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What is paleoconservatism and how should it be understood? At first sight, it seems only to reproduce earlier, well-worn themes. Patrick Buchanan, leading spokesman widely seen as its, has adopted the slogan "America First" as part of a conscious attempt to evoke pre-war sentiments about keeping the United States out of "foreign wars." Paleoconservatism has also inherited strains drawn from the "paranoid style in American politics" that Richard Hofstadter identified three decades ago. It is marked by the hostility to the "east coast establishment" that structured different populist movements. There are echoes of Huey Long's attacks on the wealthy and Father Charles Coughlin's pleas on behalf of the local community against what he saw as the arrogance and self-interested indifference of metropolitan financial interests. Paleoconservatism also shares the sense of exclusion from the government apparatus and large corporations that informed "white ethnic" politics and movements such as McCarthyism. Buchanan not only regards Senator Joseph McCarthy as a political hero because of his anti-communism, but also because McCarthyism conveyed the hostility and resentment of those who remained outside WASP circles: "for four years he was daily kicking the living hell out of people most Americans concluded ought to have the living hell kicked out of them."
However, paleoconservatism should not be seen as a simple resurrection of these earlier themes. It fuses notions associated with the populist and isolationist traditions with other strains and concepts drawn from both the social sciences and different conservative traditions. They are reconfigured so as to form a theoretically developed and structured world view informed by a particular representation of American ethnicity, elite theory, and notions of republicanism derived from southern conservatism.
The Paleo Conception of Ethnicity
The paleoconservative conception of American ethnicity has five components. First, it is rooted in localism. Chronicles (originally Chronicle of Culture, published by the Rockford Institute) celebrates the different communities and sectional identities that were formed at the interface between European habits and attitudes-or folkways-and "America's vast quiltwork of physical environments." Some accounts, for example, point to the English regional traditions that held sway in parts of the United States. Quakers from the north midlands shaped the character of communities in the Delaware Valley. Others recall other European-American groupings such as the Cajuns of Louisiana....