Ross has replied to my my earlier post. There are several things I would like to say in response, but I want to start with his concluding point:

If the “old right” is ever going to be anything more than a sideshow in conservative politics, it needs to take its own beliefs about the limits of ideological thinking more seriously, and apply its criticisms of neoconservatives and liberals to its own leaders, writers, and institutions. Physician, heal thyself.

Of course, that is what some of us have been working on for many years now. This has been happening not only at this magazine since its inception, but has been a mark of “paleoconservatism at its best” for some time. We have not only provided outlets for dissident conservatives and libertarians of various stripes, but here at TAC in particular we have tried to bring in writers from across the spectrum to rethink conventional ideological categories, challenge our own prevailing views, and publish criticism of our own leaders. Comically, the intellectual curiosity and honesty that lead us to do these things are frequently used against us as proof of our “phony” conservatism and our supposed crypto-leftism. Considering how many more pressing issues there are to discuss, and considering how many more dangerous, powerful ideologies exist, it is remarkable that we spend as much time on this as we do.

It is disappointing but hardly surprising that Ross mostly glosses over all of this and has lumped all of us together with paleoconservatism “at its worst” as interpreted in the most polemical and hostile way. The “no-enemies-to-the-right” instinct that Ross denounces is actually proof of how sick most of us are of ideological purity tests. If we spent more time expelling undesirables, we would be having even more of the purity tests and outbreaks of factionalism that Ross claims are also proof of our ideological habits. In other words, there is no way for paleoconservatives to win this game: either we refuse to engage in purges, because we find ideological purity tests to be mind-numbing and petty exercises, or we engage in many more and impose all sorts of arbitrary standards of what people can and cannot say. One way or another, we will indict ourselves as ideologues according to Ross’ standards. Essentially, unless we wish to remain a “sideshow” we must become increasingly indistinguishable from the largely unimaginative, ideologically-stifled conservative movement that we have been criticizing for years for its lack of imagination and ideological mentality.

Ross wrote earlier in this post:

And finally, there’s the impulse to take an admirable principle — whether it’s Rand Paul’s staunch federalism or Pat Buchanan’s non-interventionism — and push it so far that people begin to doubt your intellectual judgment and your moral soundness alike.

Put another way, there is an impulse (by no means universally or equally shared) to question received wisdom from official American historiography that puts major events in U.S. history beyond any serious criticism. No doubt it would be more politically expedient and useful to offer no opinions on any major or controversial past event. What is worth noting here is that this stubborn insistence on revisiting old, settled debates is evidence that ideological thinking is not really one of our problems. Something that needs to be said here in this discussion is that principle is not ideology. Ideology exists first and foremost to acquire and justify the exercise of power, and this requires frequent, convenient forgetting and the superficial synthesizing of incompatible arguments. Nationalists are quite good at this: they can idolize political figures and causes centuries apart that are diametrically opposed to one another provided that they contributed in some way to an increase in the power of the nation, and they will likewise demonize very similar political figures and causes if they happen to be on the “wrong” side of the nationalist narrative at a particular time.

Ideologues try to craft “usable pasts” that facilitate the success of their present-day agenda. Probably nothing could be less “usable” or helpful to the cause of non-interventionism today than to argue that America should never have entered WWI and WWII because these wars did not serve American national security interests. If we non-interventionists were more ideologically-minded and therefore more flexible in our principles, we should have no difficulty pretending that entering these wars served the American interest and leave it at that, but there is the problem that many of us don’t think it is true. If we don’t think something is true, we have this incorrigible habit of saying so.

It might be worth having Ross provide some concrete examples of how paleoconservatives have been taking principles so far in relevant, current policy debates that he has begun to doubt our intellectual judgment and moral soundness.