One of the strangest allegations leveled against Donald Trump by his Republican critics is that he's not a conservative — or even, in the most extreme version of this critique, that he's actually a liberal.

"People can support Donald Trump, but they cannot support him on conservative grounds," former George W. Bush aide Peter Wehner writes at Commentary. "The case for constitutional limited government is the case against Donald Trump," declares Federalist founder Ben Domenech. "Instead of converting voters to conservatism, Trump is succeeding at converting conservatives to statism on everything from health care and entitlements to trade," complained National Review's Jonah Goldberg.

Insofar as these commentators are criticizing the recency of Trump's conservative convictions, well, fair enough. In an earlier life he was indeed a big fan of universal health care, wealth taxation, and legal abortion — and if his general election pivoting on taxes and the minimum wage is any indication, conservative fears that he would return to his more liberal roots in the general election may yet be vindicated.

But the ideological vision Trump put forward during the Republican primary campaign was deeply conservative, and, more specifically, deeply paleoconservative. The paleoconservatives were a major voice in the Republican Party for many years, with Pat Buchanan as their most recent leader, and pushed a line that is very reminiscent of Trumpism.

They adhere to the normal conservative triad of nationalism, free markets, and moral traditionalism, but they put greater weight on the nationalist leg of the stool — leading to a more strident form of anti-immigrant politics that often veers into racism, an isolationist foreign policy rather than a hawkish or dovish one, and a deep skepticism of economic globalization that puts them at odds with an important element of the business agenda.

Trump is an odd standard-bearer for paleocons, many of whom are conservative Catholics and whose passionate social conservatism doesn't jibe well with Trump's philandering. His foreign policy ideas are also more interventionist than those of most paleocons. But the ideas that have made him such a controversial candidate aren't ones he got from liberals. They have a serious conservative pedigree.

A brief history of paleoconservatism

The term "paleoconservatism" is a retronym coined in the 1980s to characterize a brand of conservatism that was by then going extinct, a brand exemplified by Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and legendary isolationist who lost the 1952 Republican nomination to Dwight Eisenhower. In its day it was often referred to as the "Old Right."

There was a time when these positions were normal for the Republican party. Leaders like William McKinley supported tariffs as a way of supporting domestic industries and raising revenue outside of an income tax. Smoot and Hawley, of the infamous Great Depression tariff, were both Republicans. Republican isolationists prevented the US from participating in the League of Nations, led a largely non-interventionist foreign policy in the '20s, and were skeptical of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine in the early years of the Cold War.

But starting in the first decade of the 1900s and continuing gradually through the '50s, this balance began to be upset, especially on trade but also on issues of war and peace. Progressives within the Republican Party began to challenge support for trade protection and argue for a more hawkish approach to foreign affairs. The increasing interest of American business in trade abroad made the anti-internationalism of the Old Right increasingly unviable in the party of capital.

The two defining moments that led to paleocon decline were Taft's defeat and the suppressing of the John Birch Society by William F. Buckley and National Review in the early 1960s. The Birch Society differed strongly from the most isolationist of paleocons on foreign affairs; it was named after an American missionary killed by Chinese communists in 1945, whom the group claimed as the first casualty of the Cold War.

The organization advocated an aggressive, paranoid approach to the Soviet Union. But on other issues they were right in sync: extremely anti-immigration, hostile to foreign trade, supportive of limited government (except where trade, immigration, and anti-communism are concerned).

Buckley, along with Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and others, issued a series of attacks on the society, which were successful in marginalizing it, and establishing Buckley and National Review's brand of conservatism as the ideology's public face in America. "The attack established them as the 'responsible Right,'" according to Buckley biographer John Judis, "and moved them out of the crackpot far Right and toward the great center of American politics." It was a key victory for the New Right, and a key loss for the Old Right.

The losses kept coming. In the 1980s, the rise of neoconservatism both threatened the anti-internationalist, America-first mentality of the paleocons and enraged them due to the prominence of Jewish writers in the neoconservative movement. While not everyone in the paleoconservative movement was an anti-Semite, it certainly had an anti-Semitism problem, which its attacks on the neocons revealed frequently.

From the Sobran purge to Pat Buchanan

The saga of Joseph Sobran is a case in point. A longtime columnist at National Review, he was fired by William F. Buckley in 1993 following years of open clashes about his attitude toward Israel and Jewish people in general. In 1991, Buckley had dedicated an entire issue of the magazine to a 40,000-word essay he wrote, "In Search of Anti-Semitism," in which he condemned Buchanan (then challenging President George H.W. Bush in the GOP primaries) and his employee Sobran for anti-Jewish prejudice.

Buckley had a point. Sobran really was a world-class anti-Semite, writing in one National Review column, "If Christians were sometimes hostile to Jews, that worked two ways. Some rabbinical authorities held that it was permissible to cheat and even kill Gentiles."

After leaving NR, Sobran's writing, in the words of fellow paleocon and American Conservative editor Scott McConnell, "deteriorated into the indefensible." He started speaking at conferences organized by famed Holocaust denier David Irving and the denial group Institute for Historical Review, asking at the latter, "Why on earth is it 'anti-Jewish' to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination?"

While Sobran was purged, Buchanan continued his rise. His ability to distinguish himself from the non-paleoconservatives was enhanced by the end of the Cold War. Many paleocons made an exception to their isolationism for the unique evil of the Soviet Union. With that boogeyman gone, they retreated to a stricter non-interventionism. They nearly universally opposed the war in Iraq and war on terror more broadly, and were deeply skeptical of Bill Clinton's humanitarian interventions in the Balkans.

The '90s anti-immigrant panic, and the era's high-profile trade deals, made Buchanan and the paleocons' views on those issues appealing to base Republicans tired of pro-trade, pro-migration GOPers. Mainstream conservatives attacked Buchanan as an anti-Semite, which he is; in 1990 he infamously insisted that 850,000 Jews couldn't have died at Treblinka from diesel fumes. But it wasn't enough to keep him from winning the 1996 New Hampshire primary and emerging as Bob Dole's most serious opposition that year.

After Buchanan's loss then, and turn to the Reform Party in 2000, the paleocon movement descended into irrelevance — and, worse, more open bigotry than ever before. John Derbyshire, perhaps the last real paleocon left at National Review, was canned in 2012 after writing a piece addressed to children full of advice like, "Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally," "Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods," and, "If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date."

Since then, Derbyshire has mostly been writing at VDARE, an anti-immigration white nationalist site named after Virginia Dare, the first white Christian born in British North America. The article that got him fired wasn't actually posted at National Review but at Taki's Magazine, an outlet run by millionaire paleocon Taki Theodoracopulos that was formerly edited by outspoken white supremacist Richard B. Spencer and has run articles by Theodoracopulos in support of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.

This has been the trend for paleoconservative writing in the past decade or two. It's largely turned from mainstream conservative outfits to openly racist venues like VDARE, Taki's, American Renaissance, and the Occidental Observer. Admirably, the American Conservative has held the line and resisted crossing over into open white nationalism, but they're basically alone in that.

Paleocons love Trump



Trump fits into this tradition quite well. He's less stridently anti–welfare state, and less socially conservative than most paleoconservatives. But he is a great exemplar of the movement's core belief: America should come first, and trade and migration from abroad are direct threats to its way of life.

And while his foreign policy worldview is not really isolationist, it's definitely obsessed with putting "America First," a term he actually used in his major foreign policy address in April, and which has a long pedigree in paleocon circles dating back to World War II. He wants to defeat ISIS, but he also wants to steal Iraq's oil for America; pure paleocons would object to embroiling America in foreign matters like that, but the nationalism driving the position is really different from the ideological pro-democracy agenda of the neoconservatives.

"We are getting out of the nation-building business, and instead focusing on creating stability in the world," he declares. "Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water’s edge." That's pure paleocon.

Don't ask me, though. Ask them. In March, Buchanan declared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show that Trump could create "a different, new, exciting, robust party." A later Buchanan column asw even more effusive:

Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America. The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back. Donald Trump’s triumphant march to the nomination in Cleveland, virtually assured by his five-state sweep Tuesday, confirms it, as does his foreign policy address of Wednesday. Two minutes into his speech before the Center for the National Interest, Trump declared that the "major and overriding theme" of his administration will be — "America first." Right down the smokestack! …Whether the issue is trade, immigration or foreign policy, says Trump, "we are putting the American people first again." U.S. policy will be dictated by U.S. national interests.

The fact that Trump attacked Buchanan in 2000, when both were seeking the Reform Party presidential nomination, for only appealing to the "wacko vote" does not seem to have soured Buchanan on him at all.

"I would not say that Donald Trump is a paleoconservative. … I don’t think [Trump’s] a social conservative," he elaborated in an interview with the Daily Caller. But he added, "I was just astonished to see him raise the precise issues on which we ran in the 1990s. … Donald Trump has raised three issues of real concern to paleoconservatives and traditional conservatives like myself."

It's not just Buchanan, either. Derbyshire has said that Trump is "doing the Lord's work shaking up the GOP side of the 2016 campaign," and in another column volunteered his services as a speechwriter. Virgil Goode, a former Congress member who was the paleocon Constitution Party's 2012 nominee, has endorsed Trump as the only candidate serious about immigration. Taki has featured reams of pro-Trump coverage, like this piece praising his economic nationalism.

Trump is an imperfect paleocon. He's unrefined, a recent convert, and not as socially conservative as they may like. But on the important stuff, the term fits him better than any other.

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