Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: What is Paleoconservatism? Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/what_is_paleoconservatism#27640 Post contents: 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. Sent at: 2008 11 20