The MAGA New Right

Paleoconservatism

Properties1
tags

6 min read

Paleoconservatism

The 1990s predecessor to the MAGA New Right; opposed Reagan-era fusionism from the nationalist, isolationist, and nativist right; associated with Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis; rebranded and succeeded by National Conservatism and the MAGA New Right

What It Is

Paleoconservatism emerged as a distinct movement at the end of the Cold War, when the collapse of the Soviet Union removed the main unifying rationale for the fusionist coalition — anticommunism. With no external communist threat to bind together social conservatives, free-marketeers, and hawks, the coalition’s internal tensions became more visible.

Paleoconservatives drew on the “Old Right” of the 1930s and 1940s — the nationalist, isolationist, protectionist strand of American conservatism that predated the Cold War consensus. They stood against:

  • Neoconservatism: hawkish foreign policy, democracy promotion, globalism
  • Free trade: economic nationalism, protectionism
  • Mass immigration: nativist, “blood and soil” identity politics
  • The Lincoln legacy: they “defended the Lost Cause of the South, despised Lincoln, and rejected the natural rights philosophy of the American founding” (Continetti)

Key Figures

Pat Buchanan (b. 1938): The most prominent paleoconservative, having worked for Nixon and Reagan before running for president several times in the 1990s. He embodied paleo politics: nativist (immigration as existential threat), isolationist, protectionist, culturally traditionalist. In 2008, published Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War — endorsing the 1938 Munich Agreement and minimizing Nazi war crimes. His 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower (chapter: “The End of White America”) prefigured the contemporary Great Replacement ideology. Fired from MSNBC in 2012 over the book. Krauthammer: Buchanan was “like a woolly mammoth frozen in Siberian ice, as a perfectly preserved specimen of 1930s isolationism and nativism.”

Sam Francis (1947–2005): The intellectual theorist of paleoconservatism, described as “the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time.” His essay “From Household to Nation” praised Buchanan for recognizing that “elites themselves are the real enemy” and for embracing “social and cultural” nationalism. For Francis, “the nation is fundamentally a social and cultural unit, not the creation of the state and its policies, but a continuing, organic body that transcends individuals and gives identity to itself through a common way of life and a common people.” His nationalism was white nationalism. Francis also wrote the famous essay characterizing the Conservative Movement as “Beautiful Losers” — arguing that conservatives had won political victories (Reagan, tax cuts, Cold War) while consistently losing the cultural battles they cared about most. The title was an indictment: the movement’s willingness to play by the rules was the cause of its cultural defeat.

M.E. Bradford (1934–1993): Literature professor at University of Dallas; the neo-Confederate intellectual. Bradford’s paleoconservatism was rooted in Southern traditionalism: defense of states’ rights, hostility to Lincoln, and opposition to the Declarationist constitutional project of Harry V. Jaffa. Reagan’s failed nomination of Bradford to head the NEH — blocked by neoconservatives in 1981 — marked the institutional defeat of this strand of paleoconservatism. See M.E. Bradford.

Paul Gottfried: Early paleoconservative theorist, also one of the first “alt-right” thinkers (closely allied with Richard Spencer). Argued Reaganism betrayed Goldwater’s truer conservatism. His 2008 critique of the conservative movement as having “made its peace with the New Deal” and his call for “a genuine oppositional force” presciently anticipated the arguments Michael Anton would make in The Flight 93 Election.

Relationship to the MAGA New Right

Paleoconservatism is the direct intellectual ancestor of the MAGA New Right. Julius Krein’s first Journal of American Greatness post explicitly took on the mantle of paleoconservatism while trying to disentangle it from its white nationalist elements — a move Field identifies as rationalization: the white nationalism is not peripheral but central.

The key paleocon positions — isolationism, protectionism, anti-immigration, anti-Lincoln — became the core positions of Trumpism. Pat Buchanan’s candidacies in 1992 and 1996 were, in retrospect, trial runs for Trump 2016.

The crucial difference: paleoconservatism in the 1990s was contained and marginalized by the Republican establishment. The MAGA New Right was not.

The Conservative-to-Counterrevolutionary Shift

Joshua Tait’s analysis (Conservatives or Counterrevolutionaries?) frames paleoconservatism as the crucial transition point in American conservative politics: from implicit counterrevolution (the New Deal was a revolution we must reverse) to explicit counterrevolution (we must actively fight for cultural restoration by any means necessary).

The trigger: Ronald Reagan did not stop the sexual revolution, the demographic transformation of America, or the advance of feminism. By the late 1980s, paleoconservatives recognized that electoral victories had not produced the cultural restoration they sought. Sam Francis’s “Beautiful Losers” argument was the logical conclusion: if you keep playing by liberal rules, you keep losing liberal culture wars.

Buchanan’s 1992 “culture war” speech was the explicit announcement of this conclusion. The conservative movement’s catastrophism — always present since National Review’s “total revolution” charge against the New Deal — had finally become explicit enough to demand explicit counterrevolution.

The Iberian Through-Line

Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025): paleoconservatism inherits the postwar Catholic NR circle’s Iberian-authoritarian admiration as one of its core continuities. Pat Buchanan was, in his youth, “a great admirer of Franco” (Getlin 1992). Sam Francis’s political-cultural nationalism is structurally a vernacular American version of the Catholic-civilizational politics Bozell’s Triumph argued for in the 1960s–70s. The wiki’s structural reading: contemporary postliberal Iberian admiration (Vermeule, Pappin, Charles Haywood, Josh Abbotoy) is the resurfacing of an admiration that ran continuously through paleoconservatism between the NR-Catholic-circle’s mid-century enthusiasm and the contemporary postliberal revival. The political-form imagination — Catholic-aligned, anti-decolonial, anti-democratic-egalitarian, hierarchically organic — is the through-line.

Cross-References

Graph View

Backlinks