From Justin Quinn,
Your Guide to US Conservative Politics.
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By Paul E. Gottfried
Raffensperger Professor of Humanities, Elizabethtown College

Since my picture drawn for Justin Quinn of the paleoconservative side in the current conservative wars is far from uplifting, it may be equally necessary to point out the Old Right’s strengths.

Among their resources, paleos control websites that reach hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, and like Taki’s Top Drawer, they are professionally managed and full of interesting polemics. The contributors to these sites consist not only of hardened veterans of Old Right warfare, but also of writers who are featured in National Review Online and other predominantly neoconservative websites.

Providing paleoconservatives can scare up the funds, they should be able to enlist some of those who are currently working for the other side to write for them as well. Here I refer to someone like the talented journalist John Derbyshire, who is not a neoconservative polemicists or a FOX TV personality and who is happy to take commissions from paleo patrons. If the paleos can raise sufficient funds (and this must be repeated), they should be able to gain ground as a serious political movement. This will happen if their resources are expanded, however much the neoconservatives and the liberal establishment might try to keep them marginalized.

I should also cite the Ron Paul presidential bid as a development that paleos played a disproportionately large role in launching and sustaining. While admittedly there is not a 100% correspondence between Paul’s positions and what most paleos believe, Congressman Paul has stood for constitutionally limited government at home and abroad and has been steadfastly opposed to both abortion and illegal immigration. Such stands tie in closely with paleoconservative concerns. While not all of the libertarian support for Paul’s candidacy may please all of the paleos, there is enough in what the Congressman has advocated that has caused him to become an attractive figure for the Right.

Another factor should be mentioned: despite the authoritarian impulses of some paleo commentators, their revulsion for the modern welfare state, and especially its expanding behavioral agenda, is so profound that the Old Right is becoming as firmly anti-statist as the libertarians. At least for tactical reasons, the two sides can cooperate, a point that is fully confirmed by their joint commitment to Ron Paul’s campaign.

Even more relevant for the continued importance of the Old Right is the fact that it has stayed in the political conversation, (yes) despite the vicious pounding alternating with contemptuous disregard to which it has been subject for the last twenty-five years. The Old right is still there because it fills a niche, which is the non-leftist spot in the ongoing ideological debate. This is a point to which I continue to return, despite all the gloom and doom about the Right that permeates my recently published (and since blacked-out) book on the American conservative movement.

There has to be one side out there (perhaps the continued operation of the principle of honesty requires it) that does not celebrate Martin Luther King and Harry Truman as secular deities. There have to be traditionalist critics who are willing to do justice to the facts of contemporary history —- and to underline the losses in liberty and community that the modern welfare state and public education have brought to this country.

The publications of Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a fine organization dedicated to the study of ideas for which I have written over the decades, carries out this task of enlightenment at the scholarly level. But the paleoconservatives do something similar at the level of political affairs. And they are not shills for the GOP. They are fundamentally different from those talk-shop celebrities who pretend on the airwaves to criticize Republican operatives but who then knuckle under to them.

Paleos do not fall into line behind either national party; they show an independence of spirit that I for one admire.