don•ny•brook: \’dä-nee-brük\ noun:

1. free-for-all, brawl
2. a usually public quarrel or dispute

What happens when you mix some paleoconservatives with a couple neoconservatives, throw in a few somewhere-in-betweens, perhaps a Libertarian and shake? We’re not sure, but in the spirit of experimentation, that’s precisely what we’ve done. Let’s see what happens…

FAIR WARNING: IF YOU POST A COMMENT, WE MIGHT (PROBABLY WILL) ARGUE WITH YOU!

The Contributors

The Paleoconservative Camp:

The Superfluous Man, known to his co-bloggers simply as SM, was raised by a pack of feral chihuahuas in the New York City area. A self-styled yet stalwart paleolibertarian who has been around the competitive eating circuit for years, SM’s main interests include politics, culture, ethics, and fried foods. An avid sports fan, SM closely follows politicians’ flip-flopping their support of professional sports teams based on constituency. When not blogging or actually earning a living, he enjoys watching television shows that serve to undermine social mores, including but not limited to Cheaters, The Maury Show, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia..

Mike
Willmoore

The Neoconservative Camp:

awb
Bill

Wandering Around Aimlessly Somewhere in Between the Camps:

Karl (He calls himself a Traditionalist, but we suspect that’s just because he won’t commit to one camp or another. Judge for yourself.) Karl came to age during the Reagan Revolution (born 1970 – Karl, not Reagan). Unfortunately, for him his first opportunity to vote was in 1988 when George H.W. Bush was running for president. Thinking that this would result in more of the same, he cast his vote along those lines. Unfortunately, as we all know, it was notoriously hard to read President Bush’ lips and Karl quickly became disillusioned. For several election cycles Karl was enamored with Patrick J. Buchanan and voted for him repeatedly to no avail. He now feels no allegiance to any particular party, but wishes there were another Reagan. Where he once leaned Paleoconservitive because he thought it more accurately reflected the policies of Ronald Reagan, he now finds himself more and more alarmed with some of the positions taken on the Paleo Right and is seriously reconsidering aligning himself with that camp.

A Definition of Paleoconservatism:

Paleoconservatism is a diverse array of political and social beliefs which, because of the universal tendency among humans to categorize things, become a facile handle to grasp. Paleos are traditionalists. This means that, rather than “conserving” the policies (and practical failures) of the era in which they find themselves, paleos wish to function in an atmosphere unrarified by merely rationalistic abstracts and ideals but rather rich in the nutritive oxygen of living wisdom wrought through experience, received from authoritative sources, and congruent with reality. This may often be vocalized by calls for political engagement and activity, e.g., the reform of a given political party, the start of a new political movement or party, etc. It may, as often as not (if not more), take the form of advocacy of disengaging from a perceived hegemony of falsely “antithetical” factions in the polis.

Often labelled “reactionaries,” the epithet is remarkably appropriate. The party of counterrevolution in France saw the best way to eliminate the obscene and antichristian Jacobin excesses as the restoration of the monarchy. The obvious resentment of the so-called Enlightenment and love of Church and traditional societal constraints, mores, and customs was in fact successful in the restoration of the Bourbons and later in the Congress of Vienna. The lumping together of Count Metternich with the clerical philosophers de Maistre and Chateaubriand shows how even then significant diversity of opinion and strategies were able to be thrown together as an ad hoc pejorative by the revolutionaries and their “conservative” heirs. This, rather profoundly, harkens back to the old saw that yesterday’s revolutionary (literally) is today’s conservative.

Paleos are also subsidiarists and, thus, federalists. Subsidiarity is the principle that the smallest, most immediate entity which has competence should be the one to which deference should be given and to whom one ought to turn for solutions. Humans are not merely “individuals,” they are necessarily social creatures. Degradation of the universal and empirically obvious definition of family as the basic institution of society, region, and nation is anathema to paleos. Almost all paleos see the family as a divinely established mirror of the revealed relational and familial aspects of the Triune Deity.

This rejection of “individualism” brings about conflict with libertarians, although less so with the libertarians who describe themselves as paleolibertarian. Often, paleoconservatives advocate the kind of “social market economics” most astutely espoused by Wilhelm Ropke. The overlap with American Southern Agrarianism in this area is particularly noticeable. The belief that macroeconomics should be handled by employers and trade guilds while fiscal policy (revenue collection and so forth) should be determined by government — all while maintaining that the state needs to establish the legal constraints against absolutist “free-market” devolution into corporate oligarchy or monopolistic excesses — is key. Paleos do not subscribe to the myth of homo economicus.

A Definition of Neoconservatism:

Neoconservatism is an American political philosophy espousing some tenets of traditional conservatism which introduces, or carries over, several distinctions derived from various Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies.

Neoconservatives tend to be fairly committed to restrictions on abortion, opposed to redefinition of marriage to recognize the validity of homosexual unions, in favor of unrestricted ownership of firearms, etc. These beliefs are shared with other conservatives.

Neoconservatives are not opposed to government expansion in principle, although they may selectively oppose certain instances of it. They see bureaucracy as a natural development of governance, especially on as grand a scale as a nation the size of the United States, and therefore do not seek to hinder its growth.

Neoconservatism advocates an interventionist, aggressive foreign policy. Central to this is the doctrine of American exceptionalism. Neoconservatives view America as one of, if not the only, remaining superpowers with a concomitant responsibility to act to resolve crises and support perceived national interests.

A Definition of Libertarianism:

One of many developments to arise from the Continental Enlightenment was a political philosophy centered around a principle of personal liberty. Liberty, as defined by John Stuart Mill, among others, takes a positive and a negative form. Positively, liberty is understood as the freedom of the individual to do as much as he can without impeding upon another’s liberty. Negatively, it means that one is free from hindrances thereunto in various forms: freedom from authority, freedom from coercion or forced choice, etc.

The positive definition listed above developed into the modern philosophy known as liberalism. Drawing on Mill’s writings (among others’), traditional proscriptions against various behaviors were eventually discarded as inconsistent with the sole guiding principle claimed by Enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinkers, “unfettered reason.”

The negative definition, along with the positive in some instances, eventually made its way into the formulation of various forms of libertarianism. Libertarians (and there is diversity of belief among subsets in that category) generally advocate as normative the least amount of government restriction on activity as possible. Common to all libertarians is the presupposition of the individual (through his reason) as the ultimate arbiter of ethics and praxis.

Economically, libertarianism (in both current incarnations, libertarianism and paleolibertarianism) are committed to free-market capitalism.

Paleolibertarianism is an offshoot which seems more oriented to the freedom from interference. While many paleolibertarians more-or-less begrudgingly pitch their tent among those (inter alia) who wish to decriminalize certain behaviours, they are not afraid to defend traditional morality as most reasonable, and therefore most free.

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