Vox - Paleoconservatism, the movement that explains Donald Trump

But the ideological vision Trump put forward during the Republican primary campaign was deeply conservative, and, more specifically, deeply paleoconservative. The paleoconservatives were a major voice in the Republican Party for many years, with Pat Buchanan as their most recent leader, and pushed a line that is very reminiscent of Trumpism.

They adhere to the normal conservative triad of nationalism, free markets, and moral traditionalism, but they put greater weight on the nationalist leg of the stool — leading to a more strident form of anti-immigrant politics that often veers into racism, an isolationist foreign policy rather than a hawkish or dovish one, and a deep skepticism of economic globalization that puts them at odds with an important element of the business agenda.

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The '90s anti-immigrant panic, and the era's high-profile trade deals, made Buchanan and the paleocons' views on those issues appealing to base Republicans tired of pro-trade, pro-migration GOPers. Mainstream conservatives attacked Buchanan as an anti-Semite, which he is; in 1990 he infamously insisted that 850,000 Jews couldn't have died at Treblinka from diesel fumes. But it wasn't enough to keep him from winning the 1996 New Hampshire primary and emerging as Bob Dole's most serious opposition that year.

After Buchanan's loss then, and turn to the Reform Party in 2000, the paleocon movement descended into irrelevance — and, worse, more open bigotry than ever before. John Derbyshire, perhaps the last real paleocon left at National Review, was canned in 2012 after writing a piece addressed to children full of advice like, "Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally," "Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods," and, "If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date."