We Will Berry You!—The Flaky Socialism of the Crunchy Cons
When you read the Crunchy Cons, one name comes up again and again. As a political movement, the group has been spearheaded by Rod Dreher, and it to him that we owe the phrase “Crunchy Cons.” Yet although he has mounted a spirited defense of the group’s credo in his Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Culture and Its Return to Roots and writes a Crunchy Con blog, he is not the movement’s principal ideologue. That post belongs to the poet, novelist, literary scholar, and farmer Wendell Berry
Before turning to him, though, let’s look at what the Crunchy Cons believe, according to Dreher’s able and authoritative exposition. Environmentalism and touting the virtues of eating organic food and, in general, getting back to nature at first sight suggest the Greens, usually classed as a movement of the Left. But for Dreher this is a false picture. True conservatives rank values, particularly religious values, higher than the pursuit of material gain, and concern for the environment reflects a proper appreciation of those values. “A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative. This is particularly true with respect to the natural world.”
The Crunchy Cons, devoted to what Russell Kirk called the Permanent Things, reject prevailing political opinions: “Both mainstream liberalism and conservatism are essentially materialist ideologies, and we should not be surprised that both shape a society dedicated to the multiplication of wants and the intensification of desire, not the improvement of character.”
With much of this, no reasonable person will quarrel. If Dreher and his friends wish to renounce life in big cities and devote themselves, to the extent that they are able, to an “organic” way of life, they have every right to do so. But the question inevitably arises, what of those of us who do not find modern life quite so repulsive as they do? Do the Crunchy Cons wish to force their way of life on others?
To answer that question, one must work one’s way through their magniloquent rhetoric and examine the political measures that they favor. Doing so leads to disquieting results. Dreher supports radical restrictions on freedom in order to promote the values he prefers. To advance the “crunchy-con political agenda,” Dreher want to
Ban cloning, strictly limit human genetic research, and closely regulate the biotech industry;. . . Shape zoning restrictions to favor the preservation of old buildings of historical value, require new development to conform to high aesthetic standards, and provide more public spaces for human interaction; and ... Adopt an attitude toward business laws that favors small businesses over large corporations” (emphasis added)
One may share the values that lie behind these prescriptions—I myself view cloning with apprehension and like old buildings—but what grounds does Dreher have for forcing those who dissent from them to conform to what he wants? What if people, however unpleasant Dreher finds this, prefer to purchase factory-farmed rather than organic chicken, because doing so is considerably cheaper? No one, after all, forces those with Dreher’s preferences to purchase food he does not like: why should he be allowed a similar privilege over others?
To these questions, and to the view that lies behind them, there is an obvious response. Why, the Crunchy Cons may say, should we start from the premise that everyone should be free to do as he pleases, so long as he does not initiate force against others? Is not this premise an expression of the philosophy of unlimited pursuit of gain the Crunchy Cons reject? To assume, as I have done, a libertarian starting point is to beg the question against them.
But I have not assumed such a starting point. Rather, I suggest only that the use of force requires some justification. If Dreher wishes to say, as one presumes he would, that the values he supports do mandate the use of force, he owes us some argument. He would have to present us with some account of what rights people have, what is the nature of property in a free society, etc. (If, following Alasdair MacIntyre, he rejects the notion of rights, he would have to explain his political philosophy on some other basis.)
He does not do so, and this is my basic criticism of him. Instead of offering some systematic and reasoned account of his views, he presents us with a number of folksy narratives of his conversations that all have the general form: “I went down to the farm and spent a nice afternoon with Joe and Mary Blow, who told me that since they threw over their jobs in Wall Street and started just scratchin’ out a livin’, they find life much more satisfying.”
The low level of argument one gets in Dreher’s book can be sampled in what he says about environmental policy. Recounting yet more of his interminable conversations, he tells us that Matthew Scully, Jim DiPeso, and Tony Dean like wetlands and deplore factory farming, but this does not give us any reason to share these views.
Dreher informs us that even if the evidence for global warming were inconclusive (he in fact thinks it is overwhelming), “given the catastrophic results of a global temperature rise. . [this].would compel the prudent conservative (which used to be a redundant phrase) to act as if the worst was likely.” Though I in fact disagree with his recommendation, I do not wish here to argue for a different course of action. Rather, what bears remarking is that the principle that Dreher takes as obvious, “act as if the worst was likely”, has, under the name the “precautionary principle,” generated an enormous critical literature. (Wilfred Beckerman and Cass Sunstein, among many others, are leading critics of the principle; I discuss some of the arguments in my review of Beckerman’s A Poverty of Reason.) Once more, though, I do not wish to argue for a position on this principle: my point is that Dreher is appallingly ignorant of the literature. He doesn’t even know that there is a controversy. He is not alone in this failing. In a book that Dreher praises highly, Small Is Still Beautiful, the literary scholar Joseph Pearce makes exactly the same mistake.
Matters do not improve if one turns to Wendell Berry, whose writing Dreher finds to be “prophetic”. He is by no means the only person of this opinion: the book Wendell Berry: His Life and Work, edited by Jason Peters, contains a whole series of adulatory essays devoted to his thought.
Readers probably expect me now to say that Berry is a worthless thinker, who writes the merest drivel—but this is far from my view. When he sticks to what he knows, his work repays careful study. He writes admirably, for example, about the meaning of death in King Lear. He has much to say about the properties of topsoil and the conduct of agriculture. I am in no position to judge what he says about this, but his views obviously are the product of long years of study and experience.
Regrettably, he has much to say about economics as well. He supports a fairly standard version of the New Deal, with a strong bias toward agriculture. In “The Idea of a Local Economy,” an essay that appears in The Art of the Commonplace, Berry defends “laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax.”
It will come as no surprise that I do not share this program, but once more my purpose here is not to challenge his policies but to ask how he supports them. He does so in an abysmally poor way. His views form a virtual compendium of anti-free-market clichés.
In “Economy and Pleasure,” another essay in the same collection, he discusses “the falseness and silliness of the economic ideal of competition, which is destructive both of nature and of human nature because it is untrue to both.” Berry’s argument for this is that competition presupposes winners and losers: those who lose find their livelihood, if not their life itself, destroyed.
The ideal of competition always implies, and in fact requires, that any community must be divided into a class of winners and a class of losers. . . In fact, the winners have never known what to do with or for the losers. The losers simply accumulate in human dumps, like stores of industrial waste, until they gain enough misery and strength to overpower the winners. The idea that the displaced and dispossessed ‘should seek retraining and get into another line of work’ is, of course, utterly cynical; it is only the hand-washing practiced by officials and experts. A loser, by definition, is somebody whom nobody knows what to do with.
Berry has confused two very different things. In a war, each combatant aims to destroy the other. But economic competition is not a war. Quite the contrary, competition in a free market is a form of social cooperation. Civilization rests on the widespread division of labor: not even Berry imagines that everyone could live in the small self-subsistent agricultural communities he thinks ideal. If people need to cooperate in this way in order to survive, how can the their activities be coordinated? The price system of the free market offers the only satisfactory answer. Through it, people and resources are prompted to the employment that will best satisfy the preferences of consumers, as reflected in their dollar votes.
“Losers” are not destroyed but directed to different lines of work. Berry may mock as cynics those who speak of getting into another line of work, but a simple fact shows the error of what he says. As he well knows, and deplores, the agricultural sector of the American economy continually decreased in the twentieth century. The many farmers no longer able to find jobs in agriculture did not die but found other sorts of work. Berry defines “loser,” so that this cannot happen: if “no one knows what to do” with a loser, he will not be able to find other work. But by this definition, he hasn’t shown that there are losers in a free market.
Berry might respond that if workers, particularly farm workers, have to abandon their customary work, their lives have been effectively destroyed.
If one person is willing to take another’s property or to accept another’s ruin as a normal result of economic enterprise, then he is willing to destroy that other person’s life as it is and is it desires to be… That this person is now ‘free’ to ‘seek retraining and get into another line of work’ signifies only that his life as it was has been destroyed.” (Emphasis added)
Once more, Berry has failed to note, or willfully neglected, an elementary point. Farmers are not being forced to leave agriculture at gunpoint. Rather, they have chosen to grow crops for a market, or to seek employment with other market-seeking farmers. If they cannot make it in this activity, this means that consumers prefer to spend their money on other things. If Berry wants their way of life preserved, he is calling for the forcible controls on how others chose to spend their money. If people, sharing Berry’s values, form a small community that grows its own crops, then the market cannot displace them. It is only those who produce for the market that are subject to its verdict.
Berry could have discovered these elementary facts had he read the relevant works of Mises and Hayek, but he shows not the slightest acquaintance with them, or for that matter with the writings of any other economist. One might object that these authors adopt an entirely too roseate vision of the free market, and certainly there are economists one could cite in defense of this view. (James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State is a recent book highly critical of the market economy.) But here once again my fundamental claim recurs. To challenge the market, one must have some acquaintance with the relevant literature. Berry manifests no sign that anyone has ever analyzed the contentions that to him seem blindingly obvious. The notion that economics is a serious academic discipline, one that needs study before its conclusions are condemned, seems not to have occurred to him. In his attitude he resembles Ezra Pound, with his endless condemnations of “usura”. Like Pound, he is on economic affairs a crank, although, unlike Berry, Pound did possess a wide if idiosyncratic knowledge of history.
In view of Berry’s plangent complaints that market capitalism destroys human beings, it is more than a little ironic that Berry is himself a tobacco farmer. I certainly do not favor any interference with tobacco farming, but the role of tobacco in causing heart disease and lung cancer is a matter rather better supported, I should think, than the alleged dangers of global warming. Berry ought to attend to his own house before he condemns others.
In fairness to the Crunchy Cons, one should note that not all of them oppose the free market. Joel Salatin, who is featured in Dreher’s book, is an organic farmer of libertarian views. He wishes only to be free of government regulations that interfere with his activities, an altogether legitimate demand. On the whole, though, the Crunchy Cons are statists of a familiar sort, distinguished by their ignorance of economics.
David Gordon is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review.
Comments
Crunchy Cons + Wendell Berry makes no sense.
Berry is a Democrat, yet Dreher and his champions are Bush/Cheney loyalists.
From all I’ve read of Berry’s works (and that includes most of his non-fiction works), it’s quite clear that he shares no political sentiment with present day Republican party, frustrated he might be with contemporary Democrats…
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This essay is a great reminder of just how alien the libertarian world-view is to conservatism. “Farmers are not being forced to leave agriculture at gunpoint.” This should remind us conservatives that we and leftists do share a common ideological adversary, and that there’s plenty of opportunity for Left-Right tactical coalitions, regardless of our personal feelings towards one other.
Re Mr. Gordon’s criticism of Dreher: the “use of force” (i.e., legislation), like any other principle, requires rhetorical justification only when the audience doesn’t already accept the principle--in this case, a libertarian or anarchist audience. Those weren’t apparently the people Dreher was addressing.
I don’t know Dreher’s philosophy on state legitimacy or natural rights, but I don’t see why it’s all that relevant. I’m sure Mr. Gordon knows more about the philosophical justifications of state intervention (which he rejects) than do most of us here. The point is that, judging from Mr. Gordon’s own description, Dreher seems to have written a book of rhetoric, not dialectics. The book should be evaluated according to the genre to which it belongs.
Speaking of rhetoric, I don’t know whether this review was written for Takimag or for the Mises Review. If the latter, then Mr. Gordon’s boilerplate libertarian answers to Dreher’s and Berry’s points are quite sufficient. But to those of us in the Takimag audience who don’t necessarily worship the free market, Mr. Gordon’s responses--e.g., that farmers losing their farms is a result of consumer preferences and is therefore (implicitly) justified--come across as nothing more than libertarian question-begging.
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Quote: “Quite the contrary, competition in a free market is a form of social cooperation.”
I find this article rather humorous.
I would rather describe the ideal “free market” as “stigmergic socialism” rather than competition so there. Pot meet Kettle. The Anarchist and Libertarian have more in common with the Marxist and Communist than you have ever had with the traditional conservative.
But the reality is that there is destructive competition because no free market exist and will ever exist because civilization is filled with and created by force, fraud, and interfering institutions.
The idea that it is socialist not conservative so say that human civilization it not organized entirely around this modernist concept of the “free market” but rather proper domains of family, church, and some kind national identity is absurd.
Quote: “Losers” are not destroyed but directed to different lines of work.”
What’s that sounds? OMG it’s Joseph Schumpeter turning in his grave. Markets aren’t destructive? There are no losers Tell that to a bunch of rural Indian Farmings getting killed by Monsanto right now. You are so fantastically wrong about the total destruction of traditional ways of life brought about by capitalism that one has to conclude that you have never heard the phase “primitive accumulation.”
In the real market, there are losers and conservatism being a real world political philosophy must deal with those realities not simply say that all attempts to form principles of governance of how do deal with these real world effects is that evil devil of “socialism.”
No it not socialism it is called living in a real human civilization.
Quote: “Farmers are not being forced to leave agriculture at gunpoint. Rather, they have chosen to grow crops for a market, or to seek employment with other market-seeking farmers.”
Yes they are. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Oil_watch/ProfitGunpoint_UnocalBurma.html and http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/06/free-for-all-on-south-central-farmers.html.
Going back in time to the era classical political economy let me quote the “free market capitalist”
Author Young: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”
Here’s another free marketer of the good old days of the British “free market”: “....by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others more labor is produced, it is an advantage which the nation should wish for.”
There is no history of any system of wages created by volunteerism. It was imposed by forced from the very folks who talked about freedom in markets and other such nonsense. Game Laws, and outright theft of guild lands, and the commons was only means by which could secured the necessary capital for their private Industrial Empires.
Remember folks a choice between a wage and starvation isn’t voluntary.
Quote: If people, sharing Berry’s values, form a small community that grows its own crops, then the market cannot displace them.
Tell that to the Chinese peasant who is removed to his farm and forced into a export development zone because the global market must produce ship more computers to America so that David Gordon can sit in his office about how wonderful and fair the “holy market” is.
Oh wait that’ next you are going tell me “no true free market” fallacy about it doesn’t apply.
Quote :” Like Pound, he is on economic affairs a crank, although, unlike Berry, Pound did possess a wide if idiosyncratic knowledge of history.”
No, you are the crank and Ezra Pound was a great man fought the the evil bankers and the evil of usuary and paid dearly in that noble fight.
His position on money was no difference than Ben Franklin’s position who was ten times the economist and scientist that Mises and Hayek combined ever were.
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To follow on the above criticism I would add that much of your argument hinges on the question “Do the crunchy cons have a right to force their way of life on the rest of us.” Yet the inorganic, processed life is being forced upon us right now. Big agro and its phalanx of lobbyists in Washington have pushed for agricultural subsidies that have put family farms out of business in favor of corporate farms. They have pushed for legislation that has favored the production of processed foods over organics. Open border immigration policies have turned small towns across the country into spralling suburbs with no green spaces. Many of the zoning restrictions in place are the result of what people in small towns want, and when development lawyers get around these laws and knock over historic buildings and pave over woodlands, whose interests are being served? You criticize the Crunchy Cons for not believing in free market forces, perhaps this is deserved, but it is delusional to think that it is predominantly the free market which shapes our current way of life.
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Some of you might find this guy’s work to be relevant to this debate:
http://www.mutualist.org
Here’s and old article of mine that discusses some of this:
http://attackthesystem.com/capitalism-versus-free-enterprise-a-review-of-kevin-carsons-the-iron-fist-behind-the-invisible-hand/
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—but what grounds does Dreher have for forcing those who dissent from them to conform to what he wants?
LOL OL’ Genghis Dreher. He is all about ordering his black-shirted -machine-gun-brandishing-hordes to force you to move out of the city, marry, and raise a family, and not pollute the air, land, and water.
You don’t think Mr. Dreher is in favor of the 9th and 10th amendments and wants to put his ideas to a vote?
Luckily, I was born into a Catholic family, in rural Vermont,in These United States, and I grew-up reading the Social Encyclicals and so I was inoculated against the ideological of liberty.
Unless an economist understands the first several Catechism Questions (our existence and purpose of life) then I guaran-damn-tee you his work will be a failure.
http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/2004/jul2004p18_1692.html
I’ll take Heinrich Pesch, S.J. over Von Mises every day of the week - especially Sunday.
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Captitalism and the Free Market care nothing about the permanent things. They--and when I say ‘they’ I really mean their deracinated champions--only care about dissolving the natural bonds between people and turning them into malleable consumers and producers.
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Go ahead and read Dreher, just don’t take him too seriously.
Dreher is not a thinker. He’s not that deep. He’s not a Paul Gottfried or even a David Gordon. In fact, he isn’t that conservative.
Dreher’s sort of a cross between today’s “National Review” and “Stuff White People Like.” Take a Whole Foods shopper and make him pro-life and you get him. Try to be traditionalist without opposing anti-racism and immigration reform and you become him.
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Heinrich Pesch wrotes:
“The purpose of the state consists in providing, safeguarding and complementing the sum of those social conditions, institutions, and structures which alone provide and preserve for all members of the state the fuller capacity to secure and maintain their temporal welfare on their own and by using their own abilities.”
I’m no libertarian, by far, but do we really need a state big enough to “provide… the sum of those social conditions, institutions, and structures?” It seems pretty huge to me.
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Long-time, no see,Mr. Ramus. Fr. Pesch is, I think, spot-on re The State but that reality is balanced by this:
<I>Subsidiarity (The Role of the State): This component of Pesch’s economic system follows directly upon his presentation of solidarity as the moral-organic bond providing unity to the communities naturally formed by human beings. The key idea of subsidiarity is that the internal life of each community should be respected, i.e., a community or social body of a higher order should not do for a community of a lower order what it should do for itself. Reflection upon the principle brings out Pesch’s position on the role of the state in economic life and the place of Christian charity or almsgiving.
As put forward earlier, Pesch’s position is that the state is a natural community, i.e., it is formed as people naturally move beyond the family to realize goals which, if it weren’t for the state, would be unattainable. This basic reason for its coming into existence designates its purpose and sets limits to its functioning. The state does not exist for its own sake but for its citizens. The natural purpose of the political community is to defend and promote the common good of the whole society. The justification of the state is that it serves the temporal welfare of the entire community.
esch lists the primary duties of the state in fulfilling its purpose as two: protection and assistance. The first is obvious. We must have the security of our personhood if we are to develop. Protection must be offered against external enemies but then Pesch points out that the threats to the citizenry may come from within, from “egotistical endeavors which cannot be reconciled with the civil common good” [10:53]. The help the state is to offer is to be strictly limited by the principle of subsidiarity.
All that individuals, families, and other lower social organs are able to accomplish of and by themselves lies beyond the purpose of the state [8:145]
The necessity of the principle goes back to philosophical psychology. Each human person possesses unique capabilities and powers and each person can only come to the full realization of his or her integral well being by exercising those powers. If the state is to will the good of its citizens, then it must not impede the use these people make of their distinctly human faculties or diminish the human initiative they exhibit unless human rights must be protected. Of course, the state must help those who can’t help themselves but even here Pesch insists that public care should only be complementary to private charity and be offered only after such charity proves to be inadequate [8:25]. Subsidiarity must be observed in charitable activity as well. A hand-up is to be extended not just a handout given.
For the endangered child, one provides sound training ... for the responsible person in need, one provides what money he needs to get back on his feet and which he can then repay. One should not take responsibility away from relatives or damage the sense of family; nor should one spoil the poor by too high a level of support, thereby depriving the worker who is willing to provide for himself of the
desire to work [10:125].
Pesch explicitly rejects laissez faire. The state is no mere night watchman. But he is also clear that there is no place for an omnicompetent state…
Here is a good (LONG) review of his work:
http://www.allbusiness.com/review-business/1180472-1.html
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Hmmm, this is the second article here today that has pissed off this loyal Takimag-reading paleoconservative sewer socialist. I second everything Ploni Almoni says. And I look forward to reading the article on Pesch.
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After factoring in the cost of various medications for hypertension, cancer or whatever industrial related disease one might possess in old age.... as a result of grazing the toxic pleasures of the industrial food array, the savings against the cost of a chicken raised by Mr. Salatin might not be savings anymore.
In some instances, high productivity and technology may not be the progress they appear to be.
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White:
I take Pesch seriously - honest! - but he and Dreher have little in common. Dreher is arguing for the worldview that makes him feel comfortable: the neocons’ politics, pro-life ethics and NPR’s mores. He rejects the paleocon project and says so. He never supported Pat Buchanan, to my recollection.
Dreher is a consumerist. He’s a _crunchy_ con, which identifies himself with a type of breakfast cereal long associated with hippies.
Unlike Dreher, neither I nor, I suspect, Rome, has any real problem with cities. What I can’t stand are the riving bands of fatherless males who want to cause me harm. Get rid of them, along with the rootless idiot liberals who hijacked our urban areas and things would be fine.
After all, with no city, there would be no New York Post to launch Dreher’s career. So this guy wants the social benefits of urban liberalism, but wishes to deny them to others. Many of his little cult of soy-latte-drinking readers are just like this.
You like Dreher because he’s Catholic and hope he’s a reactionary. He’s not.w
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There is an annoying tendency among some libertarians to misuse the word “socialism” in the same way that leftists, liberals and neo-"conservatives" misuse the word “fascism”. Have either Rod Dreher or Wendell Berry suggested à la Proudhon that “property is theft” and called for its abolition? Have either of them said that society would be best organized by the collective ownership of the means of the production? Are either of them supporters of a massive, bureaucratic central state that redistributes wealth and regulates the economy to death with red tape? From what I have read of both men the answer to all of these questions is no. It is therefore as absurd to call them socialists as it was for the enemies of Barry Goldwater to liken his small-government politics to the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler.
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Quote from Peter Ramus:
“Dreher is arguing for the worldview that makes him feel comfortable: the neocons’ politics, pro-life ethics and NPR’s mores.”
I don’t think you can fairly call Dreher
a neocon acolyte. He simply doesn’t have their temperament or makes annoying appeals “democracy” or whatever “epic battle against EVIL” they are fighting for the day.
I could be wrong but Dreher doesn’t strike as the revolutionary type.
Quote: “Hmmm, this is the second article here today that has pissed off this loyal Takimag-reading paleoconservative sewer socialist”
Good God, can anyone suggest any form of governance without being called a “socialist” around here?
Banning possible pollutants or potentially harmful research like human cloning until proper guidelines have been established isn’t socialism its basic responsibility.
No, the preservation of old buildings isn’t socialist it is respect for the past and it helps us keep some perspective and culture.
Stop using the word socialist. The word is Dirigist if you must.
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Huge multi-national corporations that control their markets are not part of any “free market.” Wendell Berry and Rod Dreher are fearful of these entities for good reason. Small businesses and farmers in competition with each other do make a free market. A large faceless corporation is no different than a large faceless bureaucracy other than it is in private hands. Large corporations have a large say in the zoning laws that already “require” private land owners to conform to certain standards. Only the standards are ones that maximize the profits of the corporations and do not take into the account the affects this has on the local community aesthetic or otherwise.
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You like Dreher because he’s Catholic and hope he’s a reactionary
Mr. Ramus. He has UnPoped and thrown-in with The Orthodox
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Dear Sir:
Libertarian contributors to this site face a great deal of criticism from many readers. For instance, in the above postings Ploni Almoni rails against Dr. Gordon’s allusions to libertarianism and suggests that libertarians are the real intellectual enemies of conservatives. Fair enough I say if this is what Almoni and other readers of this site believe.
What I want to know is this: what is the proper role of the state for those here who reject libertarianism? What should the state be allowed to do and what should it be prohibited to do? What are the paleos’ views on secession? How would paleos deal with those with whom they disagree if they held the levers of power? That is to say, what would they do to those who did not agree with their policies and wanted to opt out? Also, if free trade between countries is bad, why is free trade within the United States good? If tariffs are good for the United States, why are they not good for states within the union or even municipalities?
I ask these questions because there is often a lot of criticism thrown around here regarding libertarianism and by extension classical liberalism, but I get little understanding about what paleos actually believe in other than upholding family and religion.
I ask that those who wish to tackle these questions not cop out and tell me to read Kirk or Burke or whomever. Tell me what you think.
Respectfully,
John McKerrow
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“Mr. Ramus. He has UnPoped and thrown-in with The Orthodox.”
Then I suspect Rod is more a follower of Mama Fred than Wendell Berry.
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Mr. McKerrow asks “What I want to know is this: what is the proper role of the state for those here who reject libertarianism? What should the state be allowed to do and what should it be prohibited to do?” Speaking strictly for myself I would say that the proper role of government is to enforce the law and secure the country against invasion. Evelyn Waugh wrote “I believe in government; that men cannot live together without rules but that these should be kept at the bare minimum of safety”. That always seemed a very sensible position to me. It raises the question of what is that “bare minimum” but my answer would be very similar to that of libertarianism. What I disagree with in libertarianism is not its view of government so much as how it arrives at that view. By starting with the volition of the individual and treating its inviolability as the sole absolute against which everything else is relative classic liberalism has written a prescription, not merely for limiting government, but for the unravelling of the social and moral orders as well. A conservative argument for limited government, is that without restraints and limitations, power is harmful. Therefore, to prevent the harm of tyranny, government must be limited. But human nature is such that for limited government to work, the appetitites of the individual must be limited by internal restraints reinforced by a strong moral and social order. To make the freedom of the individual your starting point and absolute, undermines the authority of family, church, and local community. To weaken these institutions, however, works against limited government because the state will point to the ensuing chaos as justification for enhancing its power and will obtain popular support for doing so. Thus to make the freedom of the individual your starting point in your case for limited government is self-defeating.
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Reply to Mr. McKerrow: First of all I wouldn’t call libertarianism the “real enemy.” I don’t believe that paleo-conservatism should have real enemies. I support ad hoc Left-Right coalitions against libertarians, but I also support ad hoc conservative-libertarian coalitions against the Left. Everything issue-by-issue. No permanent friends, no permanent enemies.
I don’t have a philosophy of the proper role of the (US) state in the economy. I certainly reject the “night watchman” philosophy, as well as the Austrian claim that voluntary transactions are eo ipso mutually beneficial (that’s not even talking about external costs). The spheres of the political, the economic, and the moral are not autonomous and they shouldn’t be treated as such.
The principal of subsidiarity makes sense, but I suspect it’s too abstract to be of much use in deciding specific cases. I certainly don’t see anything wrong with zoning laws and other local regulations intended to restrict consumer choice, for instance restricting the choice to eat at McDonald’s as opposed to a local hamburger joint.
How should the state or local government encourage family farms? I really don’t know. It’s a hard, detailed question that requires more knowledge of economics than I have. I don’t accept any free-market or “consumer preferences” argument that government intervention is wrong a priori. The institution of the family farm is special because of its importance in preserving tradition, and farmers should not be treated the same as computer programmers or auto mechanics.
On secession, I don’t believe in any “right” to secede. Again, any claim needs to be argued on a detailed, case-by-case basis, rather than by appealing to abstract rights as some paleos do. Juridically and politically, it’d be great to return to the 19th-century approach towards recognizing rebels in foreign civil wars, but this isn’t the 19th century and recognition of secessionists has to be granted on a case-by-case basis, according to how recognition would support real US interests.
I think I answered most of the questions. I’m sort of paleo, but I don’t really want to label myself as such, or even as a conservative at all. Take it as just one individual’s uninformed opinions.
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On secession, I don’t believe in any “right” to secede. Again, any claim needs to be argued on a detailed, case-by-case basis, rather than by appealing to abstract rights as some paleos do.
Mr. Almoni. When the several states approved The Constitution, they did so while still retaining their status as “free and independent States” (back in the day “state” meant country).
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
IOW, Rhode Island was like unto France back in the day.
All that being true, those countries, once having entered into a contract, can (TODAY.PLEASE) give notice and repudiate it.
The Country of Rhode Island was not accepting a Covenant from God who alone could change it.
“The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution” has all the basics we need to reorient our own selves.
As to there being no right to secede, didn’t we secede from Perfidious Albion?
http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/990930.shtml
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The State is like a dog. Indulge it and let it roam at will and the animal will keep you busy cleaning up after it or apologizing to the neighbors for its exploits. Combine , with your love, a firm hand and need for obedience and the animal will provide great companionship and the pet will not become the master.
May we now open a very large, very secure Dog Pound.
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OK, correction: I meant to say I don’t believe in any natural right of secession. The American colonies had no right of any kind to secede from Britain. Of course that doesn’t mean that the secession wasn’t right, i.e., justified.
On the existence of a US constitutional right of secession, I’m an agnostic; I don’t know enough to have an opinion one way or the other. I know that there are some brilliant scholars on both sides of the debate. Either way, I don’t see it as a burning issue right at the moment.
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Mr. Berry wishes to keep his farm because he enjoys it and pass it on through the
generations. Does his intention need some sort of philisophical backing or manifesto to
understand him or have we lost our ability to decipher simple human emtions?
It may very well be Wendell Barry or even Rod Dreher are classic New Dealers and
market socialists. But what libertarians like Mr. Gordon seem to conviently forget when attacking
paleos for their attachments, sentimental or not, is the lack of a pure “free” market to begin with. Modern
big business agriculture exists because of the state, not in spite of it. It is the state that provides the money
in the forum of subsidies. It is the state’s university extention offices and ag schools that provide the justification and services for such economical structures. They are the one’s who negotiate the trade deals that demand large amount of foodstuffs for exports or subsdize products like ethanol to provides outlets for surplus grains, surplus they insist must happen. They’re the ones who give tax breaks to ADM and Cargill.
Thus we have socialized agriculture and yet Mr. Gordon spends his time not attacking the state, but small fry like Dreher and Berry for non-existent threats to freedom. Instead of looking for differences between paleos and libertarians, perhaps we should look for what brings us together. And certainly taking down the current ag economic model to benefit small scale producers and creat a true free market where all can compete on the same playing field is something we can all agree on.
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Well said, Mr. Scallon. Most of the other stuff I’ve read here is much less clear. Give me Wendell Berry and Bill Kauffman anyday.
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Well put Sean.
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So… the Crunchy Cons aren’t conservative in the sense of American conservativism - support for free markets, limited government, etc. They are conservative according to the flat definition of the word: inclined to nurture established values. In this case, the established values seem to be those of old lefty communes of the ‘60s, where hippies convened to get back to the land, apply cooperation instead of ungroovy competition and knot up really bad macrame. These Cons are the products of those idealized dirt “farms”, with a few decades of reality-based social evolution spooned in. A Crunchy Con is not so much Barry Goldwater hefting a hemp backpack as Allen Ginsberg howling at metrosexual power walkers tromping through his soy patch.
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Re S.F. Curt…
The Branding of American Politics, its tidy categories and neatly checked boxes has successfully muscled skepticism and empiricism aside, leaving the Law of the Advertising Jingle in it’s wake. Madison’s 10th Federalist paper drew a bead on this phenomenon and raised the issues surrounding the hazards of factionalism but decided that it is far better to deal with the effects of factionalism than to kill the goose that lays this nettlesome egg. I wonder how patient Mr. Madison would be if he saw the current Apotheosis of Corporate-Sponsored Factionalism at work in Washington.
There are some very non-hippy, back to basics, bedrock capitalist so called “crunchy cons” . Joel Salatin writes in his fine practical book “You Can Farm” that one of the most frequently recited laments of failed farmers (who he advises to never ask the Department of Agriculture for help) is the refrain that “we did everything the government told us to do and we still went broke.”.
The Agriculture Department and Industrial Agriculture grew up together and only know one way.....like much of our dysfunctional government. It is the last bastion of Soviet Socialism in America.
Industrial food production created huge efficiencies and great surpluses but it has also created a host of health effects that are becoming readily apparent. To equate those who seek a more individually profitable, widespread and healthful decentralized agriculture with Allen Ginsberg and a soy patch is a little hasty.
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Thanks one and all for your compliments. I’m just going to say I cannot wait for Baby Boomers
passing the torch so I do not have to hear the shrieks over dead beatniks like Allan Ginsburg.
Is it too much to ask that we put your 60s conflicts to bed once and for all?
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Should be rated “R” for toxic Rockwellite nonsense.
Dreher is a localist. His community may have zoning restrictions. Gordon’s doesn’t have to.
Gordon, who raises libertarian objections to Dreher’s proposed restrictions on things like cloning, flails at Berry with a bully’s love of the sheer power of the market.
Berry raises important questions. They don’t deserve to be dismissed with a simple wave
of Gordon’s magical Misean wand.
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Naum said:
Berry is a Democrat, yet Dreher and his champions are Bush/Cheney loyalists.
Have you ever read Dreher’s blog? He’s hardly a “Bush/Cheney loyalist.” It’s hard to take you seriously when you make errors of such magnitude.
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