The "Ron Paul Newsletters" controversy has revealed a little known conservative synthesis, "paleo-libertarianism." Paul Gottfried joins Richard to discuss the history of this coalition of writers and activists, which was quite willing to take seriously not only libertarian economics but race, immigration, and the National Question.

Reading an online response by someone described as “National Review’s chief domestic policy analyst,” with the mellifluous, politically correct name of “Reihan Salam,” addressed to Ron Unz of the American Conservative, I was struck by a stray reference to a group that Salam’s employers have not accorded the right of recognition. Salam observes that Unz, who edits a “paleoconservative” publication, has written a “thought-provoking” article on Hispanic immigration. Unz wishes to discourage further Hispanic immigration because it depresses wages in the U.S., but otherwise this publisher raises no substantive objection to the influx of Third World, uneducated population from south of our border.

Unz begins his brief by arguing that Hispanic crime, including in all probability crimes by illegals, is no higher than it is among the Anglo population. (Unfortunately, Ron's thesis has been debunked, but let's not dwell on that.) Furthermore, the Latino immigrants, according to Unz, are generally hard-working and make reasonable efforts to fit in. Unz states that Republican politicians have overreacted by declaring war on illegals and by engaging in supposedly xenophobic policies and rhetoric against the newcomers. His only objection against continued immigration from Latin America is that it’s depressing the wage structure for those already in the work force. Latino immigration has hurt vulnerable American wage-earners, by providing cheap, expendable labor.

According to Salam, Unz has gone outside the box of what he would expect from the right. He has properly condemned the anti-foreign gestures of the GOP, and he never raises those “cultural issues” that one hears, perhaps with a shudder, from “paleoconservatives.” But who, pray tell, is this last group? Although Salam devotes an entire essay to them, I don’t have a clue as to what he’s talking about. The people alluded to have something to do with how the Right used to be...and they tend to follow “the idiosyncratic political economist Murray Rothbard,” my late friend. Many of them have racial reasons for not wanting to flood the country with Hispanic immigrants, but Unz, to whom one could never ascribe the slightest twinge of racial or cultural Angst, is somehow a paradigmatic paleo. Indeed, engaging in discussion with Unz is the litmus test for whether Salam’s neoconservative camp is open to a “good-faith conversation” with a group on the right with which Salam “doesn’t agree very often.” One might note that if he did, he would in all probability have to apply for food stamps.

Matthew Lyons is a leftist writer of  the "watchdog" variety and has in the past worked as a co-author with Chip Berlet. He currently operates a blog called "Three Way Fight" which previously featured a critique of AlternativeRight.Com from a hard left perspective. More recently, Lyons published an extensive critique of the ideas and work of yours truly on the socialist New Politics website. I have since produced a three part response. See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Lyons has posted a very brief reply to my reply. Readers of AltRight may find the exchange interesting or at least amusing.

Paul Gottfried joins Richard to discuss the 2010 HL Mencken Club conference and the prospect for forming a counter force on the right.

Registration can be completed online here. 

Last week was a bad one for David Weigel, an acquaintance of mine who resigned his position as an online reporter and blogger at the Washington Post (likely at his editors’ urgings) after it was revealed that on a liberal email listserve, “JournoList,” he had written mean things about Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and the conservative movement he was tasked with covering.

Weigel’s attacks on Rush and Drudge were personal: he wrote, clearly in jest, that he wished they’d both die. His take on Glenn Beck must have been red meat on an email list that was created by WaPo’s Ezra Klein and reportedly included such luminaries as Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias, Eric Alterman, and Jeffrey Toobin. Said Weigel,

One extra, obvious point -- Beck’s campaign against [Van] Jones was transparently racial . . . he treated his very white, very angry audience to video after video of Jones giving scorching speeches. At one point Beck just eschewed subtlety and played videos of Jones alongside videos of Jeremiah Wright while he remained on the screen mugging like Harpo Marx.

Perhaps even Klein, Krugman & Co. were embarrassed by Weigel’s Frankfurt-esque comments about Republicans' protecting "white privilege” (if only!).

When a friend told me about this last weekend, I predicted that Weigel would soon get hired by The Nation. I was wrong. Yesterday, he was named a MSNBC contributor.

It’s perfectly reasonable for my friends Tom Piatak and Christian Kopff to disagree with Hans-Hermann Hoppe on free trade, as they do in the comments. But it’s wrong for Tom to pretend that Hoppe isn’t an economic and political thinker of the highest order. He’s also far from a “loudmouth,” and he’s refrained from associating himself with the maudlin “Americanism” beloved by “ferrners” like Frum, Hitchens, and Sullivan. (Tom's and my friendship survived our heated debates about the 2008 auto bailouts, and I sincerely hope it will survive this dustup, too.)

I wasn’t there, of course, but my understanding is that at a ‘96 John Randolph Club meeting, Hoppe called Francis a “national socialist” and “social nationalist” -- as opposed to a “National Socialist” or “Nazi.” There’s a difference. And truly, “national socialism” isn’t a wholly inaccurate term for what Francis was proposing… (Hoppe’s speech can be read here and is developed further in Democracy -- The God That Failed.)

I wish that Hoppe and Francis could have pursued a debate, for though they disagreed on economic matters, on a deeper level they had much in common. Remembered mostly as an undeceived political commentator, Francis was himself connected with a “radical Right” 19^th-century European tradition, particularly in his conceptions of hierarchy and the scope of Western decline. This aspect of Francis, which his Chronicles editor didn't apparently approve of, is evident in articles such “The Roots of the White Man,” which Jared Taylor collected in the volume Essential Writings on Race. Francis’s notion of “anarcho-tyranny” is also the kind of concept that Hoppe’s libertarian Right could develop further.

I’m sure that the libertarian camp bears some of the blame for the breakup of the “paleo-libertarian” JRC. And perhaps the whole project was doomed to failure from the beginning: “paleo-libertarianism” represented a hastily assembled rearguard action against neocon ascendancy in the conservative movement, and there are simply limits to which groups can form a movement based on a shared animus.

That said, I find it difficult to imagine that the peculiar personality of Thomas Fleming wasn’t decisive in the paleo-libertarians’ undoing. Fleming’s ability to alienate colleagues -- as well as subscribers and donors -- is well known. (I’ve experienced it personally.) And though Hoppe never suggested Francis was a “Nazi,” Fleming is himself capable of great heights of vitriolic hyperbole. In the ‘90s, the paleo half of the coalition had the upper hand in terms of readership and organization; the situation is now much reversed.

I won’t say anymore on this subject. Ad hominem attacks against people with whom one shares quite a bit in common are rarely a good idea, and I’ve profited greatly from reading Fleming’s articles and books over the years. The best course of action, I’ve discovered, is to keep a good distance.

With a mention by the New York Times's favorite conservative, Ross Douthat, one might surmise that "paleoconservatism" is undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Even Jeb Bush has picked up on the term, as, according to my sources, he recently joked at a New York State Republican convention, in between pronouncing pleasantries en español,

I don't know who the paleocons are, but I think they are the ones with pitchforks who want to take us back to an agrarian economy.

He's right about the pitchforks.

And though I've never suffered from technophobia, I'd much prefer an "agrarian economy" to the post-industrial, Latino service-economy wasteland that Jeb thinks is a sign of America's advancement.

Paleoconservatism -- a hastily assembled, rear-guard action against the neocon ascendancy in the conservative movement -- reached its zenith in the '92 meeting of the John Randolph Club, at which Tom Fleming, Murray Rothbard, and Sam Francis gave command performances. Murray famously announced that the insurgent movement wouldn't just "turn back the clock" -- but break it! With Pat Buchanan, the paleocons could even boast, quite correctly, that they had a presidential candidate of its own.

I've always avoided associating myself with the term, in part for ideological reasons, in part because the movement's time has clearly come and passed, and in part because those now associated with it have gone off in different directions. This said, the conservative wars of the '90s was an important moment in American political history -- and paleoconservatism was (and is) infinitely more interesting and culturally literate than what's on offer at NR, The Weekly Standard, FrumForum, and the rest.

Douthat seems to associate paleoconservatism with the political bloggings of Daniel Larison, which is unfortunate, since Larison is currently staking out a position of being "thoughtful" ... which, as far as I can tell, means publishing long, barely penetrable blog posts dedicated to hair-splitting with various Beltway wonks. Larison also brags of his lack of a coherent ideology, which means that he won't reveal to us what he actually thinks about, say, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which launched the recent "paleocon" dispute. One must surmise, however, that he's very, very "thoughtful" about the issue.

"Paleoconservatism" might be turning into a convenient straw man for the Establishment -- "Eww, look at those reactionary, racist paleos who don't like MLK and want to turn Americans into traditionalist farmers! But this also means that people like Douthat, Frum, and Jeb recognize it as a threat. Being a "paleocon" might, in its current manifestation, begin to represent something like "thinking dangerous, impossible thoughts." And for that, this new paleo-cussword is a hopeful development. Indeed, some of us might want to consider adopting it.