Posted on 11/13/2001 12:10:56 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator
(Well, it's a bump at least.)
Do they dream of a reborn medieval European chr*stendom, or a reborn early-federal-period enlightenment/Masonic United States of America? Do they want a virtually nonexistent government or something like the strong, paternalistic governments of Franco, Salazar, and Petain that will preserve the purity of the ethnoculture? Or they for or against free trade? (It is forgotten by today's Buchananite Confederacy-partisans that "free trade" was one of the doctrines most dear to the real Confederacy.) Are you for Jeffersonial localism or against it when a Hispanic border town votes to make Spanish (the language of Franco!) its official language?
LOL! You’re going to make a few heads explode with this paragraph.
BTW, it would also be very gratifying to learn why America's "pacifists," both Left and Right, never make the same pacifistic demands of the foreign dictatorships they identify with that they do of the United States.
Paelo Conservitism is a replay of the 30's isolationist dogma, they didn't have a problem with intervention in WW1, merged with some socalist protectionism of the last half of the 19th century.
To the light
Little Bill
You wont get an explanation because the connection is only in your head. Bullshit on false premise sandwich.
Personally, I often think of myself as "paleo", but that is only relative to my mostly marxist friends. I mean I don't believe in income tax or the public schools, and I am strongly 2nd Amendment and pro-life (the last two are not open for debate, even amongst friends.)
I think English ought to be the official language because I understand what drove Webster to write his dictionary, but unless they try to prohibit English, I could not care less what is the "official" language of your hypothetical border town. What about the entire state of, say, California? I don't know about that one.
And since I am firmly in favor of a Jewish State, I guess your post doesn't really aply to me
Huh? There's always LaRouche.
What has come to be considered the "Right" in America today is really borne of three strands, not so very well integrated:
1) The classical liberalism born of Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, which was the liberalism of the Founders and the 19th century, and which now encompasses Austrian economics, neoclassical microeconomics and rational expectations economic theory, and political libertarianism, in the broad sense more than in the party sense.
2) A moderate conservatism that seeks gradual change and to preserve the essence of the good in traditional institutions, borne of Burke's revulsion at the French Revolution and being now essentially country club Republican ism. The relationship of this with classical liberalism is gradual and curious, consider how the Republican party began as an amalgam of conservative Whigs and anti-slavery radicals who were often classical liberals. and
3) Authoritarin conservatism, that of the high Tory or Ultramontagne Continental Conservative. Whether it glorifies the state in monarchal or religious terms, it still views the individual as subordinate to the state. It lacks being totalitarian only because of its traditionalism grounding in morality (in most places) and the sense of reciprocal obligation of all in society in the Great Chain of Being whereby each had is place.
The Paelos are authoritarian conservatives for the most part, but who rarely have the historical or philosophical training to understand the implications of their views.
Huh? There's always LaRouche.
I thought he went to prison or Europe or something.
The problem with the classification "conservative" is that it doesn't always refer to the same status quo being conserved. Those who would return to the social mores of the 1950s, for example, would probably have a claim to that name, but to those for whom that era's post-FDR federal government constitutes a terrible inflation of power over that of the Founders' day, they wouldn't be "conservative" at all. Making it worse, libertarians are referred to as "conservative" because the status quo they are trying to conserve most resembles the original plan (or more properly, an more or less fuzzy idealization) of the Constitution. But to return to that era's laissez-faire attitude toward, say, drugs, appears to many latter-day "conservatives" as "liberal" or even "libertine" (for those who prefer looser usages of the English language).
As you point out, it gets worse still when European definitions are used, wherein "liberal" means adhering to the policies most Americans would classify as "conservative." Worse still when "conservative" applies to old-line Communists in, say, the ex-Soviet Union, whose economic and political stance is diametrically opposed to "conservative" in the U.S.
I think, therefore, that if it isn't merely a relative term, it doesn't have a great deal of meaning at all.
Then there are the Israel haters like Sobran, Reese, Buchanan et al. They each have their own virtues and areas of clear thinking. However, they have swallowed whole the idea that somehow Jews and Israel have American foreign policy by the throat - all to the detriment of US interests.
I think what unites paleos, however, is the idea of the "old republic" - the devolution of power away from the federal government back down to the states and people. And the destruction or restraining of the "New World Order" - an even higher and more remote level of social and economic control.
For more insights into their thinking "Chronicles" is the magazine to read. Warning - reading it can be disorienting sometimes. FreeRepublic is the place for clear-thinking.
The subsequent intellectual history of the conservative movement has largely been the story of how the two great strands of conservative thought, classical liberalism and Burkean traditionalism (the "Blue and White Niles of the conservative movement," as I have sometimes called them), have come to recognize each other. They have recognized each other not as adversaries but as complementary aspects of a single overarching worldview. To borrow a military metaphor, it has sometimes seemed to me that the conservative movement's resolute opposition to the advance of world communism was its response to the great but essentially tactical problem of our time. Its commitment to political and economic freedom (the contribution of classical liberalism, as we have seen) was its profound strategic contribution, the enormously important insight that human freedom makes possible a level of political and economic well-being that no dirigiste system can hope to equal. But...traditionalism is neither a strategy nor a tactic; it is, in the fullest sense of the word, a philosophy. As such, it is the bedrock of American conservatism.For the full lecture containing this quote go here
Worse still when "conservative" applies to old-line Communists in, say, the ex-Soviet Union, whose economic and political stance is diametrically opposed to "conservative" in the U.S.
I always thought it amusing when the NY Times would refer to the forces in the Soviet Union that clung desperately to communism as the “conservatives” while those fighting for individual liberty and freedom from state power were the “liberals.”
I realized then that in NY Times-speak, political terms were fungible, mostly sticking to the formula “conservative=mean” and “liberal=nice”.
Whittaker Chambers, of course, was an American version of Arthur Koestler -- the Continental/British intellectual who had really realized how he'd been snookered by the Marxists and so became more anti-communist than McCarthy, if you will.
Conservatism in the US has always meant something very different (at least since our Revolution) than in Europe, as we haven't had any monarchists since the highest of high Federalists who wanted Washington as king, and the fundamental notions of liberty and individual responsibilty are the fabric of our political philosophy. Traditionally, there was never much of a place here for the European ultramontagne Caltholic right, the unreconstructed English Tory supporter of the Stuarts or even the enlightened despotism that characterized the German and Austrian monarchies, let alone the truly reactionary views of the Russian monarchy. [Witness Bismarck's rows with the Catholic Church and the top down socialism as an instrument of control in the Prussian state and the various reforms and evolution in the dual monarchy] Those views came here mostly through intellectuals writing in Europe and through the Roman Catholic Church, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the Church fought valiantly against modernity. One needs to understand that this is the worldview in which many such as Pat Buchanan grew up.
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