Paleoconservatism

Paleoconservatism combines traditionalist cultural commitments with non-interventionism abroad, restriction of immigration, and deep scepticism of global markets and supranational institutions. The 'paleo' (old) prefix marks its claim to be the original American right, against the 'neo' newcomers.

It crystallized in the 1980s and 90s in explicit opposition to neoconservatism. It rejects democracy promotion by force as a utopian project of exactly the kind conservatism exists to resist, treats free trade and open borders as solvents of the communities it wants to conserve, and prizes national sovereignty, local attachment, and inherited culture over any universal creed.

Its public face was Patrick Buchanan's insurgent presidential campaigns of 1992 and 1996, with their slogan of 'America First' and warnings of a coming culture war — a programme long marginal within the Republican coalition that anticipated much of the populist-nationalist turn that reshaped the American and European right after 2015.

Its emphasis on a particular inherited people, place, and religion makes it the most consistently particularist of the Anglo-American conservative currents, and the most willing to accept tariffs and economic intervention in defence of cultural and demographic continuity rather than market efficiency.

Critics on the mainstream right call its protectionism and isolationism economically naive and its immigration politics a euphemism for ethnic anxiety; critics on the left see in its 'heritage' talk a defence of a racial and religious order under the language of place and tradition.

It is often conflated with generic conservatism, but it is defined as much by its enemies inside the right — the free-marketeers and the interventionists — as by the left, which is why two entries on this map can sit near each other yet regard themselves as opposites.