America first: paleoconservatism and the ideological struggle for the American right

ABSTRACT

This article provides an engagement with American paleoconservatism at the level of its intellectual foundations. Although relatively unknown in the mainstream media, this anti-establishment strain of radical conservatism has provided intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces challenging the prevailing liberal order nationally and internationally, positions that have at different times resonated with political movements including the Tea Party, the Alt-Right and Trumpism. The analysis begins with an exposition of the paleoconservative critique of contemporary liberal democracy and global liberal governance, in the context of the transformation of the American right and the ideological contest with neoconservatism since the early 1980s. We then move on to examine the neo-nationalist agenda championed by paleoconservative intellectuals in response to the perceived consequences of multiculturalism, neoliberal globalization and internationalist foreign policies, revealing an intellectual project far more substantive, complex and encompassing than its frequent reduction to ‘populism’ allows. For what is at stake in this politics is not only the democratic gains of the twentieth century, but also the political terrain upon which our dominant conceptions of the political are being re-amalgamated and represented into new struggles over the meaning and future of human co-existence under conditions of globalization.

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