The battles raging on the right since Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes are not new. They are a continuation of a conflict that goes back more than thirty years, to the era when conservatives faced watershed questions about what conservatism would mean in the post-Reagan and post–Cold War world. Controversies over anti-Semitism marked this debate from the very beginning.
The battle lines were drawn in the late 1980s and early ’90s between “paleoconservatives” led by Pat Buchanan on the one side and “neoconservatives,” whose leading figures were in many cases Jewish ex-liberals, on the other. They were at odds not only over foreign policy in general and America’s relationship with Israel and involvement in the Middle East in particular, but also over immigration, economics, and attitudes toward modernity and American history. They also had different interpretations of conservatism’s own history and meaning.
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