Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism are two major branches of the American conservative political movement. Representatives of each faction often argue that the other does not represent true conservatism. Disputed issues include immigration, trade, the United States Constitution, taxation, budget, business, the Federal Reserve, drug policy, foreign aid and the foreign policy of the United States.
Conflict of values
The phrase Paleoconservative ("old conservative") was originally a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder used in the 1980s to differentiate traditional Conservatives from Neoconservatives and Straussians. Pat Buchanan said the conservative movement had been captured by "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology" in an edition of Buchanan and Press in 2002. He was co-founding The American Conservative magazine as a challenge to what he saw as dominant neoconservatives, and for Buchanan, a corrupter of real conservative values.
The roots of this conflict predate both the Paleocons or the Neocons, which both came to prominence in the 1970s and '80s. In 1950, essayist Lionel Trilling said that liberalism is the "sole intellectual tradition" in the United States. He dismissed Old Right conservatives as expressing "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas". Three years later, Russell Kirk's erudite work The Conservative Mind challenged this thesis by arguing that American Conservatism had a long and distinguished pedigree in the history of ideas.
The Neoconservative movement, as it rose in the 1970s, articulated a different vision from the Old Right. While Neoconservatives were not opposed to the New Deal as were the Old Right, they thought the subsequent developments in the Great Society and the New Left went too far. Neoconservatives embraced an interventionist foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. They espoused especially strong support for Israel and believe the United States should help ensure the security of the Jewish state.
In a feature article called "The Democracy Boosters" in the March 24, 1989 issue of National Review, Claes G. Ryn warned of the uncritical advocacy of democracy and abstract universalist principles among so-called Conservatives, including Michael Novak, Allan Bloom, Ben Wattenberg, and Richard John Neuhaus. These sentiments, Ryn argued, were more akin to leftism than to Conservatism. In the ensuing controversy Ryn was attacked at length in National Review by the democratic socialist Sidney Hook, as well as by others aligning themselves with the exceptional notion that America is called by history to advance its principles in the world. In 1991 Ryn argued in a book, The New Jacobinism, that Neoconservatism bears a close resemblance to the ideas behind the French Revolution. The French Jacobins of the late 1700s appointed France the agent of universal principles; the new Jacobins of the late 1900s had similarly selected the United States for the task of transforming the world. Ryn thus warned of the dangers of ideological imperialism.
Paleo historian Thomas Woods elaborated on the divergence in the Conservative movement, and the ascent of the Neoconservatives, and their distinguishing features from more traditional Conservatives: The Conservative's traditional sympathy for the American South and its people and heritage, evident in the works of such great American Conservatives as Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk, began to disappear ... [T]he Neocons are heavily influenced by Woodrow Wilson, with perhaps a hint of Theodore Roosevelt. ... They believe in an aggressive U.S. presence practically everywhere, and in the spread of democracy around the world, by force if necessary. ... Neoconservatives tend to want more efficient government agencies; Paleoconservatives want fewer government agencies. [Neoconservatives] generally admire President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his heavily interventionist New Deal policies. Neoconservatives have not exactly been known for their budget consciousness, and you won't hear them talking about making any serious inroads into the federal apparatus.