Meritocracy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Meritocracy (merit, from Latin mereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos "strength, power") is a political philosophy which holds that certain things, such as economic goods or power, should be vested in individuals on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than factors such as sexuality, race, gender, or wealth. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement. Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the term itself was first created in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Young. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first use in 1956 and gives this citation. "1956 A. Fox in Socialist Comm. May 13/1 The ‘meritocracy’; the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance." Young's entry is listed as "1958 M. Young Rise of Meritocracy iv. 71 Before the meritocracy was fully established, age-stratification as a substitute for the hereditary order may have been necessary for the sake of social stability."

Definitions

Early definitions

The "most common definition of meritocracy conceptualizes merit in terms of tested competency and ability, and most likely, as measured by IQ or standardized achievement tests." In government and other administrative systems, "meritocracy" refers to a system under which advancement within the system turns on "merits", like performance, intelligence, credentials, and education. These are often determined through evaluations or examinations.

In a more general sense, meritocracy can refer to any form of evaluation based on achievement. Like "utilitarian" and "pragmatic", the word "meritocratic" has also developed a broader connotation, and is sometimes used to refer to any government run by "a ruling or influential class of educated or able people."

This is in contrast to the original, condemnatory use of the term in 1958 by Michael Young in his work "The Rise of the Meritocracy", who was satirizing the ostensibly merit-based Tripartite System of education practiced in the United Kingdom at the time; he claimed that, in the Tripartite System, "merit is equated with intelligence-plus-effort, its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications."

Meritocracy in its wider sense, may be any general act of judgment upon the basis of various demonstrated merits; such acts frequently are described in sociology and psychology. Supporters of meritocracy do not necessarily agree on the nature of "merit"; however, they do tend to agree that "merit" itself should be a primary consideration during evaluation. Thus, the merits may extend beyond intelligence and education to any mental or physical talent or to work ethic. As such meritocracy may be based on character or innate abilities. Meritocrats therefore reject evaluation on the basis of race, wealth, family circumstances, and similar criteria.

In rhetoric, the demonstration of one's merit regarding mastery of a particular subject is an essential task most directly related to the Aristotelian term Ethos. The equivalent Aristotelian conception of meritocracy is based upon aristocratic or oligarchical structures, rather than in the context of the modern state.

More recent definitions

In the United States, the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 prompted the replacement of the American Spoils System with a meritocracy. In 1883, The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed, stipulating government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit through competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation.

The most common form of meritocratic screening found today is the college degree. Higher education is an imperfect meritocratic screening system for various reasons, such as lack of uniform standards worldwide, lack of scope (not all occupations and processes are included), and lack of access (some talented people never have an opportunity to participate because of the expense, most especially in developing countries). Nonetheless, academic degrees serve some amount of meritocratic screening purpose in the absence of a more refined methodology. Education alone, however, does not constitute a complete system, as meritocracy must automatically confer power and authority, which a degree does not accomplish independently.

Etymology

Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" is relatively new. It was used pejoratively by British politician and sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else, being the combination of the root of Latin origin "merit" (from "mereō" meaning "earn") and the Ancient Greek suffix "-cracy" (meaning "power", "rule"). (The purely Greek word is axiocracy (αξιοκρατία), from axios (αξιος, worthy) + "-cracy" (-κρατία, power).) In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group. The essay, written in the first person by a fictional historical narrator in 2034, interweaves history from the politics of pre- and post-war Britain with those of fictional future events in the short (1960 onward) and long term (2020 onward).

The essay was based upon the tendency of the then-current governments, in their striving toward intelligence, to ignore shortcomings and upon the failure of education systems to utilize correctly the gifted and talented members within their societies.

Young's fictional narrator explains that, on the one hand, the greatest contributor to society is not the "stolid mass" or majority, but the "creative minority" or members of the "restless elite". On the other hand, he claims that there are casualties of progress whose influence is underestimated and that, from such stolid adherence to natural science and intelligence, arises arrogance and complacency. This problem is encapsulated in the phrase "Every selection of one is a rejection of many".

It was also used by Hannah Arendt in her essay "Crisis in Education", which was written in 1958 and refers to the use of meritocracy in the English educational system. She too uses the term pejoratively. It was not until 1972 that Daniel Bell used the term positively.

History

Ancient times: China

According to scholarly consensus, the earliest example of an administrative meritocracy, based on civil service examinations, dates back to Ancient China. The concept originates, at least by the sixth century BC, when it was advocated by the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who "invented the notion that those who govern should do so because of merit, not of inherited status. This sets in motion the creation of the imperial examinations and bureaucracies open only to those who passed tests."

As the Qin and Han dynasties developed a meritocratic system in order to maintain power over a large, sprawling empire, it became necessary for the government to maintain a complex network of officials. Prospective officials could come from a rural background and government positions were not restricted to the nobility. Rank was determined by merit, through the civil service examinations, and education became the key for social mobility. After the fall of the Han Dynasty, the nine-rank system was established during the Three Kingdoms period.

According to the Princeton Encyclopedia on American History:

One of the oldest examples of a merit-based civil service system existed in the imperial bureaucracy of China. Tracing back to 200 B.C., the Han Dynasty adopted Confucianism as the basis of its political philosophy and structure, which included the revolutionary idea of replacing nobility of blood with one of virtue and honesty, and thereby calling for administrative appointments to be based solely on merit. This system allowed anyone who passed an examination to become a government officer, a position that would bring wealth and honor to the whole family. In part due to Chinese influence, the first European civil service did not originate in Europe, but rather in India by the British-run East India Company... company managers hired and promoted employees based on competitive examinations in order to prevent corruption and favoritism.

Both Plato and Aristotle advocated meritocracy, Plato in his The Republic, arguing that the most wise should rule, and hence the rulers should be philosopher kings.

17th century: spread to Europe

The concept of meritocracy spread from China to British India during the seventeenth century, and then into continental Europe and the United States. With the translation of Confucian texts during the Enlightenment, the concept of a meritocracy reached intellectuals in the West, who saw it as an alternative to the traditional ancient regime of Europe. Voltaire and François Quesnay wrote favourably of the idea, with Voltaire claiming that the Chinese had "perfected moral science" and Quesnay advocating an economic and political system modeled after that of the Chinese.

The first European power to implement a successful meritocratic civil service was the British Empire, in their administration of India: "company managers hired and promoted employees based on competitive examinations in order to prevent corruption and favoritism." British colonial administrators advocated the spread of the system to the rest of the commonwealth, the most "persistent" of which was Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, China. Meadows successfully argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China, published in 1847, that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic. This practice later was adopted in the late nineteenth century by the British mainland, inspired by "Chinese mandarin system."

The British philosopher and polymath John Stuart Mill advocated meritocracy in his book, Considerations on Representative Government. His model was to give more votes to the more educated voter. His views are explained in Estlund (2003:57–58):

Mill's proposal of plural voting has two motives. One is to prevent one group or class of people from being able to control the political process even without having to give reasons in order to gain sufficient support. He calls this the problem of class legislation. Since the most numerous class is also at a lower level of education and social rank, this could be partly remedied by giving those at the higher ranks plural votes. A second, and equally prominent motive for plural voting is to avoid giving equal influence to each person without regard to their merit, intelligence, etc. He thinks that it is fundamentally important that political institutions embody, in their spirit, the recognition that some opinions are worth more than others. He does not say that this is a route to producing better political decisions, but it is hard to understand his argument, based on this second motive, in any other way.

So, if Aristotle is right that the deliberation is best if participants are numerous (and assuming for simplicity that the voters are the deliberators) then this is a reason for giving all or many citizens a vote, but this does not yet show that the wiser subset should not have, say, two or three; in that way something would be given both to the value of the diverse perspectives, and to the value of the greater wisdom of the few. This combination of the Platonic and Aristotelian points is part of what I think is so formidable about Mill's proposal of plural voting. It is also an advantage of his view that he proposes to privilege not the wise, but the educated. Even if we agreed that the wise should rule, there is a serious problem about how to identify them. This becomes especially important if a successful political justification must be generally acceptable to the ruled. In that case, privileging the wise would require not only their being so wise as to be better rulers, but also, and more demandingly, that their wisdom be something that can be agreed to by all reasonable citizens. I turn to this conception of justification below.

Mill's position has great plausibility: good education promotes the ability of citizens to rule more wisely. So, how can we deny that the educated subset would rule more wisely than others. But then why shouldn't they have more votes?

Estlund goes on to criticize Mill's education-based meritocracy on various grounds.

19th century

In the United States, the federal bureaucracy used the Spoils System from 1828 until the assassination of United States President James A. Garfield by a disappointed office seeker in 1881 proved its dangers. Two years later in 1883, the system of appointments to the United States Federal Bureaucracy was revamped by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, partially based on the British meritocratic civil service that had been established years earlier. The act stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit, through competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. It also made it illegal to fire or demote government employees for political reasons.

To enforce the merit system and the judicial system, the law also created the United States Civil Service Commission. In the modern American meritocracy, the president may hand out only a certain number of jobs, which must be approved by the Senate.

Australia began establishing public universities in the 1850s with the goal of promoting meritocracy by providing advanced training and credentials. The educational system was set up to service urban males of middle-class background, but of diverse social and religious origins. It was increasingly extended to all graduates of the public school system, those of rural and regional background, and then to women and finally to ethnic minorities. Both the middle classes and the working classes have promoted the ideal of meritocracy within a strong commitment to "mate-ship" and political equality.

20th century to today

Singapore describes meritocracy as one of its official guiding principles for domestic public policy formulation, placing emphasis on academic credentials as objective measures of merit.

There is criticism that, under this system, Singaporean society is being increasingly stratified and that an elite class is being created from a narrow segment of the population. Singapore has a growing level of tutoring for children, and top tutors are often paid better than school teachers. Defendants recall the ancient Chinese proverb "Wealth does not pass three generations" (Chinese: 富不过三代), suggesting that the nepotism or cronyism of elitists eventually will be, and often are, replaced by those lower down the hierarchy.

Singaporean academics are continuously re-examining the application of meritocracy as an ideological tool and how it's stretched to encompass the ruling party's objectives. Professor Kenneth Paul Tan at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy asserts that "Meritocracy, in trying to 'isolate' merit by treating people with fundamentally unequal backgrounds as superficially the same, can be a practice that ignores and even conceals the real advantages and disadvantages that are unevenly distributed to different segments of an inherently unequal society, a practice that in fact perpetuates this fundamental inequality. In this way, those who are picked by meritocracy as having merit may already have enjoyed unfair advantages from the very beginning, ignored according to the principle of nondiscrimination."

Meritocracy in the Singaporean context relates to the application of pragmatism as an ideological device which combines strict adherence to market principles without any aversion to social engineering and little propensity for classical social welfarism, is further illustrated by Kenneth Paul Tan in subsequent articles:

There is a strong ideological quality in Singapore's pragmatism, and a strongly pragmatic quality in ideological negotiations within the dynamics of hegemony. In this complex relationship, the combination of ideological and pragmatic maneuvering over the decades has resulted in the historical dominance of government by the PAP in partnership with global capital whose interests have been advanced without much reservation.

Within the Ecuadorian Ministry of Labor, the Ecuadorian Meritocracy Institute was created under the technical advice of the Singaporean government.

Most contemporary political theorists, including John Rawls, reject the ideal of meritocracy. However, in recent years, Thomas Mulligan has defended meritocracy. He argues that a just society is one in which there is equal opportunity and people are judged on their merits.

Modern meritocratic movements

The Meritocracy Party

In 2007 an anonymous British group called The Meritocracy Party published its first manifesto, to which they have now added more than two million words on the subject (discussing Hegel, Rousseau, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and various other philosophers, scientists, reformers, and revolutionaries). In summary, The Meritocracy Party wants to achieve the following:

1. A world in which every child gets an equal chance to succeed in life.
2. The abolishment of party politics.
3. Only those with a relevant education and work experience should be allowed to vote, rather than just anyone who has reached the age of 18 or 21.
4. The introduction of 100% inheritance tax, so that the super-rich can no longer pass on their wealth to a select few (their privileged children). This would mean the end of the elite dynasties and hereditary monarchy.
5. A radically reformed educational system, based on the MBTI personality types, and insights from radical innovators such as Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori.
6. To replace free market capitalism with social capitalism and to replace democracy with a fully transparent meritocratic republic, under a meritocratic constitution.
7. The end of nepotism, cronyism, discrimination, privilege and unequal chances.

On their website The Meritocracy Party lists five meritocratic principles and thirteen primary aims. The Meritocracy International is the host of all meritocratic political parties in the world and the place where these may be found by country of origin.

Criticism

The term "meritocracy" was originally intended as a negative concept. One of the primary concerns with meritocracy is the unclear definition of "merit". What is considered as meritorious can differ with opinions as on which qualities are considered the most worthy, raising the question of which "merit" is the highest—or, in other words, which standard is the "best" standard. As the supposed effectiveness of a meritocracy is based on the supposed competence of its officials, this standard of merit cannot be arbitrary and has to also reflect the competencies required for their roles.

The reliability of the authority and system that assesses each individual's merit is another point of concern. As a meritocratic system relies on a standard of merit to measure and compare people against, the system by which this is done has to be reliable to ensure that their assessed merit accurately reflects their potential capabilities. Standardized testing, which reflects the meritocratic sorting process, has come under criticism for being rigid and unable to accurately assess many valuable qualities and potentials of students. Education theorist Bill Ayers, commenting on the limitations of standardized testing, writes that "Standardized tests can't measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes. What they can measure and count are isolated skills, specific facts and function, content knowledge, the least interesting and least significant aspects of learning." Merit determined through the opinionated evaluations of teachers, while being able to assess the valuable qualities that cannot be assessed by standardized testing, are unreliable as the opinions, insights, biases, and standards of the teachers vary greatly. If the system of evaluation is corrupt, non-transparent, opinionated or misguided, decisions regarding who has the highest merit can be highly fallible.

The level of education required in order to become competitive in a meritocracy may also be costly, effectively limiting candidacy for a position of power to those with the means necessary to become educated. An example of this was Chinese student self-declared messiah, Hong Xiuquan, who despite ranking first in a preliminary, nationwide imperial examination, was unable to afford further education. As such, although he did try to study in private, Hong was ultimately noncompetitive in later examinations and unable to become a bureaucrat. This economic aspect of meritocracies has been said to continue nowadays in countries without free educations, with the Supreme Court of the United States, for example, consisting only of justices who attended Harvard or Yale and generally only considering clerkship candidates who attended a top-five university, while in the 1950s the two universities only accounted for around one fifth of the justices. Even if free education were provided, the resources that the parents of a student are able to provide outside of the curriculum, such as tutoring, exam preparation, and financial support for living costs during higher education will influence the education the student attains and the student's social position in a meritocratic society. This limits the fairness and justness of any meritocratic system.

Another concern regards the principle of incompetence, or the "Peter Principle". As people rise in a meritocratic society through the social hierarchy through their demonstrated merit, they eventually reach, and become stuck, at a level too difficult for them to perform effectively; they are promoted to incompetence. This reduces the effectiveness of a meritocratic system, the supposed main practical benefit of which is the competence of those who run the society.

In his book Meritocratic Education and Social Worthlessness (Palgrave, 2012), the philosopher Khen Lampert argued that educational meritocracy is nothing but a post-modern version of social Darwinism. Its proponents argue that the theory justifies social inequality as being meritocratic. This social theory holds that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is a model, not only for the development of biological traits in a population, but also as an application for human social institutions—the existing social institutions being implicitly declared as normative. Social Darwinism shares its roots with early progressivism, and was most popular from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II. Darwin only ventured to propound his theories in a biological sense, and it is other thinkers and theorists who have applied Darwin's model normatively to unequal endowments of human ambitions.

Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article describes ideological and practical differences between neoconservatism and paleoconservatism, the two branches of the American conservative political movement. Representatives of each faction often argue that the other does not represent true conservatism. Disputed issues include immigration, trade, the United States Constitution, taxation, budget, business, the Federal Reserve, drug policy, foreign aid and the foreign policy of the United States.

Conflict of values

Pat Buchanan is a leading example of paleoconservatism

The phrase Paleoconservative ("old conservative") was originally a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder used in the 1980s to differentiate traditional Conservatives from Neoconservatives and Straussians. Pat Buchanan calls Neoconservatism "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology". The Paleoconservatives argue that the "Neocons" are illegitimate interlopers in the Conservative movement.

The roots of this conflict predate both the Paleocons or the Neocons, which both came to prominence in the 1970s and '80s. In 1950, essayist Lionel Trilling said that liberalism is the "sole intellectual tradition" in the United States. He dismissed Old Right conservatives as expressing "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas". Three years later, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind challenged this thesis by arguing that American Conservatism had a long and distinguished pedigree in the history of ideas.

Former Dep. Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is considered to be^{[weasel words]} one of the most influential neoconservatives of the 21st century.

The Neoconservative movement, as it rose in the 1970s, articulated a different vision from the Old Right. While Neoconservatives were not opposed to the New Deal as were the Old Right, they thought the subsequent developments in the Great Society and the New Left went too far. Neoconservatives embraced an interventionist foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. They espoused especially strong support for Israel and believe the United States should help ensure the security of the Jewish state.

In 1972, James Burnham commented that the Neoconservatives still clung to "what might be called the emotional gestalt of liberalism, the liberal sensitivity and temperament." He said they substituted abstractions about "compassion, kindliness, love and brotherhood" for indispensable civic virtues. These were "courage, duty, discipline, and especially self-discipline, loyalty, endurance, [and] yes, patriotism."

In a feature article called "The Democracy Boosters" in the March 24, 1989 issue of National Review, Claes G. Ryn warned of the uncritical advocacy of democracy and abstract universalist principles among so-called Conservatives, including Michael Novak, Allan Bloom, Ben Wattenberg, and Richard John Neuhaus. These sentiments, Ryn argued, were more akin to leftism than to Conservatism. In the ensuing controversy Ryn was attacked at length in National Review by the democratic socialist Sidney Hook, as well as by others aligning themselves with the exceptional notion that America is called by history to advance its principles in the world. In 1991 Ryn argued in a book, The New Jacobinism, that Neoconservatism bears a close resemblance to the ideas behind the French Revolution. The French Jacobins of the late 1700s appointed France the agent of universal principles; the new Jacobins of the late 1900s had similarly selected the United States for the task of transforming the world. Ryn thus warned of the dangers of ideological imperialism.

The late Samuel T. Francis, a leading Paleoconservative intellectual and a white supremacist, wrote that during this time,

Old Conservatives who welcomed the Neocons into their ranks soon found that their new allies often displayed the habit of telling them what was and what was not "permissible" to say and how to say it. Criticism of the New Left and domestic communism was fine, but what the Neo-Conservatives regarded as "McCarthyism"—calling for restoration of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, for example, or the FBI's domestic security functions—was not respectable. Criticizing affirmative action was also acceptable, but criticism of unconstitutional civil rights legislation, the Civil rights movement, or Martin Luther King Jr. was not respectable. Old Conservative heroes like Joseph McCarthy, Douglas MacArthur, Charles Lindbergh, Robert A. Taft, and even Barry Goldwater tended to disappear or earn scorn in Neoconservative journals, while Harry Truman, George Marshall, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry Jackson developed into idols before whom conservatives were supposed to bend the knee. Almost none of the Neo-Conservatives showed any interest in American constitutional principles or federalist and states' rights issues and arguments based on constitutionalism were muted in favor of the "empirical" arguments drawn from disciplines like sociology and political science in which Neoconservative academics tended to concentrate.

Paleo historian Thomas Woods elaborated on the divergence in the Conservative movement, and the ascent of the Neoconservatives, and their distinguishing features from more traditional Conservatives:

The Conservative’s traditional sympathy for the American South and its people and heritage, evident in the works of such great American Conservatives as Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk, began to disappear... [T]he Neocons are heavily influenced by Woodrow Wilson, with perhaps a hint of Theodore Roosevelt. ... They believe in an aggressive U.S. presence practically everywhere, and in the spread of democracy around the world, by force if necessary. ... Neoconservatives tend to want more efficient government agencies; Paleoconservatives want fewer government agencies. [Neoconservatives] generally admire President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his heavily interventionist New Deal policies. Neoconservatives have not exactly been known for their budget consciousness, and you won't hear them talking about making any serious inroads into the federal apparatus.

In discussing Neoconservatives' distinctive positions on state power, Irving Kristol wrote in 2003:

Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable... People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional Conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of de Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.

What made the Neoconservative movement so potent was the number of influential intellectuals who attained positions of power in the government and media. Paul Gottfried argued that the neocons funded their efforts using funding originally intended to fight the New Deal or the Great Society. Kristol remarked that "one can say that the historical task and political purpose of Neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American Conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of Conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."

By comparison, the Paleocons were marginalized. Samuel Francis wrote,

Contemporary Paleoconservatism developed as a reaction against three trends in the American Right during the Reagan administration. First, it reacted against the bid for dominance by the Neoconservatives, former Liberals who insisted not only that their version of Conservative ideology and rhetoric prevail over those of older Conservatives, but also that their team should get the rewards of office and patronage and that the other team of the older Right receive virtually nothing.

Francis also argued that many on the Left misunderstood both the Neocons and Paleocons, as well as the conflict between the two. He said they disregarded the Paleocons' critiques and over-emphasized the influence of Leo Strauss on the Neocons:

This silence about the Paleocons was the result, in part, of the abysmal ignorance of the writers of most such articles but also of the hidden purpose that lurked beneath much of what they wrote. That purpose was not so much to "deconstruct" and "expose" the Neocons as to define them as the real Conservative opposition, the legitimate (though deplorable and vicious) "right" against which the polemics and political struggle of the left should be directed. The reason the left prefers the neocon "right" to a paleo alternative is, quite simply, that the neocons are essentially of the left themselves and, thus, provide a fake opposition against which the rest of the left can shadowbox and thereby perpetuate its own political and cultural hegemony unchallenged by any authentic right.

Further, Francis also complained that the Neocons never fought the left with anything more than elegant reprimand. If they saw serious criticism in return, they issued charges of anti-Semitism. He also said that if "the point is to wipe out Israel's enemies," such as in the Iraq invasion, "the [neocon] Likudniks don't care about American casualties very much."

Claes Ryn places Neoconservatism in a larger historical and philosophical context. In America the Virtuous (2003) he argues that America's traditional civilization, specifically, its constitutionalism and liberty are rapidly eroding and that neoconservatives exemplify and aggravate this development. Their abstract moral principles, summarized as "virtue," constitute a break with older Western values. Though speaking in the name of America and patriotism and even Conservatism, the neoconservatives are replacing attachment to America's older religious, moral, intellectual and cultural traditions with a form of universalism that has roots in leftist thinking. Additionally, Ryn argues that what he terms “Neo-Jacobin imperialism” threatens to produce interminable wars and poses a serious threat to American constitutionalism.

Policy disputes

Trade

Neoconservative view: Neocons strongly support free trade as a way to spread American values throughout the world. Neocons also support globalization. Neocons believe in free market capitalism and believe in an open market and oppose tariffs.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons devoutly support fair trade. Paleocons support the Republicans old stance of tariffs and protectionism. They believe free trade has failed the American worker and American manufacturing companies. Paleocons claim the trade deficit has skyrocketed under free trade. They believe free trade agreements codify protectionist policies at the global level. Paleocons strongly oppose global legislation.

Immigration

Neoconservative view: Neocons support amnesty for illegal immigrants living in the United States, and support fixing and simplifying the legal immigration system. As such, President George W. Bush was open to giving amnesty to some illegal immigrants and supported the DREAM Act.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons oppose illegal immigration and sometimes support reducing or eliminating legal immigration for certain periods of time or from certain areas. Many Paleocons believe in building a fence/border wall along the U.S-Mexico Border. They believe the United States should enforce stricter border controls.

Foreign policy

Neoconservative view: Neocons call for an aggressive foreign policy that can include preemptive war. Neocons support Nation-building, even if it is done unilaterally. They also support a strong military and higher military spending. Neocons support a Wilsonian-type of foreign policy. Neocons believe that the United States should act as the "world police" to continue promoting democracy. This belief includes supporting and working with multi-national institutions such as NATO and the European Union.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons are Non-interventionists. Paleocons believe in going to war only if the United States is attacked or is directly threatened. This belief manifests itself as an opposition to multilateral alliances and institutions that the Paleoconservatives see as outside the United States' interests. Paleocons do agree with Neocons on a strong national defense, but Paleocons believe that the military budget does need to be cut down as it is too wasteful. Paleocons are also typically resistant to the idea of direct military intervention in the absence of existentially threatening circumstances. They are also very skeptical of multilateralism and supranational unions and support less involvement or complete withdrawal from NATO and the UN.

The constitution

Neoconservative view: Many Neocons believe that the Constitution can be changed at will and is a living document.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons believe that the Constitution is a document that is supposed to be interpreted the way and during the time it was written and that the Constitution is not to be violated. Paleocons could be referred to as "Constitutional Conservatives".

Size of the Federal Government

Neoconservative view: Neocons support cutting the size of federal agencies in terms of economic issues but support increases for the military.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons are strong supporters of a limited federal government. Paleocons support abolishing many government agencies to create a smaller federal government.

Taxation and budget

Neoconservative view: Neocons support tax cuts but tend to increase government and deficit spending, mainly due to military spending. Under George W. Bush, the deficit increased massively over a period of 8 years.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons support tax cuts and call to decrease government and deficit spending. Many Paleocons are budget "hawks". These are people who strongly support a balanced federal government.

Welfare

Neoconservative view: Neocons support mild forms of welfare. The first Neoconservatives supported the New Deal formulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression years.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons support dismantling welfare programs altogether.

Big business

Neoconservative view: Neocons massively support big business. Neocons support corporatism and corporate welfare.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons are skeptical of big business just like they are of big government. Paleocons support cutting corporate welfare because of their stance on government spending.

Federal reserve

Neoconservative view: Neocons support keeping the Federal Reserve in place.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons support abolishing the Fed and support bringing back a constitutional monetary system and the gold standard.

Drug policy

Neoconservative view: Neocons are against outright drug legalization and strongly support the War on Drugs.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons are also against outright drug legalization but oppose the War on Drugs. They see it as a waste of taxpayer money and believe it has failed to achieve the desired results.

Foreign aid

Neoconservative view: Neocons support giving foreign aid to other countries, as it furthers their goals of international democracy promotion.

Paleoconservative view: Paleocons oppose all forms of foreign aid to cut government spending, including supporting cuts to the State Department.

Politics and Jewish identity

Some Paleocons say they are honest Conservatives who were bullied and smeared by a corrupt ideology tied to Social democracy and globalism.

Historian Edward Shapiro, tracing the debate back to the 1960s, wrote that many Neoconservatives saw their new political philosophy within a specifically Jewish context. This became an element in the dispute with the Paleocons. He said that these neocons equated Conservatism with country club exclusion, racism, and the "Protestant hinterlands." They also considered the Burkean social order as a "premodern social order revered by Edmund Burke and the other pioneers of Conservative thought, a world which had ostracized Jews to the fringes of society." He continued:

"For the Jewish Neoconservatives, children and grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe, this was far too narrow a view of American culture. They emphasized the pluralism and openness of America and claimed that Americanism was less a matter of biological descent and European culture than of civic values and political ideology. Just as the neoconservatives stressed the ideological content of American diplomacy and asserted that American political ideology had well-nigh universal applicability, so they underscored the plastic character of American identity. Anyone was potentially a good American just as long as he or she affirmed the fundamental American political precepts of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. The Neoconservatives, the traditionalists responded, exaggerated the appeal of American political principles to the rest of the world, and they underestimated the powerful hold which culture has, or should have, on its citizens.

The Conservative War

1981: National Endowment for the Humanities

The beginning rift is often traced back to a dispute over the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities by the incoming Republican administration in 1981. Senator John East proposed literary scholar Mel Bradford, a former Dixiecrat. Bradford withdrew himself from consideration after Neoconservatives argued that his record of academic articles criticizing the actions and thought of Abraham Lincoln ill-suited a Republican nominee. They circulated quotes of Bradford calling Lincoln "a dangerous man," and saying, "The image of Lincoln rose to be very dark" and "indeed almost sinister."

Historian Paul Young described Bradford's view of Lincoln as follows:

Bradford cast all of Lincoln's life in the most sinister of terms. He gave Lincoln no credit for any intellectual or moral progression from his pronouncements in the 1840s to the years of the Civil War. Rather, Bradford freely juxtaposed the young Lincoln's comments on race and slavery, whether on the political hustings or otherwise, with his later statements and actions in order to convict him of hypocrisy. Neither did Bradford afford any consideration to the expediencies of politics; no sin by Lincoln could ever be justified by an appeal to political necessity. Bradford's Lincoln was a paragon of venality: hypocritical, corrupt, racist, unscrupulous, and duplicitous in his rhetoric. He was motivated by his own ambitions and thirst for power, provoking sectional conflict in order to attain his goals. Lincoln was guilty of war crimes for denying medicine to the South, complicit in the under rationing of his own troops, given to locking up political opponents in a "Northern 'Gulag,'" and, in general, an apt model for the twentieth-century dictator. Noting the dyspeptic Edmund Wilson's comparison of Lincoln to Bismarck and Lenin in Patriotic Gore (1962), Bradford added Hitler for good measure.

The Neoconservative choice, William Bennett, was nominated on November 13, 1981. Curiously, a few leaders, whom the Paleocons would later oppose, supported Bradford: Dan Quayle, William F. Buckley Jr., and Harry Jaffa. Former Bradford associate Thomas Landess wrote in 2003 that today's Neocons "are too busy running the world to tilt with Mel Bradford."

1983: The John Birch Society

Democratic congressman from Georgia Larry McDonald was elected second president of the John Birch Society upon the retirement of first president, Robert Welch. Shortly after, McDonald was reported killed when the passenger plane he had boarded to take him to the 30th year commemoration of the U.S.-S. Korea Mutual Defense Treaty, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, was shot down near Moneron Island by the Soviets. Three months earlier, McDonald had appeared as the guest of Pat Buchanan's Crossfire T.V. show, on which Buchanan and journalist Tom Braden discussed with him the John Birch Society's position with regards to the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and conspiracy. Speaking of the Rockefeller family, McDonald had written in the introduction of a book:

The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government, combining super-capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.

1986: Intercollegiate Review and Philadelphia Society

The real genesis of the Paleocons came in 1986 when the Paleoconservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute's journal Intercollegiate Review ran a "State of Conservatism" symposium. Some of the contributors complained about growing Neoconservative dominance. Historian Clyde Wilson wrote of being "crowded out by overwhelming numbers." Gregory Wolfe argued that true Conservative scholars valued "order and organic community, class and natural aristocracy" and considered "Christian belief as the foundation of morality and law."

Soon after, a Conservative group called the Philadelphia Society held a symposium on Neoconservatism at its 1986 annual meeting. Among the critics was historian Stephen Tonsor (who does not accept the paleo label), who said:

It has always struck me as odd, even perverse, that former Marxists have been permitted, yes invited, to play such a leading role in the Conservative movement of the twentieth century. 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.

Tonsor also argued that the movement divided "techniques from ends in an effort to maintain their cultural modernism while rejecting its social and political implications." He said it couldn't be done.

Neoconservatives are, as Irving Kristol remarked, "liberals who have been mugged by reality," but while they have been detached from their social and political myths they have not located themselves in a body of principle that makes life worth living, or that one would die defending.

1987: The Catholic University of America

Paul Gottfried says that Neoconservative lobbying kept him from a professorship in classical political theory at The Catholic University of America. David Frum claims this allegation is "relentlessly solipsistic." Gottfried described the incident as follows:

[In 1987,] Neocons denounced me to the authorities at Catholic University of America, on the grounds that I was "not safe on Israel," their flagrantly illogical argument: I had denied that Imperial Germany was principally to blame for the outbreak of World War One. Somehow this proved that I had denied the Holocaust, at least by indirection (never mind that it was the wrong German war!), and therefore I had to be against the Israelis (many of whose ancestors fought for the Central Powers in World War One—as did my own, Austrian Jewish forebears). Nevertheless, I still lost a graduate professorship.

Gottfried described Israel as "an ethnic national state with a constitutional government that offers legal protection to non-Jewish minorities." He said the country "should remain predominantly Jewish and that the U.S. and Europe should remain predominantly Euro-American—and I support whatever is necessary to achieve these objectives." He also argues that "American and European Zionists" insist that Jews "have a special inviolable right to an ethnic state, while Euro-American gentiles are expected to practice multiculturalism." He explained his position in the interview:

Clearly Jews outside of Israel have adopted a double standard about Jewish and gentile rights to national identity, but the Israeli government has not caused the problem. Israelis have not ordered Martin Peretz, Alan Dershowitz, and Abe Foxman to think and act in this hypocritical, malicious fashion. In my view, Jewish liberals and Neocons who favor both a Jewish right to ethnocentricity and a Euro-American obligation to have open borders and to exchange their traditional identities for "Human rights," have turned Paleocons against Israel.

1988: The Heritage Foundation

Russell Kirk found himself in the minority on December 15, 1988, when he gave a lecture at The Heritage Foundation. The title was "The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species." As Chronicles editor Scott Richert described it,

[One line] helped define the emerging struggle between Neoconservatives and Paleoconservatives. "Not seldom has it seemed," Kirk declared, "as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States." A few years later, in another Heritage Foundation speech, Kirk repeated that line verbatim. In the wake of the Gulf War, which he had opposed, he clearly understood that those words carried even greater meaning.

Neoconservative commentator Norman Podhoretz, called Kirk's line "a bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of Neoconservatives." She claimed that Kirk "said people like my husband and me put the interest of Israel before the interest of the United States, that we have a dual loyalty." She had previously denounced Joseph Sobran and the Intercollegiate Review symposium as anti-Semitic as well. She told The New Republic, "It's this notion of a Christian civilization. You have to be part of it or you’re not really fit to conserve anything. That's an old line and it's very ignorant."

Conversely, Paleocon Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among Neoconservatives." He called Decter's response untrue, "reckless" and "vitriolic." Furthermore, he argued that such a denunciation "always plays into the hands of the left, which is then able to repeat the charges and claim Conservative endorsement of them."

1989: The Rockford Institute

Another defining incident came on May 5, 1989, when the Rockford Institute fired Richard John Neuhaus, who went on to launch the religious journal First Things. One issue between them was that Neuhaus claimed that Chronicles, Rockford's magazine, tilted toward nativism and was "insensitive to the classic language of anti-Semitism." Allan Carlson, then Rockford's president, called the allegations "egregious and potentially damaging." Fourteen years later, Neuhaus called Chronicles "racist and anti-Semitic," joked about "Schadenfreude" and said he holds a "gala staff luncheon" every year to commemorate his termination.

John Judis, a left-wing author and journalist, described the incident:

Under the Rockford Institute's name and funding, Neuhaus published a regular newsletter out of his Center for Religion and Society in New York. But in March 1989, Neuhaus and Podhoretz took strong exception to two articles published in Rockford's glossy journal, Chronicles. In one of them, Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming called for stricter quotas to prevent the United States from "being dominated by Third World immigrants," and in the other, novelist Bill Kauffman defended Gore Vidal, who had earlier attacked Podhoretz for putting Israel's interests before America's. In a letter, Podhoretz wrote Neuhaus, "I know an enemy when I see one, and Chronicles has become just that so far as I am concerned." In May the Rockford Institute made the next move by locking Neuhaus out of the center and confiscating his files. When Neuhaus left, three foundations linked to the Neoconservatives, Olin, Smith Richardson, and Bradley, withdrew their funding for the Rockford Institute, costing an estimated $700,000 a year.

1990: The McLaughlin Group

Pat Buchanan's Paleoconservative views soon became a point of dispute. The major controversy began with the August 26, 1990 The McLaughlin Group television broadcast. He said that "there are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East—the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States"—and was accused of anti-Semitism.

1993: The National Review

A further event was the demotion and eventual firing in 1993 of Joseph Sobran from National Review, who had criticized American supporters of Israel. One such comment was that the New York Times "really ought to change its name to Holocaust Update." Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz vehemently objected to such writing, saying they were "anti-Semitic in themselves," His wife, Midge Decter, told Sobran she felt "shock and disgust—and contempt—at the discovery that you are little more than a crude and naked anti-Semite."

Sobran himself claimed that founder William F. Buckley told him to "stop antagonizing the Zionist crowd," and Buckley accused him of libel and moral incapacitation. Buckley had previously said that an outsider "might reasonably conclude that those [Israel] columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism." Before his firing, Sobran discussed the issue in National Review, saying:

I'm responding to an obsession—a more or less official national obsession with a tiny, faraway socialist ethnocracy, which, I agree, ought to be a very minor concern of American policy-makers, but isn't. The orthodox view that Israel is a "reliable ally" is so brittle that a single maverick can ignite a frenzy. The reason, I repeat, is not that critics of Israel are so numerous, but that even one, as far as Israel's claque is concerned, is one too many. There is the terrible danger that the public may be more interested in what he has to say than in the party line the rest of the chorus is emitting.

1997: The New York Post

Paleoconservative Scott McConnell was fired as the New York Post's editorial page editor on September 4, 1997 after writing editorials critical of Haitian immigration and Puerto Rican statehood. About the latter, he had cited statistics that "half the island's 3.7 million inhabitants receive Food Stamps" and "59.4 percent of Puerto Rican children born on the U.S. mainland are born to unwed mothers." He concluded:

We believe that the looming vote on Puerto Rico's status is yet another sign of how the congressional GOP has lost its way. The current leadership seems more interested in trying to placate the liberal Washington establishment—or hatching schemes it imagines are popular with minority voters—than in protecting the interests of the voters who elected it. This is a feckless way to guide America's destiny.

McConnell, an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, later remarked that "our society had developed an expected script of white Anglo contrition and apology... and that I had failed to follow it." He found himself replaced by John Podhoretz, who denounced him as a "very dangerous" sort of Conservative. About his former employer, he said:

When push comes to shove, Rupert Murdoch does not want any difference of opinion with the Hispanic community. So if you have to put on one side appeasing a growing demographic and on the other side a conservative principle having to do with the language and traditions of the United States, he falls clearly on the first side.

Two years after the incident, McConnell said he had changed his mind about Pat Buchanan and joined his campaign as an adviser. He once dismissed his presidential hopes as "not worth discussing." Soon he helped found The American Conservative.

A protracted conflict

The ongoing conflict

Since the end of the Cold War, the rift within the conservative movement has deepened with the neoconservatives' ascent and the paleoconservatives' marginalization. For example, there were no prominent paleoconservatives in the Bush administration. Charles Krauthammer called Paleoconservatism a "philosophical corpse" and "a mix of nativism, protectionism and isolationism." However, the Trump administration saw a resurgence in paleoconservatism, with Steve Bannon serving as White House Chief Strategist until his dismissal in August 2017, and Stephen Miller continuing to hold a prominent advisory post.

On domestic affairs, The Weekly Standard claimed that "the paleos' radical dissatisfaction with contemporary America could eventually veer into an anti-Americanism almost indistinguishable from the more familiar variety on the left." David Brooks, in the same magazine, claimed that the movement combines "high principle and bad-boy bravado," along with melding good ("longing for the old virtues") with bad ("race and sex roles"). He concluded that paleocons replace "the universalist ideas of the Founding" with "blood and soil." Brooks also described Pat Buchanan's campaign supporters as "people who thrived in the machine age" but who "are not going to thrive in the new economy."

Lew Rockwell once illustrated the depth of paleo/neo schism with the story of an encounter between a Paleocon and a Neocon. The Neocon complained that the Paleocon made an "insensitive remark" about AIDS and said, "How can you say that, when we all have so many close friends who have been struck down by this terrible disease?" The Paleo replied, "'Close friends?' I don't know anyone who has AIDS. I don't know anyone who knows anyone who has AIDS." After that, the Neocon stopped speaking to the Paleocon.

March 2003: The Crossfire

David Frum of National Review and Pat Buchanan of The American Conservative exchanged harsh words just before the Iraq War began. Buchanan wrote that Neocons influence the U.S. government toward the pursuit of global empire and the benefit of pro-Israel hawks. Frum charged that Paleocons have become unpatriotic, racist, and anti-Semitic. He also hinted that Paleocons were subversives, claiming they "made common cause with" international Islamists and "deny and excuse terror." (Though a year later, National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. described The American Conservative as "highly literate" and "wonderfully well edited.")

In his article, Buchanan wrote:

This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the Neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, "Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight."

Frum wrote that:

Having quickly decided that the War on Terror was a Jewish war, the Paleos equally swiftly concluded that they wanted no part of it. It's odd: 9/11 actually vindicated some of the things that the Paleos had been arguing, particularly about immigration and national cohesion. But the Paleos were in no mood to press their case. Instead, they plunged into apologetics for the enemy and wishful defeatism.

Beyond Paleo and Neocons

In 2003, Paleocon Clyde Wilson speculated that their critique of this "nasty little cabal" might be "belated and repetitive—a diversion from more fundamental problems," namely "a fatal defect of national character." He wrote that the Neocons are courtiers who saw "the chance presented by the vast gaping vacuum of ideas and principles that is the Republican Party." He concluded that Middle America is too willing to "clamber aboard" a GOP bandwagon "and hosanna their way down the road to perdition," instead of creating a populist replacement that might preserve "some semblance of civilized order and liberty."

In addition, while Paleos and Neos quarrel over Middle East policy, Paul Gottfried argued that domestic equality and the exportability of democracy are greater points of contention between them. He wrote that the neocons' call for "permanent revolution" exists independently of their beliefs about Israel, characterizing the Neos as "ranters out of a Dostoyevskian novel, who are out to practice permanent revolution courtesy of the U.S. government". He also said, "What bothers me is not what Israel is but the manner in which its well-wishers blatantly misrepresent it," Also, Paleos, while not wanting the US tied to Israel too strongly, freely disagree with one another about certain Israeli leaders. Pat Buchanan supported Yitzhak Rabin, while Gottfried, who criticizes "truculent [neoconservative] Zionism," admires Ariel Sharon.

Note, however, that not everyone associated with American conservatism can be easily sorted into neo or paleo categories. Prominent examples are Claes Ryn, John Lukacs and George Carey, who are strongly critical of neoconservatism but do not share the paleocon fondness for sociobiology, positivist social science or populism. The division into two camps also ignores that it might be possible to support the war in Iraq, for pragmatic rather than ideological or ethnic reasons, and yet support economic nationalism and immigration reform. Note further that paleos and neos both oppose the New Left, Marxism and Soviet Communism, especially Stalinism, and do not necessarily disagree on every political and cultural matter.