Thread by @ClassicLibera12

Pat Buchanan's American H̶e̶r̶i̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ Ethnos and Paleoconservativism's Severing of the Universals of the Moral Order.

One of the many troubling issues with the Post-Liberal Right is their invocation and esteem of Pat Buchanan. This is one of the primary vectors of the Post-Liberal mystification of many a Normie conservatives...even ones that still do push back on the more radical ends of the Post-Liberal Right (like Fuentes).

Buchannan as it will be shown is a Conceptualist Motte and Bailey.

But in order to do this we have to establish the construction of Buchanan Motte and why many are so drawn to it.

Part 1: The Buchanan Motte, Shared Objective Reality and Universal Principles...but with a (Conceptualist) Twist

Upon reading Buchanan it is quite clear given his Christian background that like many a conservative he believes that:

1. There is an objective reality
2. God authored this reality (including Men)
3. There are universal moral principles

Example:
The Death of the West:

“Man is not self-created. He is the creature of a Creator who endowed him with a moral nature and placed him under divine and natural law.”

However as you keep digging you soon start to realize there might be some contradictions as he often speaks of the manmade establishment of culture, tradition, heritage, as either upholding the moral order or as being eroded or in decline.

This is because for Buchanan while Ordered Reality is authored by Man, the Moral Order while objectively real is authored not by God but instead by Man himself.

This is Abelardian Conceptualism

Example:

“America was born of a moral vision and a faith. If that faith dies, the nation dies. The fate of our civilization lies not in the stars but in ourselves.”
— Suicide of a Superpower, ch. 1

Pause

The time must be taken here to point out that reading Buchanan's second quote here is just expressing something rather self evident, though as you can see even in this quote his eyes move away from the Cosmos and towards the anthropological ground of Men.

Before straw man arguments can be posted let's make it abundantly clear here that in no way is it being positioned that without the moral vision and faith of Christianity and Classic American Liberalism that the fate of our country doesn't lie. It is objectively apparent alignment with these principles is a necessity for America's survival and prosperity...but NOT in the way Buchanan is smuggling in his Conceptualist framing.

The following concept is an often difficult one for many a conservative normie to wrangle with. The moral order as understood by both Christianity and Classic American Liberalism was authored independent of Man and is founded not on Man's actions but on his being.

There are very fundamental consequences to this.

If every single Jewish or Christian or Classic Liberal ceased to exist

...the moral order and the universal principles therein...would still objectively exist...

Because the moral order is bound to Man's being and even non-Jews, non-Christians and non-Classic Liberals are still bound by this being and thus can still access and know first principles.

Now is our society better served with reason and faith that know and understand reality in this way and act in accordance with it like Judaism, Christianity and Classic Liberalism? Yes of course.

Is our society worse off when society is bereft of reason and faith that aligns with this understanding of reality? Also yes.

So yes the actions of Man to align with the moral order is of course important, but Man's actions within the moral order are contingent against Man's own being.

Buchanan's metaphysics refutes Thomist and American universals and the disposition to usurp Authority (Authorship) of the moral order in the hands of Men like all his Conceptualist counterparts has consequences.

Part 2: The Bailey, Where Is Buchanan Getting His Conceptualist Ideas From? Answer, Oswald Spengler

It doesn't take long to pursue Buchanan and realize that he doesn't mention Abelard's Conceptualism as influential in thinking. This is not surprising Abelard hardly shows up anywhere in his own Conceptualist domain has he has been Dialectically laundered since the middle ages.

So where does he get it from?

Well in an act of transparency I can tell you I haven't looked too deeply into Edmund Burke but long have I squinted at him and see some of the signs of Abelard there though moderate.

However more striking is the influence of one Oswald Spengler.

One does not have far to look to find his direct influence on Buchanan.

Indeed Buchanan's book "Death of the West" can be seen as a spiritual continuation of Spengler's book "Decline of the West"...ever is the gnostic way to implicitly initiate new readers...

Spengler is operating non-coincidentally at the same time as his intellectual contemporaries Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger influences are rather straightforward and are also easy to tie back to Abelard. Through German Idealism itself. This means of course Nietzsche, Hegel, Fichte, Herder, and Kant.

This then will go back to Descartes, the Jesuits and eventually back to Abelard. Its the same source as all political adversaries of the West; Communism, Fascism/Nazism, Progressivism, and Post-Liberalism, Wokeness, etc...

When reading Spengler it is quite clear where he is deriving his understanding of ordered reality from and that Conceptualism and Nominalism underpin the worldview (amongst other lines of thought which we'll get too).

Spengler:

“Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it.” (Decline of the West, Vol. I)

Buchanan:

“Every great civilization is a unique creation with its own moral vision, its own understanding of right and wrong, its own heroes and saints.” (Suicide of a Superpower, ch. 1)

Here the Hegelianism stands out, each culture self-actualizes it's own "becoming".

But it gets worse...

Part 3: Enter Goethe, the Esoteric and Paganism

It turns out that Spengler was also influenced much by Nietzsche and Goethe...yes the same Goethe that influenced one Karl Marx.

Along with Hegel this means all three major lines of non-Christian esoteric thought run through Spengler into Buchanan. This being Hermeticism (Hegel), Occult Gnosticism (Goethe), and Paganism (Nietzsche, Herder). This is mostly done through Immanuel Kant who secularly reformulated Abelard as an apologetic Trojan Horse for Pantheism. While Kant is muted in this, Hegel is far more overt in this Esoteric smuggling operation.

In any case this is where Hermetic "becoming" is laundered and smuggled into Christian thought via Abelardian Conceptualism which on first glance has a Thomistic realist facade.

The Paganism is also interesting here as Spengler pretty much sets up the various "Cultures" of the world as a Pantheon of Gods each vying for Authority over the moral order. It should be noted that Carl Schmitt makes similar metaphysical claims which is par for the course of German based Volkish belief systems.

Part 4: Buchanan's "American Heritage", Culture, Tradition...Ethnos

Pat Buchanan’s concept of culture and traditionalism, expressed through the phrase “American Heritage,” rests on a Conceptualist metaphysics that he inherits—indirectly—from Abelard through Spengler and the Romantic–idealist lineage. Like Abelard, he believes universals are real, authored by God, yet they live in history only through acts of human understanding and will. Spengler secularized that structure by treating every civilization as a living organism—a culture-soul—whose people embody their metaphysical ideas through collective consciousness.

Buchanan baptizes that logic but joins it to an explicitly ethnic and historical realism: the American nation, descended from the Christian West and shaped by European civilization, gives temporal form to divine truth through its inherited moral and cultural traditions. In his view, American Heritage is not only faith and law but also lineage, language, memory, and custom—the lived continuity of a people who recognize themselves as heirs to the West’s spiritual order.

When he writes, “No civilization survives the loss of the faith that gave it birth,” or mourns that “the European peoples are dying,” Buchanan fuses Conceptualist participation with ethnic inheritance: universals must be both believed and embodied in a people’s historical flesh. Tradition, therefore, is not nostalgia but a metaphysical stewardship—a people’s recollection and re-affirmation of the truths they were formed to express.

“American Heritage” names that sacred continuity: the shared moral and ethnic consciousness through which a distinct people re-creates the divine order in time. It is both inheritance and authorship—God provides the moral universals, but the American people, as heirs of a particular civilizational lineage, keep them real through belief, family, and custom.

In this way, Buchanan’s traditionalism becomes a Conceptualist Ethnos: a cultural body where transcendent truths live through the ongoing faith, memory, and traditions of a historically defined people.

Part 5: Buchanan's Paleoconservativism is NOT American Conservativism

American Conservatism arose not from romantic nationalism or cultural traditionalism but from the moral realism of the early republic — a worldview grounded in Scottish Presbyterian moral philosophy, common sense realism, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of natural law.

It holds that reality and moral order are objective, stable, and divinely authored. God — or “Nature’s God,” as Jefferson phrased it — is the author of creation, and within that created order He has implanted a moral structure that reason can know. Virtue and vice are not conventions of culture but reflections of the permanent properties of human nature. Justice, prudence, courage, and temperance exist as unchanging excellences of being, and liberty is rooted in the ontological dignity of man as a rational creature made in God’s image.

Thus, moral and political truths are not contingent on national will or historical circumstance; they are universal and binding because they belong to the nature of man as man. The role of religion and education in this older conservatism was to cultivate virtue in accordance with those objective realities — to form citizens capable of recognizing and obeying natural law.

Culture was judged by its fidelity to that transcendent order, not by its mere continuity or ethnicity. The republic’s task, in this view, was to preserve the moral architecture of creation within human law and custom — a political application of metaphysical realism.

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Patrick Buchanan, by contrast, stands within a different metaphysical lineage — one shaped, though often unconsciously, by the Conceptualist and Idealist inheritance that runs from Abelard through Spengler. He affirms that moral universals originate in God, yet his vision of civilization depends on the collective assent and historical continuity of a particular people.

Truth, for Buchanan, does not simply endure by virtue of its eternal being; it endures because a people continues to believe it, remember it, and embody it. His concept of “American Heritage” names this participatory dynamic: the spiritual and ethnic community through which transcendent truths are kept alive in time. Where the older conservative realism viewed universals as fixed laws of nature accessible to all mankind, Buchanan treats them as living realities that survive only within the faith and traditions of a specific civilization — the Christian West, and most immediately, the American nation descended from it.

His moral vision therefore binds truth to cultural memory and religious will. The decline of the West, in his reading, is not merely a moral falling-away from natural law but an ontological fading — the death of belief itself, the exhaustion of the historical form that once housed divine order.

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The difference, then, is one of metaphysical emphasis. The classical conservative realist believes man discovers and submits to a moral reality that exists independently of him; the conceptualist traditionalist believes man must continually re-create and sustain that reality through faith, memory, and cultural continuity. In the first, being precedes will — the moral order stands whether men acknowledge it or not.

In the second, will and belief preserve being — the moral order remains present in history only so long as a people consents to embody it. The older conservatism sees the republic as the guardian of a universal law; Buchanan’s traditionalism sees the nation as the vessel of a particular soul. One defends the permanent things as reflections of divine reason; the other defends the inherited ways as the living form of divine truth.

The former is a conservatism of natural law; the latter is a conservatism of cultural faith. Both affirm God, virtue, and order — but the first locates them in the nature of reality itself be it God or Nature's God, while the second locates them in the collective memory and moral will of a historically distinct people, or rather Man himself.

If you are an American Conservative who believes in American principles and the Constitution it behooves you to know and understand the difference between conserving American Liberty and whatever it is Paleoconservativism is trying to transform America into "becoming"...which isn't American.

Our Constitutional Republic, our continued Liberty and the principles upon which it is founded upon depend on it.