PALEOMAIL: Responses to my field report from the America’s Future Foundation happy hour on “What the heck is a neocon?” which turned out much closer to “What the heck is a paleocon?” Reader comments are in bold, I’m in plain text.

From Ed Ahlsen-Girard: I LOVED this post. I used to subscribe to Chronicles in the late 80s early 90s, but dropped it as it got not just weirder but hostile to my family weirder (I’m white with adopted black children). I’m glad they’re there, sort of, but they got pretty ‘blood and soil’ and that was too much for me.

The number of people who assume that Ramesh Ponnuru was born in south Asia is amusingly high. And truly hilarious in this context, given a Chronicles article which refers to an incident at the end of the Civil War in which a Union general, a German immigrant with a thick accent, started cheerfully lecturing a surrendered Confederate general that now he could start learning to be a real American. The Confederate general’s family came to Virginia in the early 1600s.

From Tom Harmon: Ack! Equation of paleoconservativsm with Buchanan (who is, indeed, creepy and decrepit) is unfair. Buchanan is a sort of paleocon, but, as far as I can tell, has very weird ideas on race, immigration, and foreign policy.

The much more itneresting differences b/t paleos and neos, I think lie

in the realms of religion and economics. To be very brief and therefore not to do practically any justice at all to the differences, neocons seem to have an almost dogmatic trust in the free market, whereas paleos tend toward Cheterbellocianism (if not all paleos are quite so extreme as to be

distributists, they at least lean that way).

Also, neocons seem to have a more instrumental view of religion. Religion is good because it promotes virtue and leads to ordered societies, not necessarily because religion is true. Also, neos seem to have an idea that religion should more or less stay private when talking about how to form society. Sure, the neocons like that religion forms people’s moral consciousness, and therefore charges people up to fight against, say, abortion, but as as far as conforming society and government to the Church, that’s no good in the minds of the neos (see Novak, Weigel, Kristol, Decter, John COurtney Murray, etc.). The paleos think that religionists should work to make society and the state to look more

like the kingdom. So, basically, neos are implicit secularizers and paleos want religion to inform every aspect of society. Neos are hunky-dory with an enlightenment, liberal, secular state. Paleos are decidedly not. For a fantastic discussion of this, see David Schindler’s Heart of the Church, Center of the World.

Actually, I think Schindler has the best discussion of what neoconservatism is and why it is deeply problematic, from a Catholic perspective.

Anyway, my twelve cents.

Me: Couple superbrief thoughts: 1) One of the reasons I was basically on Ramesh Ponnuru’s side in this whole kerfuffle was that he emphasized that there’s a thing that’s not a neocon, not a paleocon, not even a libertarian–just, you know, a conservative. So my post wasn’t intended as a defense of “neoconservatism”–whichever of the many, many definitions that word has got today.

2) I always do wonder, though, what people are referring to when they speak of dogmatic faith in the free market. Which market restraints are being advocated… which “neocons” are we discussing here… that sort of thing. Give me specifics and I’ll tell you what I think of them; “the free market” is one of those terms (like “conservative”) with an immense amount of wiggle room.

3) Relatedly, can’t say I rightly understand how distributism, agrarianism, and similar ventures are meant to happen without the Heavy Hand of the State enforcing small-scale property ownership. For so much more, see my posts on Wendell Berry. I have yet to encounter a plausible “how we get from here to there” map to distributism or agrarianism that didn’t eventually turn into socialism. Admittedly, though, this isn’t something I’ve read much about.

4) Not sure what “conforming society and government to the Church” and “make society and the state look more like the kingdom” entail. Also sketched on overly-swift assimilation of “society” to “state.” But since I don’t really know what the two alternative visions here are, I’ll keep my yap shut, except to say that if this is about the Establishment Clause I will sign on in favor of the Constitutional order. If it’s about something else, what is it?

And finally, from James P. Gelfand: I had wanted to go to that discussion, but was unable to attend — Ryan Balis pointed me to your synopsis and I had a couple questions. What is a “vichy con”, and is it a phrase I should have heard before? Did anyone argue that there were no such things as neo-conservatives? Why did the discussion center on paleo-cons, is it now assumed that all conservatives are either neo or paleo, thus effectively dividing the movement?

I really didn’t think many conservatives bought into that — I thought it

was more just liberals trying to marginalize and vilify conservatives that want to intervene in the middle east and keep rogue leaders in other

places from selling WMD’s to terrorists. Thanks for posting the summary though, at least now I didn’t totally miss out.

Me again: 1) “Vichy cons”–sorry I was unclear about this–was John Zmirak’s term for non-paleocons, whom he charged with selling out to the Establishment. No, there’s no reason you should know this term.

2) I seem to recall, although it’s been a while now, that Ponnuru argued that the definition of “neoconservative” shifts so much from speaker to speaker that it’s difficult to pin down what people actually mean when they say it.

3) As I said above, Ponnuru also argued strenuously that the paleo/neo split does not exhaust the possibilities of conservatism. I think the discussion panned out that way largely due to the speaker list, really, rather than reflecting a major current in contemporary inside-conservatism discourse.