>But now I see, in the
>newest New Left Review, that Dan Lazare (in his reply to Michael Lind)
>refers to a school of thought calling itself paleoconservatism, as if were
>simply a term of self-description. He said it is
>
><quote>
>
>associated with the magazine Chronicles, published in Rockford, Illinois,
>which, month after month, flails away at global capitalism, international
>democracy and modernist revolutionaries from Oliver Cromwell onwards.
>
><endquote>
>
>Anybody know about these people? Anybody ever read the magazine?
I read a bunch of them during the 1992 pres campaign, because Perot's VP nominee, Adm James Bond [sic] Stockdale, was on the board of Rockford and wrote some columns for Chronicles, mainly inspirational stuff. The rest of the magazine read like an uppermiddlebrow version of Buchananism - very nationalist, nostalgic for a fantasy of U.S. smalltown life around 1840. They're - or at least were then - close to the von Mises Institute at Auburn. The Von Mises director Lew Rockwell (who opposed the Gulf War, like many right libertarians) had a piece denouncing Nelson Mandela as a conman in a $1,000 suit, and predicted that if he became president, SA's government would soon resemble "All Sharpton after a barbecue." There's a lot of crypto-racism and crypto-antisemitism in it, very anti-immigrant in the Buchananite way - i.e. friendly to northern European immigrants, but not ones from Haiti. They published the ravings of Samuel Francis, who I think was bounced from the Washington Times for being too nuts, about the Santerians overrunning our sacred Christians shores. Even those who don Western dress and learn English will be unable to "absorb the underlying habits that define a culture."
Fleming also wrote a piece about the importance of stopping immigration from the south and restoring the white-favoring quotas of yesteryear. I had a long phone chat with Fleming; he followed the left press pretty closely, knew my stuff, and predicted that both he & I would end up under house arrest in a Perot administration. He also said he favored a black-white alliance against immigration.
I haven't followed them since, but I'm pretty sure they still follow the same line. Fleming's on the board of the League of the South, a neo-confederate organization; the guy formerly known as Crawfish who follows the neo-confed's has a piece on Fleming & Rockford at <http://www.mindspring.com/~newtknight/Rockford.htm>. The paleo- refers to the fact that all these people long for not pure Manchester liberalism, but pre-Civil War U.S. They're antifederalists and states' righters.
>PS -- I was kind of amused to read in a conservatism FAQ that they
>described _Telos_ as _Neopaleoconservative_. They also noted that Thomas
>Fleming, editor of Chronicles, was now on Telos editorial board. What was
>amusing is that there is now seems to be no difference at all in the case
>of Telos from the oldest and lowest term of Telos abuse and the newest and
>highest form of approbation.
Telos is at least semi-close to Le Pen & the Lombard League too, no?
Doug