Whither paleoconservatism?

This scattered post on the future of paleoconservatism is not necessarily meant to be taken in the context of the "Paleo Epitaph" flurry (on which Robert Stacy McCain has, I think, the best take), although it might make sense to put it there insofar as more than a few of us are Bright Young Paleos who, while certainly not up to the task of reenergizing the intellectual Right just at the moment (we've got finals!), at least take the task seriously.

If I can quote Paul Gottfried back to himself:

Above all [paleoconservatives] raise issues that the neoconservatives and the Left would both seek to keep closed, for instance, questions about the desirability of political and social equality, the functionality of human rights thinking, and the genetic basis of intelligence. In all these assaults on liberal and neoconservative pieties, paleoconservatives reveal an iconoclastic exuberance rarely found on the postwar intellectual Right. Their spirit is far more Nietzschean than neo-Thomistic, and like Nietzsche they go after democratic idols, driven by disdain for what they believe dehumanizes.

This "iconoclastic exuberance" has eliminated a certain kind of traditionalism from the Yale paleo scene. We have very few let's-pretend-modernity-never-happened Burkeans, and far more paleos who attack with Nietzschean audacity liberal orthodoxies as well as the traditions they love and live by, with the implicit argument that our traditions are better than the Left's because they can stand it.

Stephen Tonsor's 1986 paleo manifesto—the one with the jaw-dropping swipe at neocons: "It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far"—quotes Werner Dannhauser:

Too many conservatives have failed to come to terms with Nietzsche's though, dismissing it as an embarrassing attempt to outflank them on the Right. But the challenge he represents will not go away.

Nietzsche went far beyond Burke, who held out hope for a time when atheism might cease to be fashionable. Nietzsche postulated an irreversible loss of naïveté in Western civilization. To put the matter crudely, he argued that the cat of atheism was out of the bag. The meanest capacities could now learn that religion was a myth, and when a myth is exposed for what it is, it can no longer serve to provide a unified horizon.

Too many conservatives whose own belief is weak or nonexistent, who will privately admit that religion is "for the troops," continue to try to teach the catechism to those troops, forgetting that the latter have by now been thoroughly exposed to the Enlightenment and its lessons.

Tonsor, on the other hand, holds Nietzsche at arm's length, describing conservatives as "free of metaphysical anxiety and as happy as clams in a world that bears the unmistakable imprint of God's ordering hand." This doesn't apply to the young paleos I know, who do have metaphysical anxiety and, while they see the imprint of God's ordering hand, wouldn't call it unmistakable. Larison is right that the term "post-paleo right" is inapt inasmuch as the priorities — "constitutionalism, decentralism, immigration restriction and rejection of democratist hegemony" — remain the same, but the tone is more postmodern than pre-modern (or, if you prefer, more rock 'n' roll). All your "decent drapery" without any "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

An illustrative anecdote: The Reactionary Epicurean, back when he was an eager sophomore, confessed to Eve that he didn't really know what postmodernism was and asked her which postmodern thinkers he should read to get an idea. Her first recommendation was John Paul II.

It remains to be seen whether paleos of the Bill Kauffman school will accept as one of their own a brand of localism that loves Jane Jacobs but not Wendell Berry, and I have no idea whether the young conservatives that Yale is training will fit in at all with the trajectory of conservatism outside these ivied walls, but, at the very least, Dan McCarthy's rueful observation that "the youth movement has been overtaken by the career-oriented College Republicans" is not without exceptions. The tail end of the Millenial generation may be more libertarian than ever, but that doesn't mean that all of the intellectual ferment on campuses is happening among the libertarians.