| In a recent issue of The American Conservative, populist and conservative regionalist Caleb Stegall reviewed "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future" by Bill McKibben. Stegall describes an exchange in post-war Switzerland that shows historical contrasts in how different sides of the political spectrum approach human nature.
In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke's home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. "A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!" Mises noted disapprovingly. "Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness" was Röpke's rejoinder.
As a libertarian Democrat, I don't really fit in well with other libertarians or other Democrats. The reason, as I see it, is that most of today's political debate falls into two corners:
In one corner are the "vulgar libertarians" (As I call them) who believe that a free market means a corporate economy and that a corporate economy is a good thing.
In the other corner are traditional liberals and progressives who believe that a free market means a corporate economy and that a corporate economy is a bad thing.
I don't believe that a free market means a corporate economy, so I don't fit in well with either group. To me the real enemy are the "industrial authoritarians" (a term I love so much I'm stealing it from Glenn Smith) who realize that a free market wouldn't mean a corporate economy, and so corporations must support a host of politician candidates ranging from Rudy Giuliani to Hillary Clinton to maintain control. But I don't want that to be the focus of this diary. I want to focus on how these two views dominate the current American political debate.
What I've noticed recently is a rise of conservatives who seem to adopt the world view of the traditional left. They see a free market as a corporate economy and don't like it. Rod Dreher and his idea of "Crunchy Cons" was a first major voice in this growing "left-wing conservatism." While traditional liberalism and progressivism tends to turn to government as a force to restrain the corporate economy, these "left-wing conservatives" tend to place a greater emphasis on the rule of tradition. But they are also increasingly supporting a role of government as well.
Caleb Stegall outlines what he sees as necessary for the maintenance of a free society and the problems facing modern society:
The civic virtues associated with widespread ownership of land, decentralized systems of trade, commitment to the common good of one's tribe and the moral sturdiness of belonging to a tradition are necessary to the continued independence of a free people.
. . .
Because of this primary commitment to local and regional interests, culture and norms over national ideologies, this "folk" populism will not look like any one thing in particular, but rather like many things. It requires people who are rooted by a love of what T.S. Eliot called the "permanent things" and who are loyal above all to the tradition and membership of their "little platoons" - Edmund Burke's term for the small groups and associations to which each person belongs and which, in Burke's view, hold society together.
Folk populism requires people willing to make sacrifices to defend what they love from encroaching destruction via spaghetti-like superhighways, foreign entanglements, megacorporations and megachurches, technological developments, mass media and hypermobility.
All of these features of modernity are systems of control by other, less violent means. As Mr. Lasch cogently argued, they have the effect of harnessing and neutralizing populist discontent. How? By creating a cycle of dependence whereby local goods - intellectual, fiscal, cultural and generational capital (in the form of children) - are drawn into the maw of the centralized corporate-state. They are returned in the form of processed "goods" - products and services that prove to be remarkably habit-forming in a culture of dependency.
Here's how it works. Midwestern wheat farms are largely owned by massive agribusinesses that function as industrialized, oil-dependent factories dedicated to efficient mass production of their widget, which happens to be the wheat berry. The wheat berry is shipped to other factories for processing and packaging, shipped again to Wonder Bread Inc. for further refinement into a "bread product." This, in turn, is shipped to stadium-size retail "food outlets," purchased by the hurried and haggard farm laborer (who used to own the land the wheat was grown on) and taken home to make sandwiches for the kids to eat in front of the TV.
There's something profoundly unnatural, indeed fundamentally wrong with a consumer-driven system that alienates people from their land, their neighbors and their traditions for the sake of satisfying consumer desire. We've got to break the cycle that turns self-sufficient yeomen into docile consumers who, in the immortal words of Samuel Adams, "crouch down and lick the hands which feed them." This is the only way we will realize Bryan's dream of defending our homes, our families and our posterity.
Now these are just two writers and they have only made a minor impact on the right so far. But I think they are signs of things to come, a direction that some aspects of conservative politics could take in the future. |
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