Do you get all your epithets from the N.Y. Times (10/10/2004 ny times review):
[This long history of residing on the fringe ended suddenly with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In 1992, Buchanan ran a surprisingly strong campaign in the Republican presidential primaries on an explicitly ‘’anti-imperialist’’ platform — a platform that he further developed in his revisionist history, ‘’A Republic, Not an Empire.’’ ‘’When we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers,’’ he wrote in one of his newspaper columns. Even if his party ultimately rejected him, it co-opted much of his program, and in 1995, a year after Republicans ascended to the majority in the House of Representatives, 190 of them voted to deny funds for American troops stationed in Bosnia. By the end of the decade, condemnations of ‘’foreign policy as social work’’ and ‘’nation building’’ had become standard in conservative boilerplate.
Buchananite foreign policy has an intellectual wing, paleoconservatism. Long before French protesters and liberal bloggers had even heard of the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in mortal combat with them. Paleocons fought neocons over whom Ronald Reagan should appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, angrily denouncing them as closet liberals — or worse, crypto-Trotskyists. Even their self-selected name, paleocon, suggests disdain for the neocons and their muscular interventionism.
Clustered around journals like Chronicles and Southern Partisan, the paleocon ranks included the syndicated columnist Sam Francis and the political theorist Paul Gottfried. Their writings have been anthologized in ‘’The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right,’’ edited by Joseph Scotchie. The paleocons explicitly hark back to Garrett, Nock and the Remnant, what they lovingly call the ‘’Old Right.’’ Like their mentor, Russell Kirk, the paleocons venerate traditional society, celebrating hierarchy, patriarchy and even the virtues of the antebellum South. They bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism. A foreign policy naturally follows from these domestic views. The dismal state of American civilization so depresses them that they see no point in exporting its values abroad. Kirk announced in a 1990 lecture to the Heritage Foundation that America’s contribution to the world will be ‘’cheapness — the cheapest music, the cheapest comic books and the cheapest morality that can be provided.’’
Counterattacking, the neocons often accused the paleocons of anti-Semitism. David Frum, for instance, built this case in his 1994 book, ‘’Dead Right.’’ Indeed, this is a charge that has dogged isolationists — from Nock to Charles Lindbergh (who is elected president in Philip Roth’s new counterfactual novel, ‘’The Plot Against America’’) to Buchanan. With their pleas for ‘’America first’’ and their rejection of cosmopolitan foreign policy, they have occasionally vilified the oldest symbol of cosmopolitanism — the Jew.]