Is Conservatism just NeoTraditionalism these days?

[Consul]

The new Argentinian president Javier Milei prides himself on being an anarcho-capitalist. In the texts of the hard/strict libertarians Rothbard, Hoppe, and Rockwell we find a far-right libertarianism, which is an "illiberal liberalism".

"A right-wing populist program, then, must concentrate on dismantling the crucial existing areas of State and elite rule, and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant and oppressive features of that rule. In short:

1. Slash Taxes. All taxes, sales, business, property, etc., but especially the most oppressive politically and personally: the income tax. We must work toward repeal of the income tax and abolition of the IRS.

2. Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.

3. Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire “civil rights” structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.

4. Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not “white collar criminals” or “inside traders” but violent street criminals—robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.

5. Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.

6. Abolish the Fed; Attack the Banksters. Money and banking are recondite issues. But the realities can be made vivid: the Fed is an organized cartel of banksters, who are creating inflation, ripping off the public, destroying the savings of the average American. The hundreds of billions of taxpayer handouts to S&L banksters will be chicken-feed compared to the coming collapse of the commercial banks.

7. America First. A key point, and not meant to be seventh in priority. The American economy is not only in recession; it is stagnating. The average family is worse off now than it was two decades ago. Come home America. Stop supporting bums abroad. Stop all foreign aid, which is aid to banksters and their bonds and their export industries. Stop gloabaloney, and let’s solve our problems at home.

8. Defend Family Values. Which means, get the State out of the family, and replace State control with parental control. In the long run, this means ending public schools, and replacing them with private schools. But we must realize that voucher and even tax credit schemes are not, despite Milton Friedman, transitional demands on the path to privatized education; instead, they will make matters worse by fastening government control more totally upon the private schools. Within the sound alternative is decentralization, and back to local, community neighborhood control of the schools.

Further: We must reject once and for all the left-libertarian view that all government-operated resources must be cesspools. We must try, short of ultimate privatization, to operate government facilities in a manner most conducive to a business, or to neighborhood control. But that means: that the public schools must allow prayer, and we must abandon the absurd left-atheist interpretation of the First Amendment that “establishment of religion” means not allowing prayer in public schools, or a creche in a schoolyard or a public square at Christmas. We must return to common sense, and original intent, in constitutional interpretation.

So far: every one of these right-wing populist programs is totally consistent with a hard-core libertarian position. But all real-world politics is coalition politics, and there are other areas where libertarians might well compromise with their paleo or traditionalist or other partners in a populist coalition. For example, on family values, take such vexed problems as pornography, prostitution, or abortion. Here, pro-legalization and pro-choice libertarians should be willing to compromise on a decentralist stance; that is, to end the tyranny of the federal courts, and to leave these problems up to states and better yet, localities and neighborhoods, that is, to “community standards.”"

(Rothbard, Murray. "Right-Wing Populism." 1992. Reprinted in The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard, edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., 37-42. Burlingame, CA: Center for Libertarian Studies, 2000. pp. 40-2)
——————
"[A]ny realistic libertarian strategy for change must be a populist strategy. That is, libertarians must short-circuit the dominant intellectual elites and address the masses directly to arouse their indignation and contempt for the ruling elites."

(Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Getting Libertarianism Right. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2018. p. 89)

"Now, taking our cues from the Buchanan-, the Paul- and the Trump-movements, on to the specifics of a populist strategy for libertarian change, in no specific order except for the very first one, which has currently assumed the greatest urgency in the public mind.

One: Stop mass immigration.
…
Two: Stop attacking, killing, and bombing people in foreign countries.
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Three: Defund the ruling elites and their intellectual bodyguards.
…
Four: End the FED and all central banks.
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Five: Abolish all ‘affirmative action’ and ‘non-discrimination’ laws and regulations.
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Six: Crush the “Anti-Fascist” mob.
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Seven: Crush the street criminals and gangs.
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Eight: Get rid of all welfare parasites and bums.
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Nine: Get the State out of education.
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Ten: Don’t put your trust in politics or political parties."

(Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Getting Libertarianism Right. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2018. pp. 90-7)
——————
"If we are to have any chance of victory, we must discard the defective cultural framework of libertarianism. I call my suggested replacement, with its ethically-based cultural principles, "paleolibertarianism": the old libertarianism.

I use the term as conservatives use paleoconservatism: not as a new creed, but as a harking back to their roots which also distinguishes them from the neocons. We have no parallel to the necons, but it is just as urgent for us to distinguish libertarianism from libertinism.

Briefly, paleolibertarianism, with its roots deep in the Old Right, sees:

I. The leviathan State as the institutional source of evil throughout history.

II. The unhampered free market as a moral and practical imperative.

III. Private property as an economic and moral necessity for a free society.

IV. The garrison State as a preeminent threat to liberty and social well being.

V. The welfare State as organized theft that victimizes producers and eventually even its "clients."

VI. Civil liberties based on property rights as essential to a just society.

VII. The egalitarian ethic as morally reprehensible and destructive of private property and social authority.

VIII. Social authority—as embodied in the family, church, community, and other intermediating institutions—as helping protect the individual from the State and as necessary for a free and virtuous society.

IX. Western culture as eminently worthy of preservation and defense.

X. Objective standards of morality, especially as found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as essential to the free and civilized social order."

(Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr. "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism." Liberty 3/3 (1990): 34–38. p. 35)

[Consul]

There's a chapter in Hoppe's book titled "Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change". An excerpt:

"Someone, anyone, is not a libertarian or merely a fake libertarian who affirms and advocates one or more of the following: the necessity of a State, any State, of ‘public’ (State) property and of taxes in order to live in peace; or the existence and justifiability of any so-called “human rights” or “civil rights” other than private property rights, such as “women rights,” “gay rights,” “minority rights,” the “right” not to be discriminated against, the “right” to free and unrestricted immigration, the “right” to a guaranteed minimum income or to free health care, or the “right” to be free of unpleasant speech and thought. The proponents of any of this may call themselves whatever they want, and as libertarians we may well cooperate with them, insofar as such a cooperation offers the promise of bringing us closer to our ultimate goal, but they are not libertarians or only fake libertarians."

(Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Getting Libertarianism Right. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2018. p. 77)

This far-right/alt-right libertarianism is an antisocial liberalism!

[Consul]

That makes Liberalism weak...and it's why the Liberal-Leftists cannot differentiate from the Marxists, when marching under the banner of Antifa or BLM...

I don't think they deserve the name "liberal" any longer. It's a useful term, but they've abandoned all it really stands for. They've sold out the position of individual rights and freedoms, and opted instead to campaign for mob rule and totalitarian governance. They're certainly not Classical Liberals, today; so I prefer just to call them "Neo-Marxists" or "the Left." It keeps things clear.

The Left (as a whole) mustn't be equated with (Neo-)Marxism (let alone with Marxism-Leninism)!
The Left comprises social liberalism (left-liberalism), social democracy, socialism, and communism. Social liberalism and social democracy overlap widely; and, as Roger Scruton writes, "in US popular usage, ‘liberal’ means left-liberal, and is expressly contrasted with ‘conservative’." (Dictionary of Political Thought, 3rd ed.)

[Gary Childress]

There is a conservative liberalism (right-liberalism), which overlaps with liberal conservatism; and there is also a libertarian conservatism.

True. I've sometimes heard it referred to as "classic liberalism" or "neo-liberalism". But "conservative liberalism" is probably an apt name as well. In a sense the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are not the same in relation to each other as "liberal" and "not-liberal" or "conservative" and "not-conservative". I think it mostly stands in contradistinction from what is sometimes called the "new left". But I don't think the terms "left" and "right" are very applicable nor descriptive terms. Mostly, they seem to me like attempts at lumping everyone onto a single binary axis.

[Consul]

There is a conservative liberalism (right-liberalism), which overlaps with liberal conservatism; and there is also a libertarian conservatism.

True. I've sometimes heard it referred to as "classic liberalism" or "neo-liberalism". But "conservative liberalism" is probably an apt name as well. In a sense the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are not the same in relation to each other as "liberal" and "not-liberal" or "conservative" and "not-conservative". I think it mostly stands in contradistinction from what is sometimes called the "new left". But I don't think the terms "left" and "right" are very applicable nor descriptive terms. Mostly, they seem to me like attempts at lumping everyone onto a single binary axis.

Classical liberalism isn't per se conservative. For example, Friedrich Hayek refused to call himself a conservative, thinking that classical liberalism "differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism." See his "Why I Am Not A Conservative" (PDF)!
However, I'm not a Hayek expert, but I think one is not mistaken in calling him a conservative liberal or right-liberal. (He certainly wasn't a right-libertarian in Hoppe's and Rothbard's sense. Hayek was a capitalist but not an anarcho-capitalist rejecting any kind of welfare state.)

I regard neoliberalism as a neoclassical liberalism, which overlaps more or less with classical liberalism.

The New Left of the 1960s/70s was part of the Radical Left. It was influenced by socialist (neo-Marxist), liberal, anarchist, and existentialist ideas.

"The New Right is a marriage between two apparently contrasting ideological traditions. The first of these is classical liberal economics, particularly the free-market theories that were revived in the second half of the twentieth century as a critique of ‘big’ government and economic and social intervention. This is called the liberal New Right, or neoliberalism. The second element in the New Right is traditional conservative – and notably pre-Disraelian – social theory, especially its defence of order, authority and discipline. This is called the conservative New Right, or neoconservatism. The ideological coherence within the New Right stems from its defence of a strong but minimal state: although it seeks to ‘roll back’ the state in the economic sphere, it aims to strengthen it in the social sphere."

(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 62)

Note that the label "the New Right" is alternatively used (especially in Germany and other European countries) to refer to the New Far-Right, i.e. to neofascism rather than to neoconservatism!

[Gary Childress]

Note that the label "the New Right" is alternatively used (especially in Germany and other European countries) to refer to the New Far-Right, i.e. to neofascism rather than to neoconservatism!

Maybe the terms "left" and "right" have some utility. I don't know. Instead of "far-right" I guess I'm thinking of someone who is "extremely" conservative or "extremely" liberal. But what does "far right" mean? Does that mean that they are "extremely" right handed or drive extremely "far" to the right in the "right" hand lane when they're in traffic?

[Consul]

…But I don't think the terms "left" and "right" are very applicable nor descriptive terms. Mostly, they seem to me like attempts at lumping everyone onto a single binary axis.

There is an extended centre on the axis, which is subdivided into centre-left and centre-right. In the broad sense, the left includes the centre-left and the right includes the centre-right. For example, Christian democracy (as a moderate form of conservatism) is a centre-right ideology.
Anyway, there are different charts or maps of the landscape of political ideologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

[Gary Childress]

…But I don't think the terms "left" and "right" are very applicable nor descriptive terms. Mostly, they seem to me like attempts at lumping everyone onto a single binary axis.

There is an extended centre on the axis, which is subdivided into centre-left and centre-right. In the broad sense, the left includes the centre-left and the right includes the centre-right. For example, Christian democracy (as a moderate form of conservatism) is a centre-right ideology.
Anyway, there are different charts or maps of the landscape of political ideologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

Again, the very terms "left" and "right" are empty and non-descriptive terms. They don't mean anything other than themselves and they are placed on a linear axis and people supposedly sit on one end or the other of that imaginary axis created by two meaningless terms.

[Consul]

Maybe the terms "left" and "right" have some utility. I don't know. Instead of "far-right" I guess I'm thinking of someone who is "extremely" conservative or "extremely" liberal. But what does "far right" mean? Does that mean that they are "extremely" right handed or drive extremely "far" to the right in the "right" hand lane when they're in traffic?

"Far" refers to forms of political radicalism, extremism, or fundamentalism. (This can be marked by prefixes such as "ultra-", e.g. "ultraconservatism".)

[Consul]

Again, the very terms "left" and "right" are empty and non-descriptive terms. They don't mean anything other than themselves and they are placed on a linear axis and people supposedly sit on one end or the other of that imaginary axis created by two meaningless terms.

These terms may be imprecise or vague, but they are not meaningless in the political context.
Recommended reading:
* Norberto Bobbio: Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction

[Immanuel Can]

Who is "they"? And if "they" aren't liberals, then they aren't liberals and someone else is. So why call them "liberals"?

It's what they call themselves. But they're not entitled to the name, because they've forsaken the Classical Liberal principles, and now work to abolish them. As has been pointed out, it's like Antifa, who act like Nazis and use exactly the same tactics as Hitler's brownshirts, or BLM, which apparently only stands for "Buy Large Mansions." They certainly don't care about "black lives," since all they do is all the charitable donations they've been given, deprive their people of policing, burn their own neighbourhoods, and do nothing about any real source of black deaths.

That's what the Left loves to do -- to claim liberal virtues they not only do not uphold, but which they actively work to destroy.

OK. Then the "left" is not synonymous with "liberals". As I pointed out "left" goes back to the French Revolution and those who stood against the monarchy.

Yeah, but it's changed so radically since then that the French Revolution distinction no longer applies. There are no Jacobins, or Thermadorians, or monarchists to incorporate into our thinking today. So whatever "left" and "right" now signify, it's clearly not that.

And I suggest that "Left" essentially means Socialist now, and "right" is now taken by the Left to mean everything not Socialist...or even not-sufficiently-Socialist, because even moderates and centrists like Classical Liberals and social conservatives are now called "right wing" by the Left. Marxists use terms like "reactionary" and "anti-revolutionary" to describe anybody who refuses to sign on to the whole package of Leftism. It's a cheap bully-tactic, designed to either shame, demonize or exclude from any serious attention anybody who doesn't join them.

This is what is so often noted today: the disappearance of the moderate middle into sharp "polarities" of right and left. But it's the Left's fault: they've eliminated the whole moderate middle, because it simply wasn't radical enough to support their agenda ambitions, which have kept getting more and more radical.

[Gary Childress]

Again, the very terms "left" and "right" are empty and non-descriptive terms. They don't mean anything other than themselves and they are placed on a linear axis and people supposedly sit on one end or the other of that imaginary axis created by two meaningless terms.

These terms may be imprecise or vague, but they are not meaningless in the political context.
Recommended reading:
* Bobbio, Norberto: Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction

They're not "meaningless" no. But all they mean is themselves or else someone who would have stood with either the king or else commoners during the French revolution. I don't think they're useful terms. If you want to say that someone is "extremely liberal" or "extremely conservative" or "extremely opposed to X, Y, or Z, then I suppose that's fair game. Otherwise to say someone is just "far right" or else "far left" is simply another word for "extreme." But "right" and "left" themselves do not denote anything.

[Gary Childress]

And I suggest that "Left" essentially means Socialist now, and "right" is now taken by the Left to mean everything not Socialist...or even not-sufficiently-Socialist, because even moderates and centrists like Classical Liberals and social conservatives are now called "right wing" by the Left. Marxists use terms like "reactionary" and "anti-revolutionary" to describe anybody who refuses to sign on to the whole package of Leftism. It's a cheap bully-tactic, designed to either shame, demonize or exclude from any serious attention anybody who doesn't join them.

OK. But then we are simply saying that all socialists are left and all individualists or right or that all communists are left and all 'non-communists' (whatever that would amount to in opposite) are right. "Left" and "right" themselves seem rather superfluous or unnecessary. I mean, I'm left-handed and maybe more individualistic than socialist (depending on who you compare me to and how one defines "socialist" and "individualist"), however I don't know where I fit in term of being "left" or "right" strictly speaking. Personally, I don't see those two terms as particularly applicable to me. I just go with what sounds fair and reasonable from others and sometimes go overboard in what is desirable or necessary for myself (which is why I listen to what others say).

[Immanuel Can]

I would say that there's fairly widespread use of the term with a big C and I would say that if we wish to have monolithic terms such as "Liberalism", "The Left" and so on, then "Conservatism" should probably qualify with a similar set of caveats to those others.

I don't think so, and I did say why. The Left has a particular, identifiable set of ideological derivations and theories. They've got their Marx, their Foucault, their Gramsci, their Freire, etc., all penning manifestos of what kind of Socialism they aim to create.

Conservatism, by contrast, is a sort of general impulse that binds widely disparate groups together, and has no central ideological commitments. They have no singular manifestos, and for anybody one might name as the progenitor of conservatism, one would find most of the field would disagree with that. Conservatism's just a kind of "mood" or "impulse" to preserve some legacy but it's a little thin on saying what the specific legacy is that should be "conserved." With regard to content, it's highly variable, actually.

That also explains why rounding up any single "conservative movement" is like trying to herd cats. They're not naturally inclined to stick together at all. But Socialism seems to be the glue that keeps the Left a monolythic ideological entity.

I'm sorry but here you are simply sbjecting the thing you like (the right) to a less difficult test than the thing you don't like (The Left).

For a very good reason: that both sides misunderstand each other when they imagine they're the same.

That's a very common human error, called "projection." It means when one takes one's own motives, and attributes them to somebody else, as if one is that person, even though that person has very different motives. The Left projects onto the right its own ideological conformity, its authoritarian intentions, its monolythic political-engineering ambitions, it's lust for power, and so on. The conservatives, on their side, tend to attribute to the Left a potential for individual thought (rather than conformity to an ideology), a willingness to be convinced by things like reason and logic (rather than the Left's stark rejection of both), a willingness to respond to arguments (rather than the belief that all arguments are inauthentic and power-aiming anyway), and so on.

The result of this is that they end up talking past each other and attributing inaccurate intentions to each other all the time. The very first thing that both sides would need to realize, in order to see the other clearly, is that they are not the same.

Instead of the historical science that Marxists adore, Conservatives tend more towards such explanations of historical tendency as Manifest Destiny, Protestant Work Ethic, perhaps with a little dash of the Invisible Hand of the markets.

I don't think they really do. "Manifest Destiny" is an ideological curiosity very peculiar to America, not to conservatives. The Protestant work ethic is actually a construct of Weber, which he premises on a minority religious position known as "Calvinism," and not even most Christians are Calvinists: secular conservatives are certainly not. And the idea of that the market has an "Invisible Hand" is a weird one from Adam Smith. A person could easily be a conservative while believing in none of these things at all. That's what I mean about "herding cats."

These handy little myths

They aren't myths. They're the real history of those ideas. And while I know that the Left thinks history is all fake (or "a tale told by the winners," as they so often say), it's not. In this case, I'm telling you exactly where those ideas originate. And if you know what "Manifest Destiny" or "the Protestant Work Ethic" or "the Invisible Hand of the Market" are, you already know I'm telling you the truth.

And by the way, I have Weber's book right here, if you want to know anything about it.

I was talking about radicals. I do not see any reason to conflate that with "the left", these are not coextensive concepts.

Well, straighten me out, then: what is "the Left," according to you?

More latterly though, I would agree that modern Conservatives would be expected to have the highest regard for institutions that check the power of the excutive and so on.

Well, they're not keen on institutions, and tend to have less belief in the intrinsic goodness of government than the Left does, for sure. But I would argue this stems from them tending to have a more realistic and less naive view of basic human nature, and a stronger belief in personal liberties than in the possibilities of human social engineering.

I think you are using a more limited defintion of "institution" than I am here.

I am. I'm not talking about everything that can be "instituted," like a marriage, or something like "mental institutions"; I mean governmental-type "institutions."

As such, I do believe it is fair to say that "modern Conservatives would be expected to have the highest regard for institutions that check the power of the excutive and so on" in such terms.

Quite so. But then, you're using the term "institutions" in its most general sense, as in "something instituted," not in terms of governmental organizations, as I am.

There are radicals who stand against Conservatism who aren't The Left, in fact they hate The Left and consider themselves Conservatives.

Of whom are you thinking?

Wizard22 considers himself a conservative, he doesn't meet any definition of conservatism I can see though. He's a Hitler apologising white-supremacist with a long list of grievances aimed at Jews. The traditions he wishes to bring back are a grab-bag of old racist and sexist tropes. He's a radical with a platform of faux-tradition to sell. His links to tradition are not about respect for the process but are actually just aimed at giving himself greater access to white women. This is far-right Neo-Traditionalism. Jacobi is the same really.

Out in the real world, I think there are many such people.

I don't find there are. I mean, I'm not doubting your word regarding Alexis or Wizard22, since I really don't know them, and maybe you do. But outside of them, I don't find many among conservatives. I do think you're right about this, though: that such would be only a radical fringe, whose views I would never share, nor would most conservatives. And I'd agree with you that any such have gone way too far with their views. But I don't at all think conservatives in general are akin to any such.

Not terrible.

Good. I'm gratified we're finding grounds for a pleasant, civil conversation on this particular issue. It's very nice.

Likewise

Well, let's continue in that vein, since it's mutually pleasant. Before responding, I shall endeavour to hear you with the most charitable reading I can muster; and you may, if you wish, continue in the same vein with me.

[Immanuel Can]

When someone identifies as a liberal, one always needs to ask: What kind of liberal are you?

Yes, that's very apt. The term has almost completely lost its meaning, since it is applied to such a wide and even contradictory group of views. This is where more precise labels, such as those you suggest, can come to our aid.