Paleoconservatives are those conservatives that oppose the neoconservative elements of the American Right wing that dominate the New Right movement. It was born out of post-Cold War politics, and its members included former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, scholars like Mel Bradford and Paul Gottfried, and journalists like Samuel T. Francis and Thomas Flemming. They are mainly social conservatives that hold the opposite positions from neoconservatives on free trade, immigration, and foreign policy. That is, objectively speaking, what the paleoconservatives are.
I self-identify as paleoconservative because a number of my political positions overlap with theirs. I agree with them on the destructive effects of free trade, the wastefulness of overseas empire-building, and the problem of demographics. I also agree with them about the failure of mainstream conservatives to conserve the moral order of the American republic, how the mainstream conservatives have ceded to the left entirely on issues of gender, ethnicity, and race. The position of the modern Republican Party on those issues is to the Left of the 2009 Democrats on those issues.