[snipped: commentary from Brad] No offense, but this got me to thinking about something else. I do like the irony of snubbing the DLC-type/Reagan Dems with paleocon outreach.
> May 21, 2003
>
> REVOLT AGAINST THE NEOCONS
> Backlash on the right: mainstream conservatives
> reject Frum purge, oppose neo-imperialism
> [by Justin Raimondo]
This is about the paleo- v. neo- split with regards to foreign policy, but it set me to speculating that there could be other factors. Raimondo's article notes clearly the juggling of laissez-faire and Trad Vals that prevailed in recent decades. Raimondo credits anti-Communism with uniting these separate threads. He sees the fusion folding.
This may be ridiculous to use a Raimondo piece as a springboard, since Raimondo isn't coming from a Trad Vals angle so much as a libertarian one. But here's another angle: part of what now undermines the ever precarious shotgun marriage of Trad Vals and laissez-faire is the rise of what Thomas Frank calls "market populism". This ideology -- the market as a plebiscite; the entrepreneur as Everyman, ousting the elitism of unions and regulators -- provides an alternative means of gaining larger public support, from the voter base at least, for policies that once had to be coupled with Trad Val frothings about the '60s to win elections. In a world of homocons like Andrew Sullivan, could there be a new impetus for a post-Trad Vals conservatism?
One counter to my suspicion is that evangelical Christians are very much the foot soldiers for the "Israeli lobby". But then Raimondo wrote some of Buchanan's speeches (correct?), has a Buchanan into for his book, and, of course, Pitchfork Pat was once the preferred of the Christian Right. Perhaps this goes beyond foreign policy, no?
-- Shane
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