Surprisingly, two debates have largely occupied the newly live American Conservative blog: one about what exactly constitutes “paleoconservatism” and one about whether conservatives should support Barack Obama for president. The two debates are intertwined in that several of the TAC writers seem uncertain whether paleos should continue to think of themselves as a dissident minority within the conservative movement, or whether, under present conditions, their ideas might get more traction on the Left.

At the risk of oversimplifying, what sets “paleoism” apart from much mainstream conservatism can be boiled down to three positions: they’re restrictionist on immigration, protectionist on trade, and anti-interventionist in foreign affairs. At the other end of the conservative spectrum, neoconservatives generally take the opposite position on all three issues.

On the Left, though, at least two of the pillars of paleoism can gain a respectful hearing. The apparently resurgent left wing of the Democratic Party is definitely more hostile to free trade and military interventionism than the centrist-DLC wing of the party that was dominant during the 90s. Immigration restriction is a harder sell, but even here some on the Left are receptive to restrictionist arguments for labor and/or environmental reasons.

For example, Herman Daly and John Cobb, an economist and a theologian who are, by any definition, on the Left, advocate protectionism, anti-interventionism, and reduced immigration. Their reasons are largely environmental, but also social justice-oriented (see here for my review of their book For the Common Good). Obviously, paleocons would have disagreements with them on other issues, but to the extent that these issues drive the paleo outlook, a potential Left-Right alliance is discernible.

The connecting thread of paleoconservatism is a kind of particularistic nationalism that takes the nation-state to be the most important political unit, and one that is in danger of being dissolved by unchecked immigration, global capitalism, promiscuous interventionism, and supranational governments-in-embryo like the WTO. So, much of the paleo program is dedicated to resisting this erosion of national sovereignty. While the Left casts a much more jaundiced eye on nationalist sentiment (though there are exceptions), I think the Left’s concern for democracy can, at times result in remarkably similar policy preferences. Left-wing criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, for instance, are often couched in terms of those institutions’ anti-democratic nature. It’s not too much of a leap, then, to connect national sovereignty and democratic self-determination.

For many the key issue, of course, is the war. Most of the writers at TAC express skepticism that Obama is any kind of consistent anti-interventionist. Where they seem to differ among themselves is over how likely Obama actually is to extricate us from Iraq, and how likely he is to start further wars. Some TACers see Obama as essentially a globalist Wilsonian interventionist who would take America into varous do-good interventions around the world.

Obviously no one can predict what a president will do once in office with any great ceratainty, particularly in foreign affairs where the president has a much freer hand. But my hunch is that extricating us from Iraq, attempting to root out al-Qaeda from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, and dealing with Iran would provide plenty to keep President Obama busy and prevent him from, say, invading Sudan.

Now, some of the TAC writers are just frankly opposed to Obama’s views on key domestic issues: the welfare state, health care, abortion, etc. (I have some differences with him here too.) So the question for Obama-leaning conservatives becomes twofold: how likely do you think Obama is to actually end the war in Iraq, and is the issue of the war important enough to override disagreement on other issues?

I sit much looser to any self-definition as a “conservative” (and was, despite my anti-Iraq war views never a “paleo” per se) than do the professional conservatives over at TAC, but, for me, the war issue, combined with the broader issues of executive aggrandizement, civil liberties, and abuse of power is more than sufficient to justify rooting (and probably voting) for Obama. But, more broadly, seeing the virtual implosion of the GOP and organized conservatism over the course of the Bush presidency has spurred a reevaluation of a lot of the conservative views I once held.

I used to think it was desirable to salvage a kind of “conservatism rightly understood” from the wreckage of Bushism, but that seems a lot less important now. For instance, it’s become pretty clear to me that global warming is a very serious issue, possibly even a catastrophic one, that will require the sustained attention of the next president and Congress. Is this a “conservative” or a “liberal” position? In the US it’s de facto a liberal position, because organized conservatism still essentially doesn’t recognize it as a problem and is forced to resort to increasingly implausible conspiracy theories about socialist climate scientists in cahoots with Al Gore who want to take away your car.

Likewise with the war. I think there was a “conservative” argument to be made against it, but the more important question is whether there was a fundamentally moral and prudential case to be made against it. I don’t know if conservatism has been betraying its essence in falling down on these two huge issues, but I just don’t have enough invested in the survival of “conservatism” to worry too much about it.

There will likely always be a “liberal” and a “conservative” party in the U.S., even if their definitions change over time. Right now the “conservative” party still stands for a cavalier attitude to war, environmental protection, and economic justice, even if the positions it takes aren’t necessarily for good conservative reasons (it’s hard not to think, for instance, that Russell Kirk would be aghast at contemporary conservatism; and I think someone like Wendell Berry has as good a claim to being a conservatism as anyone). Whether or not more conservatives will find themselves migrating to the Left will be interesting to see.