For many years on Truth Social, GETTR before that and more recently on X in both text and audio formats I have continued to insist that paleoconservatism is socially conservative socialism, ie using socialist style government to accomplish socially conservative goals. This would include taxing corporations funneling that money into checks for people who decide to get married and have kids for example. Another would be taking the foreign aid money from say, Israel, and using for that aforementioned purpose as well.
In my experiences paleoconservatives not only disagree with the notion of smaller government, they also disagree with the notion of capitalism itself as they believe it has led to a moral rot that only be cured via the government. I find these people to be indistinguishable from communists in economic terms and I find them to be more disgusting because of their views on social policy and Christian matters. Unlike your standard communist they don’t even pretend to be open on social policy and as far as I’m concerned they take the Lord’s name in vain.
For those that are unfamiliar with paleoconservatism here is a helpful guide I came up with a little over 7 months ago
Groypers are stupid edgelords who are paleocons
Post-liberals are fake intellectuals who are paleocons
Woke Right is a hip new term for paleocons
“America First” is a dishonest term for paleocons
America Only is a honest term for paleocons
I’m sure a lot of you have heard of some of, if not all of these terms. My discussion question is, am I correct in my characterization of paleoconservatives? If I am incorrect then what would be a more accurate characterization of paleoconservatism and how would one characterize what I described above? In either case what do you believe should be done to combat this socially conservative communist ideology?
I think the framing conflates a few distinct things. Paleoconservatism (Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, the old Chronicles magazine crowd) is really rooted in older Burkean/traditionalist conservatism, non-interventionist foreign policy, and skepticism of both managerial liberalism and neoconservatism. It’s not fundamentally anti-capitalist — most paleocons are fine with markets — but they do prioritize national cohesion, community, and cultural continuity over pure economic efficiency, which sometimes leads to support for tariffs, immigration restriction, or family policy that looks “big government” from a libertarian vantage point. That’s different from wanting the state to engineer social outcomes the way socialists want it to engineer economic outcomes.
I’d also push back on lumping groypers, post-liberals, and “America First” all under one label. They overlap in style (nationalist, anti-establishment, religiously inflected) but come from different intellectual traditions and disagree with each other plenty — post-liberals like Deneen are making a philosophical critique of liberalism itself, while groyper discourse is mostly online culture-war performance. Treating them as interchangeable makes the critique easier to dismiss.
If your concern is the drift toward state-directed social engineering, the strongest counter isn’t “this is just communism with a cross,” but making the case that voluntary institutions — family, church, community — do that work better than government ever could, which is the actual core of the classical liberal/libertarian tradition.
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Paleoconservatism started as an anti-socialist ideology, as well as a mostly small government idea if you actually look at the policies of Buchanan’s presidential run. They weren’t that much different from Trump, to be honest. Buchanan even named socialism as the root cause of all the cultural issues he cited in “The Death of The West”. I think the average paleocon these days is just remembering Buchanan wrong. In fact, I think they’re unironically taking the strawman accusation that neocons and leftists levied at him, and embracing that instead. They genuinely think Pat was a Third-Worldist antisemite who wanted the state involved in every issue the West had. As a result, while Chronicles magazine is still relatively sane, Pat’s own magazine, “The American Conservative” has essentially fallen off the deep end, being indistinguishable from Nick Fuentes’ Twitter page.
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This is a really good analysis and I agree with it. The paleocons used to be very tight with libertarians but the conspiracy thinking infected so many of the right wing conservative institutions that it polluted their capabilities. Libertarians themselves were completely overrun. I heard from people who were around before the Ron Paul days that the movement was much more reason based and Ayn Rand friendly. The Rothbardian ancaps sort of took over and pushed out anyone who wasn’t a full anarchist. But back in the day people revered Rand and Robert Nozick and scores of other outside the box thinkers that are mostly forgotten today. Robert Heinlen too.
Yeah, I think Rothbard touched off the rise of the Third Worldists and other woke parts of the movement.
I guess I lump them all together because with the occasional exception, they support state-directed social engineering directly or indirectly. This seems to be the common thread for all of them despite their stylistic differences and disagreements with each other on other areas. I have a GREAT deal of concern about this drift and the big reason I use the “this is just communism with a cross” counter is because so often that drift is being encouraged by people who people put their Roman Catholicism and even on occasion Orthodox views at the forefront.
I do believe that voluntary institutions do that work better than the government ever could and more importantly the voluntary nature of those institutions allows liberty, which should be the end goal whenever reasonably possible.
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I guess that is the heart of my question. What do you call Third-Worldist anti-semitism that wants the state involved in every issue the West has? That sounds like a goofy question given the existence of the Left, except the people I’m talking about have a “socially conservative” veneer that the Left does not have in the slightest.
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They’re just leftists who have socially conservative views. The “Christian Left” is a good example of that. Most of the internet is just that, in fact.
They are absolutely just leftists who have socially conservative views. To me the question then becomes what is the term that should be used to describe them, as I believe existence of such for terms is important in political matters. Especially to distinct the people we are talking about from your standard leftist.
I don’t think there is one. Maybe they line up enough with fascists to be that. Like, Moderate Fascists, if that makes sense?
Woke Right is actually a good name, the only problem with it is that it is difficult to explain to people who aren’t “in the know”
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“Retard Right” is another name, although that name implies these people are dumb. They’re not. Maybe their viewers are, but they aren’t. They’re more so grifters.
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And as James Lindsay has explained in LONG detail, they think exactly like your standard Woke academic types. Halsey English made a point the last time that he was on News Sight with Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto, that Woke Right doesn’t work because they aren’t actually even Right, they are just Woke, with the variation being that instead of white privilege these folks focus on Jew privilege. I do think that is a substantive argument, although I do think these folks social conservatism needs to be accounted for. You are never going to see (insert Woke Right influencer here) talk positively about transgender ideology for example.