The Missing Moral Anthropology: The Political Right versus a genuine Recovery of the Republican Tradition

INTRODUCTION

The ideas presented here are the result of long years of wrestling with early 2000s paleoconservatism that was pulled over from the 80s-90s, which I encountered in the early 2000s internet culture. The ideas developed are related but different from paleoconservatism and alternative right because they do share a diagnosis and some oppositional pressure. But I must draw lines to be clear. They are different because they do not share a primary political subject, or a theory of what should replace the present order. However, the key focuses for us is the recovery of the fullness of the republican tradition and classical democratic legacy (their depths, their roots and philosophical lineage), protection from any potential contemporary factional capture (it is for all citizens to hold the very lamp of Diogenes or possess the flame burning in the soul alighting each mind against the political poisons), and the alleviation of the degeneration of our political language and declining civic education. These are real things to solve; not just words.

PALEOCONSERVATISM AS NEW DEAL ANTITHESIS

So, there is a shared ground. Like paleoconservatives, we can treat Gottfried’s claim as basically correct, that the Left still writes the moral and institutional script of Western politics, while much of the official Right has been absorbed or reduced to reaction. Like paleocons, alt-right, and post-right writers, we too can reject neoconservative nation-building, fusionist “movement conservatism,” and the idea that the current left-right spectrum is an adequate map. We equally share an anti-managerial instinct through a suspicion of administrative power, corporate-state collusion, and cultural capture. Gottfried serves as a useful witness without becoming a central philosopher for these positions. “Paleoconservatism” a word coined by Gottfried represents a recovery of the older “Old Right,” and is the antithesis of the New Deal era, which Mayor Zohran Mamdani (N.Y.C.) wants to restore.

The break between paleoconservatism and the post-right from a genuine recovery of the republican tradition is actually over what is being recovered and for whom.

A RELATED REVOLT AGAINST A CAPTURED RIGHT

Paleoconservatism formed as a revolt against neoconservatism: older American particularity, limits on immigration, non-intervention, skepticism of the managerial state, and a claim to defend “the republic” against imperial and therapeutic liberalism. Later alt-right and post-right currents radicalized that revolt. They treated establishment Conservatism as exhausted, liberalism as a regime rather than a philosophy, and “the Cathedral” or “the regime” as the real sovereign. The essays lately thus far have sought to show that the respectable Right often fails to recover an older language of liberty and that culture-war epithets are not a philosophy. They even name post-right and alt-right currents as part of the contemporary Right’s failure. Mainly, all of these camps think the official spectrum is a trap, but this does not mean that the trap has been escaped.

DIFFERENT SUBJECT: CITIZEN OF A RES PUBLICA, NOT PEOPLES OF A HISTORIC NATION

Paleoconservatism’s political subject is typically a historic American (often “White” Anglo-Protestant or “Western”) people whose continuity is threatened by mass immigration, multiculturalism, and elite social engineering. The alt-right makes that subject explicitly ethnic or racial. Much of the post-right keeps the civilizational or national “we” while discarding liberal proceduralism, sometimes flirting with Caesarism, executive will, or post-constitutional rule.

The republican tradition’s emphasis is on the citizen formed for non-domination, or as someone who must not live at another’s arbitrary will; and who is capable of civic virtue, mixed government, and a common good. If the person does not believe or have faith in the development of this form of citizen, they cannot carry the inherited tradition. Since they cannot, they try to worm around it, hence the focus on an “older order.” The classical republican tradition also represents an “old order” without such constraints as developed by monarchy and so forth. If it is merely the romanticization of “tradition” against “modernity,” then why solely advocate the return to the principles of monarchy, feudalism, etc?

Solidarity and Association is civic and universalizable in the republican philosophy, not ethnically proprietary. It is because of this, that much attention is given to early Black republicanism (Wheatley, Walker, Douglass, Haitian republican practice) before Bolshevik capture, and why it is important to demonstrate the argument of classical republicanism and Stoicism against an order or worldview built upon racial hierarchism. A project that treats Black civic republicanism as internal to the tradition cannot be an ethnic-right project with a civic veneer.

DIFFERENT CONSTITUTION: RESTRAIN AND MIXED GOVERNMENT, NOT WILL

The post-right and alt-right currents no longer stand inside the tradition they invoke. They treat the Constitution as an instrument when useful and an obstacle when not; and they elevate national particularism, executive will, or cultural loyalty above equal citizenship and institutional restraint. That is the opposite of the republican grammar we should recover, such as the design of our eclectic political philosophy and mixed constitution, rule of law, suspicion of any unaccountable will whether a populist executive or a Red Caesar. Paleocons often still talk “republic,” but the living emphasis is usually cultural continuity and limits on the demos of outsiders. Alt-right and much post-right talk often drops even that restraint, as opposed to the older republican fear of both oligarchy and domination by a leader or faction.

DIFFERENT ANTHROPOLOGY: VIRTUE AND NON-DOMINATION, NOT TRADITIONAL HIERARCHY

Paleoconservatism tends to defend the inherited social forms of family, sex roles, local custom, Christian morals, sometimes hierarchy as natural. The alt-right treats inequality and identity as political first principles. Post-liberal and post-right thinkers often argue that liberal modernity itself is a disease and that a deeper religious or civilizational order must replace it.

Our views are traditional, only in that we want an older civic tradition restored and then further worked for and developed for the sake of that tradition, rather than its subordination to ideologies that claim to supersede it yet possess not even a half of its potentiality and philosophy. It is like when a child picks up a book, does not see pictures and drops the book. Political systems have increasingly become treated as such in a large market of ideas. Like a librarian, or a researcher, we must be willing to go back to an older book or idea, that may have already been capable of providing the solution to our current stagnation. So, this is not about “pure traditionalism.” A recovery of the republican inheritance of our system is distanced from the underlying intent of Christian nationalism, serves as an antidote to totalist nationalisms, and is distant from the expectation that feudal-technocrats, oligarchs or strongmen will save the republic. It is not up to them. Freedom is not emancipation from structure (Left) and not restoration of a sacralized inherited hierarchy (Right). It is independence from arbitrary power plus the formation of character that makes self-government possible. That is why the vacuum on the Right is the missing moral anthropology of the citizen. Culture-war aesthetics and “socialism” as a scare word do not supply it.

DIFFERENT RELATIONSHIP TO LIBERALISM

There is a difference between an anti-liberal orientation and honest critique of liberalism, and the pattern historically in the past couple centuries veered often towards authoritarian, absolutist ideology and totalist nationalisms. The Right is capable of monitoring and warning about the patterns of thinking in their political opposition but are blind to their own patterns. Paleoconservatism was often pre- or anti-liberal in mood even when it used Founding language: particular nation first, universal rights second. We are able to critique liberalism, but we are not anti-liberal nor limited by liberalism (classical and modern). Alt-right and large parts of the post-right are openly post-liberal and carry an anti-liberal zealotry that has not waned in over a decade. We want pre-liberal and liberal republicanism together: Cicero and the mixed constitution and the American Founding at its civic-republican strongest, Mazzini and an understanding of ordered liberty, not a leap into anti-liberal regime theory. We must reject reducing that inheritance to libertarian non-interference, but also refuse to treat constitutional limits, formal equality, and private property as original sins or as disposable tools. That double refusal is what separates this recovered ideal from both democratic socialism and the post-liberal Right.

DIFFERENT USE OF “THE WEST” AND OF HISTORY

Paleo/alt/post-right discourse often turns “Western civilization” into a civilizational fortress to defend a people and a faith-complex against replacement. Our emphasis on the metaphor of “Atlases” is archival and formative, because Atlas holds up the weight so a kosmos of ordered liberty can exist, making the work a recovery of lineages across continents and centuries, including Italian republicanism, Black classicists, and comparative civic currents. The point is not to police a civilizational border. It is to keep a practice of non-domination from collapsing into museum history or party property.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE POLITIICAL RIGHT AND AN ACTUAL REPUBLICAN RECOVERY