free markets”? Bah, a lot of utopian nonsense.

Well said Caper, but Fletcher, like so many soi disant catholics trolling these pages, does not realize that the Vatican Curia and the current hierarchy extending down to parish priests is modernist and progressive and, therefore, questionably Catholic; and that is why their conduct towards the homosexuals and pedophiles comes as no surprise.
And, yes, the true Roman Catholic Church does have a monopoly on moral authority.

Suffice it to say, though, the anglicans and other protestants have yet to acknowledge any of their crimes whether here or in Europe. Uncle Adolph appreciated Luther. I never will.

http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/f009ht_TwoSpirits_Arnold.htm

http://nobeliefs.com/luther.htm

It depends on whether you are talking about distinct policies and orientations or about a complete package of theory and practice called “paleoconservatism.”

Some of those policies and approaches to politics will be adopted.  You can already see that beginning with immigration reform.

Other paleo notions may also be coopted by other parts of the political spectrum. That is how a healthy political system deals with reform movements in most cases.

But the complete package probably won’t get very far.

Ideologies are for people who want a home.  If you think you already have a place in the world you won’t be easily enticed by one.

Paleos see themselves as opposed to Bush and assume that after the neocons are dismissed it will be their turn.

But for a lot of people the reaction against Bush will also be a reaction to paleoconservatism.

Certainly all the Southern chauvinism and nostalgia for some vanished order won’t play well in much of the country, including the South itself.