Paleoconservatism offers young right-wingers an intellectual framework that is both traditional and radical, conservative and subversive.
Tag: conservatism
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Do Conservatives Want Robed Philosopher Kings?
Conventional thinking on the right today embraces the Warren Court’s radical shift toward judicial supremacy, forgetting the arguments advanced by conservatives of that era as well as by the founders.
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What Americans Can Learn From China’s Dating Hellscape
China’s dystopia stems from its culture of crude utilitarianism and materialism.
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The Very Big Lie About Sam Francis and ‘Chronicles’
Recent attempts to smear Sam Francis and, with him, this magazine with the views of people like David Duke are just more tired myth perpetuation by the left to discredit serious American populism.
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What We Are Reading: February 2026
Short reviews of 'The Wide, Wide Sea' by Hampton Sides, and 'A Program for Conservatives' by Russell Kirk.
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Our Boy Bill
Sam Tanenhaus's mammoth biography of Bill Buckley reveals new stories, but it doesn't locate the core of the man's conservatism or where he wanted the movement to go.
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King, James, and Amos
When the New York Post accused Letitia James of plagiarizing Martin Luther King Jr., the paper exposed its own serial ignorance.
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Remembering Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton championed the idea that conservatism in the Anglosphere is based on the values and institutions embodied by the English "gentleman": fair play, honesty, and mutual trust.
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How Trump Changed Conservatism
Trump understood something the conservative movement didn’t: Ideas are worthless if you no longer live in a world where they can be realized.
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Conservatism Amid the Signal Flood
Every medium and every change in technology generates new fears about the same old problem—the human tendency to ideological and political theater born of our inevitable and incomplete understanding.
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The Gipper’s Stool
The legs of Reagan's stool were held together by weak political glue that inevitably gave way under strong philosophical tensions.
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Poland at the Crossroads Between America and Brussels
Polish voters face a strategic and civilizational decision about their country’s future.
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Is Transgenderism Anti-Gay?
And even if it is, why should the right be involved in the operation of discrediting it on those grounds?
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Remembering Lee Edwards: Chronicler of Conservatism
Lee Edwards was present at the creation of the conservative movement.
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Fighting Communism After the Cold War
Twenty-first-century Communism in this country is a way to feel clever about holding stupid and morally bankrupt views.
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James Lindsay Is Wrong About Wokeness
Lindsay's attempted hoax on a Christian magazine falls flat because of his own inadequate understanding of the intellectual history he meant to caricature.
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The Battles Ahead and Why We Fight
The work of restoring the American republic is only just beginning with the coming inauguration of Donald Trump.
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American Revanchism
It is well past time for Americans on the right to stop calling their movement conservative. Before we can have anything to conserve, we must first take it back.
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Limits and Hope: Against the Anti-Tragedy Agenda of the Left
Once the right allowed the left to frame politics as the avoidance of tragedy, they lost the game. We’d do well to reconsider what Christopher Lasch called the “limits and hope” of politics.
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An Inept Takedown of William F. Buckley
PBS’s “Incomparable Mr. Buckley” offers a left-wing caricature of a complex man and the conservative way of life he advocated.
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Understanding the Shifting Realities of the Right
Historical circumstances make realignments inescapable and attempts to define “conservatism” apart from an understanding of these shifts results in wild mischaracterizations.
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Why I’m Not Cheering for AIPAC
It’s not the job of American conservatives to be loudly endorsing the taking down of American politicians who are critical of Israel.
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Against Political Clichés
Being human is something far more complex and beautiful than the habit of ideological repetition can show us. We miss that if we submit to the current morphing of reality in the service of clichés that condemn us to an inanimate fake life.
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A Conservative Self-Critique
The Up From Conservatism anthology contains some insightful, biting critiques of the conservative establishment, but its contributors are part of an elite class themselves, with their own sacred cows and taboos.
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Three Conceptions of Conservatism
Editor-in-chief Paul Gottfried offers an examination of three major streams of conservative thought, based on aristocratic tradition, universal principles, and the pragmatic pursuit of power.
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Conservatism After Defeat
Edmund Burke’s statement of government as a compromise and a sharing of power is no longer relevant today. The world has been remade since Burke's warnings, unfortunately.
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A Flawed Primer on ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’
The book Partisans is a product of contemporary political discourse—made up of cut-and-paste, second- and third-hand source-filled rants—that fails to pass for serious scholarship.
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Don’t Rock the Boat, I’m Counting My Money
D.C. swamp creatures who attack paleocons and other conservatives outside of the mainstream seem unable to comprehend that recovering our liberty demands overturning, not defending, our ruling oligarchy.
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The Hitler of Legend
Contrary to the standard view of historians, Hitler was not a conservative with pre-World War I aristocratic values, but a radical revolutionary who upended the traditional German power structure.
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The Great Conservative Death Wish
The unremitting success of the left’s march through Western institutions hardly suggests that liberals suffer from a death wish; on the contrary, it is conservatism that appears to be consuming itself.
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Conservative Gatekeeping
Conservatism Inc. has a long history of purging undesirables who challenge its party lines, but those in charge of the movement typically hide this practice.
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Books in Brief: December 2022
Short reviews of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, and The Black Boom, by Jason Riley.
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Remembering Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott warned that rationalism in politics leads to rigid, rule-bound governance, and to the imposition of the state's enterprise over and against the free association of individuals.
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The Principled Fight
Those on the right would do well to look to Edmund Burke as a common example in discerning the principles at stake in our present struggle, as well as the character and conduct needed to win.
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Why Russia and China Are More Conservative Than the West
Despite their Communist past and present, Russia and China are demonstrably more conservative in many ways than present-day, self-hating America.
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The Failure of Liberalism and the Conservative Crisis of Faith
The crisis of conservatism stems from the failure of classical liberalism and the resultant politicization of the economy. Big State meets Big Capital to create our present-day arrangement: woke capitalism.