The Old Right, Ctd

Noah Millman wants to know which issues palecons are willing to compromise on:

I suspect that, for Larison, the most important issues relate to foreign policy, with civil liberties a distant second and both social and economic questions further back in the back. That is to say: his top priorities line up better with the priority list of a left-wing critic of the Obama Administration like Glenn Greenwald than with his fellows on the right, even if the larger intellectual framework and much of the stuff further down on the list would be stuff where he and Greenwald would strongly disagree.

If I’m right, and if most paleos agree, then there’s a basis for cooperation with the Greenwalds of the world, and a clear way that a paleo tendency could make itself relevant. But what if a significant bloc of paleos is concerned primarily with questions of race and identity? Or with some other issue – abortion, opposition to Federal regulation, gun rights – that sits comfortably within the existing Republican coalition? Then the basis for making that tendency politically effective is much less obvious.

I think the paleocon critique of the imperial hubris of the last decade is the most valuable. What we don't have is a prudentially non-interventionist, civil libertarian, fiscally strict, socially tolerant conservatism. At least not in America. In Britain, it seems to be thriving right now. But the paleocons deserve a real place in this conversation, if only because they might trouble the right enough to examine its anachronisms.