I was going to let the whole topic drop given that Alex and I appeared to be largely arguing over labels and semantics, and there are far more interesting things to argue about. But given that someone in the MSM is now echoing my theory that the moment is right for the rebirth of the Old Right, I’ve decided to revisit the whole idea.

Over at the Daily Beast, Lee Siegel, who appears to be a liberal commentator, issues Cassandra-like warnings to his fellow leftists to look out for the dreaded PaleoCon giant that’s about to rear its head! Says Siegel:

The Hollywood-averse Republicans are becoming contemporary masters of celebrity in the realm of politics. Sarah Palin, Beck, and Dobbs are imperfect, incremental steps toward the perfect Republican candidate. Even Obama’s eloquence is no match for their breathtakingly expressive one-dimensionality.

…

Neither Palin nor Dobbs has any type of political future—the former because of her ignorance and thin skin, the latter because of his bigot’s baggage. But if you surround Dobbs’ brain with Palin’s sensual warmth, add Beck’s acting skills, top it all off with the moderate-seeming polish of a Mitt Romney, and then throw in a dash of the new Newt Gingrich’s “ideas” and “skepticism” and “detachment,” you’ll have something like the populist Frankenstein that will, tragically, come to dominate American politics.

The decent populist sentiment that warily elected Obama is moving on, and it is becoming less and less decent as it hunts for his successor. The Democrats had better start learning what Ayn Rand knew, despite her foolish solipsism. They need to stand firm on simply stated principles. They need, in other words, to borrow celebrity’s idiom without its shallowness, to get heroically one-dimensional, and to start governing from the gut.

This is essentially what I said the other day, but with a much more welcoming tone of course, as I’d prefer to see the country re-embrace at least some of the principles of classical or small-c conservatism, including thrift, federalism, realism, and so forth. But Siegel and I are basically presenting the same idea in different ways. We both see the emergence of disparate groups of disaffected voters that are very angry, very energetic, and that have little in common other than a sort of modified version of classical conservatism. So you’ve got the Paulites, who are paleos on international affairs and who want devolution of power to the individual so that they can legalize everything. You’ve got the Dobbsians, who are paleos on immigration. You’ve got the Palinites, who want devolution of power to states and localities and who are otherwise movement conservatives. You’ve got the Beckians, who are like the Palinites, but with a paleo-esque suspicion of the coziness between large economic interests and government. And you’ve got the radical middle, which is increasingly skeptical of nation building and trade and shares the same concerns as the aforementioned groups, but just wants them addressed in a more moderate tone with lots of Newt-style solutions. Oh, and by the way, all of these groups hate the national debt. So essentially you’ve got a ready-made center-paleo-right majority in this country given the current climate, and all it lacks is a presidential candidate who can thread all of its factions together, all of which are disinclined to get along.

The fact that this is where all the energy is right now shouldn’t be surprising, as voters are essentially blaming the political assumptions of the last 15 years for our current problems. The Clinton-Bush premise was that if the US became more active in the world, developed economic and political relationships with the rest of the globe, opened its borders, kept taxes and regulations low (relative to the pre-Reagan era), maintained a strong relationship with Wall Street, and managed efficiently a strong federal government that called the shots on things like public education, the best possible society would be created. That’s because, said the Clintonites and the Bushies, America would get cheap goods and cheap labor from abroad, would end threats to our security by democratizing our adversaries, and would maintain healthy economic growth at home with a business/government partnership that essentially gave people the tools they needed to succeed and made it as easy as possible to do business, which would create jobs for everybody. It all seemed to make sense at the time. And it may yet be vindicated. But given the bleak outlook that exists today, it shouldn’t be surprising that internationalism, the federal government, and the nation’s large economic interests are getting the blame for our present situation.

Moreover, the election of a member of the Old Left as President of the United States in 2008, and the installation of a fellow PaleoLiberal as Speaker of the House, presiding over a Democratic supermajority in Congress, has ensured that big government and deficits and debt will join the pantheon of culprits to be rounded up and judged guilty by American voters. The Democratic government’s attempts to balloon an already unsustainable national debt once again awakened the sleeping giant of the radical middle, activated by Ross Perot in 1992, and again by the attempt to nationalize health care in 1993, a mistake that Democrats repeated this year, ensuring that the next revolution at the ballot box will be a conservative one, as the Independents who voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008 will go largely for Republicans in 2010.

So given that all the energy in the room is on the side of less internationalism, less federal power, less government debt, more distance between Washington and Wall Street, and a general desire for the elites/the powerful/special interests/whatever to get their comeuppance, it shouldn’t be surprising that many are predicting the emergence of a leader that, while not exactly a hard PaleoCon in the mold of Tom Tancredo, is at least more of a product of classical conservatism than of any of the other recent philosophies that have dominated American politics. No one is suggesting that Ron Paul or Lou Dobbs, both pseudo-paleos, are going to be president. But as Siegel suggested, a candidate with distinctly classical conservative sympathies, but who could express them in a temperate, constructive way, could probably unite the disaffecteds under a common banner and take the country. As of now, such a candidate doesn’t exist. But 2012 is still three years away.