Since the upheaval of 2016, the American Right has been casting about for a new basis for conservative politics. While some look to national conservatism or integralism, others have attempted to revive the legacy of failed presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Many detect the origins of the new wave of populism in his vehement opposition to free trade, higher immigration levels, and an interventionist foreign policy.

Paul Gottfried—who coined the term “paleoconservatism” to describe Buchanan’s ideology—has edited a new volume of essays, titled A Paleoconservative Anthology, addressing this new populist energy on the Right. The authors attempt to chart a new course for American conservatism, turning the movement away from constitutionalism and towards a less-restrained politics.

Unfortunately, though, there is nothing conservative about today’s paleoconservatism. With its emphasis on class warfare, racial grievance, and power politics, it is an ideology better understood as a right-wing form of Marxism. As Gottfried’s Anthology shows, this toxic mix is a recipe for electoral disaster and moral bankruptcy.

The Paleoconservative Dissatisfaction

Twentieth-century conservatives such as Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley built their movement on the idea of the American Founding. For them, conservative politics needed to be rooted in a reverential devotion to the Constitution, a healthy appreciation of the free market, and a vigorous anti-communism. And as Ronald Reagan’s stunning electoral successes proved, these ideas were immensely popular.

Paleoconservatives sneered at this approach, however, and desired something more radical. “The main thrust of Kirk’s conservatism was to assure Americans that everything was really OK,” paleoconservative ideologue Samuel Francis wrote in one essay, “that the society in which they lived and the government and dominant social and political forces that prevailed in the United States were healthy.” Protecting the Constitution and defeating the Soviet Union were not enough for Francis—he wanted to upend the entire basis for American politics and adopt new foundational principles.

The latter-day paleoconservatives who contributed to the Anthology agree with Francis. “The ideas of Kirk and Hayek, appealing as they were to Bill Buckley, were always too disconnected from the concerns of the base,” David Azerrad writes in the second essay of the collection. “Conservatism was, and largely remains, an ideology in search of a mass constituency.” He believes that mass appeal can be found in the Buchananite three-legged stool of economic protectionism, immigration restrictionism, and isolationism.

This new three-legged stool is of course wildly opposed to the original Reaganite three-legged stool of free markets, social conservatism, and a strong foreign policy. But the paleoconservatives are open about their rejection of conservative orthodoxy. Carl Horowitz, for instance, asserts that “the claim that the Reagan years were revolutionary is out of whack with reality.” In his view, Reagan’s conservatism did nothing to prevent a far-left takeover of American institutions; indeed, he says that “America is now a nation where radical ideology is the coin of the realm of higher education, mass media, and philanthropy.”

This acute sense of loss leaves paleoconservatives feeling desperate. “For paleoconservatives, the crisis of the West is real,” Gottfried writes in the introduction, “and most of these cultural warriors can easily agree that the signs of derailment they perceive have become more alarming in the last half century.” As such, paleoconservatives are open to adopting the tactics and even the principles of their far-left enemies.

Sam Francis and Right-Wing Marxism

Samuel Francis was one of Buchanan’s closest advisers, but in the wider conservative movement he was seen as a fringe thinker. In the ‘90s, Francis was even ostracized for his racism. He argued, for instance, that “neither ‘racism’ nor ‘slavery’ as an institution is a sin.” Despite these noxious views, however, Francis is undergoing a renaissance of popularity in certain corners of the right—including among the contributors to A Paleoconservative Anthology.

Through his ideological writings, Francis tried to create a right-wing Leninism. Lenin believed that a Bolshevik vanguard would free the Russian proletariat from the czarist ruling class. In a similar way, Francis believed the right should become the vanguard of an American proletarian movement. He said the Right should “enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent regime” and mobilize them “in radical opposition to the regime.” 

As Gottfried himself writes in the introduction to the Anthology: “Francis felt no reservations about taking ideas from Marxist sources if they explained social developments he was studying at the time.” He states that he has, like Francis, “abandoned the anti-Marxist tropes of Cold War conservatism and have become more critical of woke capitalists and ‘conservatives’ who accommodate the cultural Left.” The paleoconservatives want to fight fire with fire.

One aspect of Francis’s Right-Wing Marxism rarely cited by his latter-day fans is its explicit racism. He believed the “elite” allied with an “underclass” of racial minorities to subvert the “social, cultural, and national identity” of white Americans. He even deployed the Marxist concept of “false consciousness” to denigrate those who did not buy into this new kind of grievance-driven politics. 

In his contribution to the essay collection, Pedro Gonzales calls Francis’s “Middle American Radicals” a “social base for a counterrevolution.” As opposed to more genteel conservatives, Gonzales says this reactionary movement “is not opposed to exercising political power for its own advantage.” Unlike earlier conservatives who sought to reform the welfare system and deconstruct the administrative state, Gonzales envisions seizing these powers and deploying them on behalf of his own faction.

Paleoconservatism’s Unpopularity

The problem for paleoconservatives has always been that their ideas are wildly unpopular. Although Buchanan’s 1992 run for president certainly damaged George H. W. Bush’s chances for reelection, he failed to win a single state in the Republican primary. Despite what contributors to A Paleoconservative Anthology seem to believe, Right-Wing Marxism has no real mass appeal.

Failed Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters was Sam Francis’s most prominent booster in the last election. Much of his campaign’s rhetoric about class warfare and opposition to “The Regime” was obviously shaped by paleoconservative theory. At one point, Masters even recommended Francis’s book Beautiful Losers to his social media followers.

Arizona voters had little interest in paleoconservative ideology, however, and Masters lost to his Democratic opponent by hundreds of thousands of votes. It is doubtful voters elsewhere in the country are hungry for paleoconservatism, either. The candidates who did best in 2022 were mainstream conservatives such as Brian Kemp and Jim Pillen, politicians who won stayed away from the bizarre obsessions of the Right-Wing Marxists. 

Voters know Right-Wing Marxists cannot break the fever of grievance politics—indeed, they will only make it worse. Their goals are not too different from progressives’ use of the vast administrative state; both illiberal leftists and Right-Wing Marxists seek to concentrate power in a “vanguard” elite. The only difference is the “victim class” the factions seek to use as a revolutionary base. 

The conservative movement’s forebears would have soundly rejected Right-Wing Marxism. William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan were stridently opposed to the progressive establishment. But they did not believe they needed to stoke a new class conflict to defend what is best about our country. They preferred Washington and the American Revolution to Lenin and the Russian Revolution.

Right-Wing Marxism is an ideology of despair. Far from saving a republic they claim is already dead, these ideologues would simply inflame the partisan tensions which endanger it. There is little in A Paleoconservative Anthology with the enduring qualities of movement conservatism. Inspiration should be sought elsewhere.