Ron Paul and the End of Paleoconservatism

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 1:14 PM on February 26, 2008.

Pat Buchanan on the need to impeach Bush over immigration policy:

Author Pat Buchanan says President Bush should be impeached for failing to stop the invasion of illegal aliens across the U.S. border with Mexico.

"I think he's committed an impeachable offense in refusing to enforce the immigration laws and in failing to uphold the Constitution by defending the states against this invasion," Buchanan told radio talk-show host Curt Smith this weekend on National Public Radio stations in upstate New York.

"When you have 6 million people apprehended on the border and several million got in on your watch ? and you have the ability to stop it ? I think you're derelict in your duty," he said. "And if the president says 'I can't do it,' you need a new president who will do it."

"This is not Ellis Island," said Buchanan. "This is an invasion."

John McCain on our national imperative to spread Americanism worldwide, by force if necessary:

Theodore Roosevelt is one of my greatest political heroes. The "strenuous life" was T.R.'s definition of Americanism, a celebration of America's pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. "We cannot sit huddled within our borders," he warned, "and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond."(...)

And for Roosevelt that common destiny surpassed material gain and self-interest. Our freedom and our industry must aspire to more than acquisition and luxury. We must live out the true meaning of freedom, and accept "that we have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither."

Some critics, in his day and ours, saw in Roosevelt's patriotism only flag-waving chauvinism, not all that dissimilar to Old World ancestral allegiances that incited one people to subjugate another and plunged whole continents into war. But they did not see the universality of the ideals that formed his creed.

The last major conservative split took place in the early 1990's, when Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were able to exploit conservative dissatisfaction with Bush Sr. over trade, immigration, the first Iraq war, and multilateral cooperation abroad. A McCain nomination has the potential re-open this exact same rift. It is ultimately a split between neoconservative imperialism and paleoconservative American exceptionalism. While McCain is a strong believer in the inherent superiority of American civilization, he draws many of the same internationalist conclusions from that belief that we have seen from the Bushes: spread American influence through foreign wars, free trade, religious evangelizing, and immigration policies that are relatively open when compared to those favored by other conservatives. This draws the ire of paleocons like Buchanan who are mainly interested in preserving what they see as the exceptionalism of American cultural identity through closed borders, closed trade, and a general disdain for involvement overseas.

With McCain as the nominee, a conservative split of this nature is almost inevitable. Like Bush, Iraq and immigration are two of the few areas where he simply refuses to pander to certain sections of his base. What is less inevitable is that this split will blow up into a full-scale primary and third party challenge ala 1992. In fact, that appears extremely unlikely, given what appears to be a remarkable decline in the political influence of paleoconservatives.

Ron Paul carried the paleoconservative banner for Republicans in 2008, and despite his tens of millions of dollars he never once reached double-digits outside of a caucus. Buchannan, by contrast, regularly scored over 20% of the vote in 1992 and 1996 primaries. For all the talk of Ron Paul's activists as a rising force in the Republican Party or conservative politics, the influence of his supporters is actually in severe decline. Now, Republican candidates are winning primaries as a result of their internationalist (if imperialist) approach, while anti-immigration Republicans are getting crushed. The paleocons that led to the massive conservative split of 1992 have seen their coalition reduced to a rump of noisy, active, and increasingly alienated supporters. Even Bush, who bows to his base on just about everything, won't bow to paleoconservatives on issues like immigration.

The lack of influence of the paleoconservatives also arose in yesterday's flap over the picture of Obama in traditional Kenyan attire. The course of that argument was not about Obama wearing the attire, something that might offend American exceptionalists like Buchanan, but rather about whether the Clinton campaign was being sleazy in attacking Obama over wearing the garb. For the record, I don't think the Clinton campaign was behind the attack, and that Drudge just made that up whole cloth, so to speak. Anyway, the point is that when an attack like that itself becomes offensive, then paleocons have become utterly irrelevant in American politics. Consider further that while Ron Paul's crowds seem impressive, on Saturday his supporters held a GOTV rally in Austin that attracted 4,000 people, of whom only 54 actually voted. It is in this way that his campaign can be viewed as the last, desperate convulsion of a once powerful force in American politics that seems to be heading in the direction of the Dodo. That such a platform can't even succeed during a time when unpopular free trade, unpopular immigration, and an unpopular foreign war are all partially blamed for a poor economy is particularly telling.

Tagged as: bush, mccain, republican party, conservatives, trade, immigration, buchanan, paul

Chris Bowers was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007. Some of his projects have included the creation of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the first scientifically random poll of progressive netroots activists, the Use It Or Lose It campaign, the nation's most accurate forecast of Democratic house pickups in 2006, and the 2006 Googlebomb the Elections campaign.