Paleoconservative

Paleoconservative is a term that describes a academic or scholarly conservative who emphasizes religious heritage, national identity and sovereignty, opposition to illegal immigration, criticism of entitlement programs, the importance of demographics, and an anti-interventionist policy of Robert Taft.

Unlike most conservatives today, paleoconservatives are against the Iraq War. They are highly critical of the Bush administration and the mainstream conservative movement. Paleoconservatism vocally distinguishes itself in its opposition to neoconservatism.

Paul Gottfried was the first to use the term "paleoconservative." He writes in his entry to American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (p 651):

Paleoconservative becomes a conceptual and political counterpoint to neoconservative in The Conservative Movement by Thomas Fleming and Paul Gottfried (1988). Here the term no longer refers merely to conservative traditionalists of the 1950s and 1960s, e.g., Southern Agrarians, Catholic anticommunists associated with National Review, and Taft Republicans who rallied to the Cold War. Instead, the term is now applied to embattled conservatives who opposed the growing influence of anticommunist New Deal Democrats on the Reagan presidency and on the conservative movement on the 1980s.

The leading publications of the paleoconservatives includes The American Conservative and Chronicles (magazine). Perhaps the most well known paleoconservative is Patrick J. Buchanan. Other paleoconservatives include Peter Brimelow, Thomas Fleming, the late Samuel Francis, Peter Hitchens, William S. Lind, Scott McConnell, Charley Reese, Paul Craig Roberts, Steve Sailer, and Clyde Wilson. The term has also been applied to the three key intellectuals in post-war conservatism: Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet.