Steven M. Warshawsky's "Apparently I'm a Paleocon" raises the issue of what we conservatives should call ourselves.

Since the word "paleocon" is simply a 1980s rhetorical ploy meant to marginalize traditional conservatives -- used by former liberals like Irving Kristol, current social democrats, and standpatters like Fred Barnes, all now calling themselves "neocons" -- it really should be in every conservative's mental stylebook not to allow the word “paleo” to pass unchallenged. Ditto "neo."

"Paleo" is not only not a word in the American vernacular -- hence someone calling himself that will be regarded by Everyman as cultish -- but it also has defeat (aka "dinosaur") written all over it.

The Greeks taught that he who defines the terms of an argument -- or words allowed in an argument -- usually wins. Think of the enviros' rhetorical brilliance in naming "the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge" -- a wasteland populated with non-endangered mosquitoes and black flies and occasional non-endangered infrequently visiting caribou and wolves ... drilling oil in a place so named would seem ludicrous to Everyman. (It should be called "the so-called ANWR.")

Ditto with accepting "paleo" to describe ourselves. Unlike big government, social-engineering neocons, we are American conservatives rooted in American history (the Declaration, the Constitution) and received wisdom from Adam Smith libertarianism and Judeo-Christian traditionalism, each in codependence with each other -- a worldview far newer than the elitist, feudal worldview of the so-called neocons.

Jameson Campaigne is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union and lives in Ottawa, Illinois

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