Conservatism and the Old Right

According to two politically-correct dictionaries:

• paleoconservative n. a holder of outdated or old-fashioned conservative beliefs; a long-standing conservative. Also adj.

• paleoconservative n. Extremely or stubbornly conservative in political matters. ¹

On a more serious note, paleoconservatism as a concept emerged in the 1980s in reaction to the rise of the neoconservative movement. The phrasing "Paleoconservative" was something of a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder to the emergence of so called neoconservative ideologues who were not really conservatives at all. Neocons as they are sardonically dubbed by the Old Right, were in the words of Pat Buchanan, "the boat people of the McGovern revolution," or as the neocon expositor Irving Kristol put it, "Liberals mugged by reality." Neocons were essentially New Deal liberals, sometimes ex-Trotskyites, who came to embrace anti-communism while rejecting the more radical Leftism of the 1960s. In the 1980s, they gained political strength, and by the twenty-first century they ascended to become the core intelligentsia of the present Bush administration.

The distinctive flavor of conservatism in the United States is very much unique from that of its European counterpart, and it is particularly contrasted to the continental varieties of European conservatism. As Wesley Allen Riddle notes, "Cross-nationally, Americans are still the most Whiggish or libertarian people among the democratic nations." Riddle adds, "Americans are less supportive of the welfare state than citizens of any other nation. This is because distrust of a strong state was at the core of [the American idea,] and this article of faith has continued to influence American political dialogue on all sides." ² Moreover, Americans are a meritocratic-minded people, and any acceptance of equality is qualified.

The Anti-New Deal Old Right Coalition

Nonetheless, the roots of the Old Right go back much further than the 1980s. "The Old Right began in 1933," notes Murray Rothbard,

...in response to the coming of the New Deal. It was "reactionary" in the best and most generous sense: it was a horrified reaction against the Roosevelt Revolution, against the Great Leap Forward toward collectivism that enraptured socialist intellectuals and enraged those who were devoted to the institutions and the strict limitations on centralized government power that marked the Old Republic. ³

"Old Rightism was a frame of mind, a spirit rather than a rigorous philosophy. Its anima was an intransigent individualism in the face of a torrent of collectivism at home and outright dictatorship abroad." notes Sheldon Richman.⁴ He adds,

Even after the Republican Party establishment accommodated itself to the New Deal in the 1950s, the Old Right pressed the fight. In its particulars, this group held a deep respect for the founding ideals of the United States, namely, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and a few other documents, such as Washington’s Farewell Address. If the Old Rightists had a single hero it would have been Thomas Jefferson. They may not have agreed exactly on what he believed, but they would have endorsed Mencken’s view that "Jefferson would have killed himself if he could have seen ahead to Roosevelt II." ⁵

Granted, some paleos like Russell Kirk would object to embracing Jefferson as a sage, which brings us to a reflection upon the diversity of opinion within the movement. Paul Gottfried explains:

Paleoconservatives did not agree on all philosophical and policy questions, as witnessed by the bitter, prolonged debates between Frank Meyer and Russell Kirk, but they do appear, in retrospect, to have shared a number of sentiments and principles. Among these was skepticism about democracy and equality and a belief in freedom, both personal and corporate, coupled with a respect for social authority. ⁶

Trade and economic issues deeply divide the Old Right. However, they generally share the same critique of the managerial state, favoring lower taxation, and rollback of most all federal regulation. Rothbard elucidates

How much government did we wish to roll back? Stop at 1932, or press onward to repeal Progressive measures or even the centralization of the nineteenth century? We were all committed to states' rights, but how far did we want to carry this view? A few libertarian extremists wanted to go all the way back to the Articles of Confederation, but the great bulk of the right was committed to the United States Constitution—but a Constitution construed so "strictly" as to outlaw much twentieth-century legislation, certainly on the federal level. ⁷

The Old Right consisted largely of a loose-knit coalition of Taft Republicans, midwestern Republicans, southern Democrats and states' rightists, and libertarians. The Old Right also arguably encompassed a number of disgruntled progressives who departed the Left in defiance of the New Deal reforms. "What ultimately united these individuals was the determination to resist the swallowing up of American ideals, institutions, and traditions by the monster of collectivism, which in different forms they saw settled or settling in Moscow, Rome, and Berlin and threatening to settle in Washington." ⁸ Beyond the core constituency of Taft Republicans, the anti-New Deal Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s encompassed:

1. The Southern Agrarians or 'Vanderbilt Agrarians' who joined together to publish the Agrarian manifesto, a collection of essays entitled I'll Take My Stand in 1930. These agrarian traditionalists included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Gould Fletcher, Allen Tate, and Andrew Nelson Lytle among others.

2. The conservative, states' rights camp within the Democratic party led by Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland and Senator James A. Reed from Missouri. Their influence would crescendo in the post-war 1948 Dixiecrat revolt led by Strom Thurmond.

3. Most extreme among the Old Right were the libertarian and individualist writers such as H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Garet Garrett, Frank Chodorov, and Murray Rothbard. These libertarians actually lamented the statism of the 1920s long before Hoover and FDR came on the scenes.

4. There were free-market liberals such as Leonard Reed and William Harper. Reed would go onto found the Foundation for Economic Education.

5. From time to time, progressives would hang on the coattail of the Old Right movement, echoing its anti-New Deal rhetoric and lamenting its socialism and statism. Their later abandonment of ostensibly cherished principles and "moderation" was reflective of their opportunism as outsiders, but it magnified the influence of the Old Right in the eyes of post-war historians.

The Post-War Old Right

Some in the Old Right set their hopes upon an ascendency to political power in the aftermath of WWII, so as to rescind the New Deal and rollback the constitutional usurpations and rank socialism of Comrade Roosevelt. Murray Rothbard recollects, "I actually believed the States' Rights Party would continue to become a major party and destroy what was then a one-party Democratic monopoly in the South. In that way, an Old Right, Midwestern Republican coalition with States' Rights Democrats could become the majority party!" ⁹ In reality, as the postwar Right began to take shape, the Old Right slowly faded from the scenes. They lost some of their greatest spokesmen such as Senator Robert Taft in 1953 and Colonel Robert R. McCormick, owner of the unabashed conservative Chicago Tribune in 1957. To be sure, the Old Right had principled statesmen that were much admired in Congress, such as midwesterners Howard Buffet (R—NE) and Frederick C. Smith (R—OH). Compared to Congressmen today, they make the most all Congressional Republicans in our time look like irrevocably Leftist Big Government New Dealers.

Then there was the Foundation for Economic Education, which was founded in 1946, which spread an uncompromising gospel of free-markets and limited government—that resonated with conservatives and libertarians alike. Rick Perlstein notes,

The organization had pamphlets designed for placement on bookracks in factory break rooms (31 cents, on the amount of taxes extracted from each dollar earned; The First Leftists, on the French Revolution's Great Terror. At FEE seminars, businessmen learned the words, phrases, and ideas to freeze liberals in debate. The Foundation searched out cash-strapped high schools to whom it distributed free conservative textbooks. And after The Freeman folded, FEE revived it as a controlled circulation magazine that businessmen could pay to have sent to their employees, vendors, and clients. ¹⁰

It would be a mistake, however, to measure the fortunes of the Old Right by their proponents holding positions of political power. In the 1950s, expositors of conservatism came onto the scene which left an indelible influence on the conservative movement for years to come. Chief among them, were Russell Kirk, who led the post-World War II intellectual revival with the publication The Conservative Mind (1953) among several other books. "Kirk was the founding editor of Modern Age, which he edited from 1957 until 1959." In 1957, notes Lee Edwards:

Russell Kirk, with the financial help of publisher Henry Regnery, launched the quarterly journal Modern Age, which stressed the traditional rather than the libertarian or anticommunist strains of conservatism. Most of the editorial advisers held appointments in universities, and many were Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, or self-described "pre-Reformation Christians." Modern Age's circulation never rose above five thousand, but its contributors included such influential thinkers as southern agrarian Richard Weaver, economist Wilhelm Roepke, strategist Gerhart Niemeyer, and newspaper editor James J. Kilpatrick. Edwards, Lee, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement that Remade America, (New York, NY: Free Press, 1999), p. 87.

In 1960, Kirk founded and has since edited The University Bookman. From 1955 to 1980 he wrote the column 'From the Academy' for National Review. Kirk has bene an extraordinary prolific writer of articles and books." ¹¹ For the conservative, Kirk offered a better guide than reason, namely the "moral imagination:"

The concept of the "moral imagination" formed the basis of Kirk's attack on ideologies of both the Left and Right. This term, coined by Burke... as a philosophical concept to be applied as a response to modern ideological challenges, refers to man's intuitive power to perceive ethical truths and abiding law in the midst of the seeming chaos of experience. Imagination, not calculating reason, Kirk held, elevates man above the beasts. ¹²

Kirk enunciated six canons of conservatism. Gerald J. Russello described them thus:

Following the Kennedy Presidency, the American Left scored a political coup, as the Johnson campaign seized upon JFK's tragic passing in order to malign the American Right—Old and New. But the Right showed vitality and in spite of compromised Eisenhower administration, they were able to muster up a geninue conservative nominee for the 1964 Republican Party Presidential ticket. Rick Perlstein notes, "At their 1964 convention in San Francisco, the Republican Party emerged from a corrosive faction fight between its left and right wings to do something that was supposed to be impossible: they nominated a conservative. Barry Goldwater went down to devastating defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson, and there, for most observers, the matter stood: the American Right had been rendered a political footnote—perhaps for good." ¹³

The Old Right and the Cold War

While the Old Right was staunchly anti-communist, the Cold War posturing of the New Right nonetheless agitated many principled members of the Old Right. Consider the words of National Review founder William F. Buckley, who in 1952, called for "extensive and productive tax laws…to support a vigorous anti-communist foreign policy." Reasoning that due to the "far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union," he proclaimed, "we have to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." ¹⁴ This sort of rhetoric fueled the anxieties of conservatives and libertarians alike, and marked the beginning of a profound fissure in the American Right. As one Old Right spokesmen sardonically observed, "Where once the Right was fervently devoted to the freedoms propounded in the Bill of Rights, it now believes that civil liberties are the work of Russian agents." ¹⁵ For the Old Right, the principle threat to liberty at home was not Soviet foreign policy, but rather the geniune threat of collectivism and socialism on the homefront. Collectivist socialist policies had already made a crescendo with the New Deal reforms in 1930s and 40s, at the behest of crypto-Marxists like Harry Wallace in the Roosevelt administration. Nonetheless, after the 1960s many on the Old Right, put aside their differences with the New Right and united in an anti-communist coalition, which culminated in the Goldwater campaign of 1964. Though, there were always beleagured Old Right commentators that lamented the Cold War as entrenchment of statism on the home front. But as Paul Gottfried notes,

Most paleoconservatives backed an active American role in combatting communism and the Soviet Union as its most menancing armed advocate, but had little patience for big government and nonmilitary foreign aid... [T]hey saw communism as the extension of a violent revolutionary impetus going back to the French Revolution and now threatening the united States and the rest of the Western world. ¹⁶

The Old Right in the Reagan Era

In the mid-1970s, Dr. Ron Paul, MD, of Surfside, Texas, rose to become distinguished Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. He graduated from Gettysburg College and the Duke University School of Medicine, before proudly serving as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force during the 1960s. Paul was first elected to Congress as a Texas Republican in the 22nd District in 1976, after the incumbent Congressman resigned, but he was narrowly defeated in the November election. He served again from 1979 to 1985. Dr. Paul returned to Congress in 1997. Paul is affectionately known as Dr. No by his colleagues because of his uncanny penchant for vetoing unconstitutional legislation. In the words of William Simon, Dr. Paul is the "one exception to the Gang of 535 on Capitol Hill.

As Joseph Scotchie notes, "Also in the early 1980s, Llewellyn Rockwell, formerly an aide to libertarian congressman Ron Paul (R.—Tex.) left Washington to start the Von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Named after the famed Austrian economist, the institute, as opposed to a libertarianism that, for instance, sees all religions as essentially 'equal,' championed both free-markets and traditional Judeo-Christian values." ¹⁷

After Reagan's landslide election, conservatives lauded M.E. Bradford to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. That contest was lost, as neoconservative Bill Bennett won the chair. Bradford's derision upon Abraham Lincoln made him the anathema of establishment. Mel Bradford, a literary critic specializing in Faulkner studies, was an intellectual force behind the revival of the Old Right. He was a keen student of the U.S. Constitution. His 1979 anthology of writings, A Better Guide than Reason grew to be an influential tome for conservatives. To Bradford, the American founding was not some quixotic utopian vision to build a "city on a hill" but rather the product of reflection upon history and an embrace of continuity with the traditions of the past.

Joseph Scotchie notes,

In 1979, two southern traditionalists, Thomas Fleming and Clyde Wilson, founded a publication originally named the The Southern Partisan Quarterly Review. A classicist and former academic, Fleming had long harbored ambitions of editing his own journal of opinion. Specifically, he hoped to edit a quarterly that focused on Southern culture, politics, literature, and history, a publication that would advance themes and ideas Fleming felt were ignored by such leading Southern-based journals as Sewanee Review and Southern Review. In Wilson, editor of John C. Calhoun papers at the University of South Carolina, Fleming found a like-minded colleague from the usually inhospitable groves of academia. ¹⁸

Thereafter, the publication summarily folded after only two issues, but it emerged as a phoenix from the ashes when it was acquired by the Foundation for American Education based in Columbia, South Carolina. Scotchie notes, "Fleming stayed with Southern Partisan for two years before becoming managing editor of Chronicles." ¹⁹

In 1987, a bright, rising star on the Right, and a former official in the Reagan and Nixon administrations, Patrick J. Buchanan emerged as co-host of CNN's popular Crossfire television show (1987-99). Buchanan was a Columbia-educated journalist by training, and grew up in an affluent Roman Catholic family in Washington, D.C. In 1988, Buchanan also wrote his bestselling political biography Right from the Beginning. Buchanan nurtured a no-holds-barred paleoconservatism that resonated profoundly with principled old school conservatives, the blue-collar Middle class, partyless-independents, and so called Reagan Democrats. He came to reject interventionism in foreign affairs and global free trade in economics, and squarely challenged the administration of George H.W. Bush on a number of issues. Buchanan went onto address the 1992 Republican Convention where he gave his culture war speech. In the face of mass-media criticism from the Left and Right, Buchanan emerged an intellectual force to be reckoned with. As the silver-tongued sage of the Old Right, he out-argued, out-articulated, and out-gunned his intellectuals opponents with finesse and poise. Buchanan made the Old Right respectable once more. And after the Cold War ended, he made non-interventionism in foreign affairs respectable as well. And just despite muckracking criticism from the Left, he gained respect from many intellectual peers outside of the conservative camp. Buchanan attempted bids for the Republican primary for the Presidency, and emerged as the Reformed Party candidate for President in 2000. ²⁰

Paleoconservatism in the Twenty-First Century

In the twenty-first century, the Rockford Institute—its affliated John Randolph Club and Chronicle Magazine—all continued full steam ahead. More recently, a new paleoconservative magazine sponsored by Patrick Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos was founded in 2002. The American Conservative focuses largely on the culture war, the follies of American foreign policy, the intellectual bankruptcy of neoconservatism, globalization, and trade issues. In 2004, Dr. Donald Livingston, a frequent contributor to Chronicles and Southern Partisan, founded the Abbeville Institute in 2003, which has conducted a number of annual educational colloquiums for college-aged students in South Carolina and Louisiana.

For more information, about the Old Right, read our frequently asked questions (FAQ) list, entitled "What Are Paleoconservatives?"