Revolt from the Heartland: The Struggle for an Authentic Conservatism

by Joseph Scotchie

The dominant forces of American conservatism remain wedded, at all costs, to the Republican Party, but another movement, one with its roots in the pre-World War II era, has stepped forth to fill an intellectual vacuum on the right. This Old Right first rose in opposition to the New Deal, fighting both statism at home and the emergence of an American empire abroad. More recently this movement, sometimes called paleoconservatism, has provided the ideological backbone of modern populism and the opposition to globalization, with decisive effects on presidential politics. In Revolt from the Heartland , Joseph Scotchie provides an intellectual history of the Old Right, treating its main figures and defining its conflict with the traditional left-right political mainstream. As Scotchie's account makes clear, the Old Right and its descendents have articulated an arresting and powerful worldview. They include an array of learned and provocative writers, including M.E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Murray Rothbard, and more recently, Clyde Wilson, Thomas Fleming, Samuel Francis, and Chilton Williamson, Jr. Beginning with the movement's anti-Federalist forerunners, Scotchie traces its developments over two centuries of American history. In the realm of politics and economics, he examines the anti-imperialist stance against the Spanish-American War and the League of Nations, the split among conservatives on Cold War foreign policy, and the hostility to the socialist orientation of the New Deal. Identifying a number of social and cultural attitudes that define the Old Right, Scotchie finds the most important to be the importance of the classics, a recognition of regional cultures, the primacy of family over state, the moral case against immigration. In general, too, a Tenth Amendment approach to such recurring issues as education, abortion, and school prayer characterizes the group. As Scotchie makes clear, the Old Right and its grass-roots supporters have, and continue to be, a powerful force in modern American politics in spite of a lack of institutional support and media recognition. Revolt from the Heartland is an important study of a persisting current in American political life.

Genres: Politics

146 pages, Paperback

First published August 9, 2002

About the author

Joseph Scotchie is the author or editor of eight books, including The Vision of Richard Weaver, Barbarians in the Saddle, The Paleoconservatives, and Revolt from the Heartland. His work has won awards from the New York State Press Association and the North Carolina Society of Historians. A graduate of both the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the City College of New York, Scotchie has worked for three decades as a journalist in the New York City area.

Reviews

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

7.5/10.

A good survey of the paleoconservative movement, its political roots, and its critiques of Conservative Inc. by one of their own (Joseph Scotchie). I wrote an eight paragraph long review, but Goodreads did not save it. Alas! I guess I have to practice being Stoic today.

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview of the history and ideas of paleoconservatism.

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good history of American paleoconservatism, Scotchie ties together the various strands that formed America's paleoconservative movement, bringing together anti-federalists, Southern Agrarians, and anti-interventionist libertarians.

As Scotchie notes again and again, the paleos descend from this manifold ideological lineage, with its own internal tensions, and find themselves in conflict with the establishment right. From William Buckley to George HW Bush to Nikki Haley today, their ideology came under fire. They never fit neatly in the neoconservative drift. The paleoconservative wing opposes American intervention for nationalist and anti-statist reasons, not pacifistic ones. On this theme of nationalism, they're often protectionist and anti-immigration. They oppose executive power and the regulatory state, deeply localist in orientation. Underpinning all of this is a nostalgic view of history, in my personal opinion a flawed one. Scotchie is exactly right when he writes that "[t]he Old Right worldview is constantly backward looking. It would agree with Allen Tate that the past should be in the present, or also with Weaver, who flatly declared that the past is the only thing that is real . . ."

Scotchie is sympathetic to the movement and understands what makes the paleos tick. But this same favorability to them makes him too willing to overlook or excuse the fact that many of the figures he cites engage in Confederate apologia (hence my three stars). Yet when you're reading this, far from perfect as it may be, it becomes evident how valuable this history is for understanding Donald Trump's political ascendancy. It happened over a decade after publication but exemplifies the "Middle America-based populist culture movement that will force politicians to dance to a populist tune" Scotchie mentions in these pages.

[The American Conservative]

'Joseph Scotchie’s Revolt from the Heartland is not, as some readers might guess from the title, about the terrorism of right-wing militias in the Midwestern United States, although some readers might also say that guess was close enough. In fact, Revolt from the Heartland deals with the emergence of “paleoconservatism,” a species of conservative thought that despite its name (“paleo” is a Greek prefix meaning “old”) is a fairly recent twist in the cunningly knotted mind of the American Right. While paleos sometimes like to characterize their beliefs as merely the continuation of the conservative thought of the 1950s and ’60s, and while in fact many of them do have their personal and intellectual roots in the conservatism of that era, the truth is that what is now called paleoconservatism is at least as new as the neoconservatism at which many paleos like to sniff as a newcomer.'

Read the full review, "The Paleo Persuasion," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...