The Conservative Challenge to Globalization: Anglo-American Perspectives by Kiely Ray

Author:Kiely Ray [Ray, Kiely]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Conservatism & Liberalism, Political Science, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781788210973
Google: e_2KzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 49070799
Publisher: Agenda Publishing
Published: 2020-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Paleoconservatism and Trump

It is probably fair to say that paleoconservatism as an organized political movement does not exist, at least in the same way that neoconservatism does, and indeed Paul Gottfried (2017) has stressed that while he prefers Trump to the neoconservatives, he is still no enthusiastic supporter of Trump. While there are various journals that essentially hold a paleoconservative worldview, above all Chronicles and The American Conservative, and there are others such as Taki’s and American Renaissance that are more overtly white supremacist, none of these appear to have directly influenced Trump and those around him. On the other hand, there is also the direct link between Samuel Francis and Paul Gottfried to Patrick Buchanan, and Steven Bannon and Stephen Miller appear to have some knowledge of, and are influenced by, paleoconservative ideas. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, the paleoconservative William Lind met Donald Trump and gave him a copy of his co-written book The Next Conservative (Weyrich & Lind 2009). In this book, the authors rejected liberal wars of intervention, regretted growing trade and budget deficits under Bush II, decried deindustrialization, and called for the restoration of the primacy of Western, Judeo-Christian culture in the US (Weyrich & Lind 2007, 2009). They also called for a new conservative onslaught on the supposed Marxist influence in the culture wars, control over US borders and a revival of the Southern agrarian tradition5 (Weyrich & Lind 2007). However, the influence of this book on the Trump administration is unlikely to have been that great.

But more important is the fact that we can identify, paraphrasing Oakeshott, a paleoconservative disposition, which talks to the current Republican mood, and this is why we need to pay so much attention to paleoconservative ideas. Above all, paleoconservative hostility to free trade and immigration, suspicion of international commitments and liberal wars of intervention, the promotion of economic nationalism and protectionism and the return of American manufacturing jobs sounds remarkably like Donald Trump’s programme during his presidential campaign. Although there is a history of conflict between Buchanan and Trump, specifically over the Reform Party presidential candidacy in 2000 when Trump was far more socially liberal (Kornacki 2018), Buchanan (2016) himself argued in 2016 that Trump is “Middle America’s Messenger”. Trump (2017) argued at his inaugural speech that “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” In the summer of 2017, he promised that “I will bring jobs back and get wages up” (cited in Greenhouse 2017).

Before his election victory, the conservative National Review (2016) contended that “Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strongman overtones.” This is based on a narrow understanding of conservativism, which reduces it to a pragmatic acceptance of, and cautious adaptation to, the status quo. As Chapters 1 and 2 showed, this leaves aside those

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