Paleoconservatism

Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleocon) is a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government and civil society, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity.

paleoconservatives press for restrictions on immigration, a rollback of multicultural programmes, the decentralization of the federal policy, the restoration of controls upon free trade, a greater emphasis upon economic nationalism and isolationism in the conduct of American foreign policy, and a generally revanchist outlook upon a social order in need of recovering old lines of distinction and in particular the assignment of roles in accordance with traditional categories of gender, ethnicity, and race.

Practitioners of this philosophy identify themselves as the legitimate heirs to the American conservative tradition.

Pat Buchanan was strongly influenced by the Rockford Institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and helped create another paleocon publication, The American Conservative. Paleoconservativism's concerns overlap those of the Old Right that opposed the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as American social conservatism of the late 20th century expressed, for example, in the book Single Issues by Joseph Sobran. Elizabethtown College professor Paul Gottfried is credited with coining the term in the 1980s. He says the term originally referred to various Americans, such as conservative and traditionalist Catholics and agrarian Southerners, who turned to anti-communism during the Cold War.