The Pretenders Among Us: A Rebuttal to the Paleoconservative Myth
A curious faction within the populists movement masquerading as a “conservative” movement today resurrects an old ghost—paleoconservatism—but under a new guise. Though they’ve done away with the name for the most part, the ideology is unmistakably familiar, festering within certain xenophobic and isolationist veins of the MAGA movement, particularly within the likes of the America First and Groyper types. This brand of pseudo-conservatism, marinated in antisemitism and racial paranoia, clings to a vision of “America First” that bears no resemblance to any legitimate conservatism and has everything to do with ideological escapism.
They are a curious breed, draped in the familiar rhetoric of nationalism, yet thoroughly ignorant of America’s place in the world—a world whose liberties and stability owe much to the very country they believe can barricade itself from global responsibilities. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll label this collective ideology under the term “paleoconservatism”—anachronistic? Maybe, but fitting for a worldview that seems drawn more from the yellowed, tattered pages of reactionary nationalism than from any meaningful thought.
These modern paleoconservatives, though quick to disavow the term, share the hallmarks of its original strain: a romanticization of an industrial and agrarian utopia that, I assure you, is about as real as their successes with women. This faction envisions a revival of low-skill, low-wage jobs as if they could somehow rewind the clock to a time when America was, in their view, both homogeneous and isolated. Yet this fantasy is as unsustainable as it is misguided—automation would sweep away their cherished vision before they could so much as distill the first drop of nostalgia.
Theirs is not conservatism but an unfortunate populist delusion, cloaked in patriotic slogans and yet wholly divorced from the rigor, responsibility, and realism that defines any true conservative philosophy.
These are the heirs to the isolationist sentiments of Pat Buchanan—a movement long thought, with good reason, to have faded into irrelevance. Yet here they are again, resurrecting the same tired bromides about non-interventionism, ignoring the inescapable fact that America’s role in the world, forged through decades of Cold War strategy and Western leadership, cannot be simply abandoned without catastrophic consequences for the free world.