Regular readers of this magazine may recall a minor internal spat that occurred a few months ago, concerning the then new Front Porch Republic website. I wholly endorsed the project, which was followed immediately by a long piece from Richard that focused on the vague language used to promote the site and the implicit statism of some of its better known contributors. The dispute - if one could call it that - was an amicable one that ended in a podcast debate whereby Richard and I agreed to disagree on certain facets of the FPR program.
Though it pains me to condemn any site that would regularly publish the work of Bill Kauffman, Kirkpatrick Sale and Daniel Larison, two pieces that appeared on the Porch this week have left me wondering whether or not I can seriously disagree with the initial criticisms Richard spoke of months ago.
The first essay that gave me pause was by Patrick Deneen. Entitled “Subsidizing Localism?” the brief posting quotes favorably the musings of another blogger who suggested that “the localism versus globalism debate is about what we should subsidize rather than whether we should subsidize, period.” To the blogger’s comments, Deneen added:
In my view, the problem is not simply that we currently have a powerful centralized government, but that its orientation is toward supporting BIGNESS in the form of private concentration of power (which in turn reinforces its public power). While in theory it would be better to have neither public nor private concentrations of power, at this point in our history it is the public power that is at least theoretically more capable of responding to public demands, even a sustained public demand to restrict these sorts of concentrations of power.
As a person who has summed up his entire political philosophy with the mantra “Bigger is Badder” I can certainly sympathize with Deneen’s reflexive opposition to the corporate state. In fact, one of the more contentious moments in my debate with Richard occurred when I recycled the Jerry Mander inspired, neo-Luddite argument that technology was dangerously undemocratic and inherently trended toward the centralization of power. After audibly guffawing at my populist naiveté, Richard responded by thanking the heavens that technology wasn’t subject to the foolish whims of King Numbers, a counterpoint that was not without merit.
Nonetheless I retain a suspicion of “progress” that extends beyond the liberal managerial state and remain an enemy of obese institutions regardless of whether or not they are public or private. Bigness is my primary rival. Having said that, there is something uniquely dangerous about trusting the public institutions to curtail the Bigness of the private institutions, by way of making the public institutions bigger and stronger than they already are. Setting aside the obvious contradictions, the very notion of expanding the powers of the allegedly more accountable public sphere is the bedrock principle upon which globalism rests.
Whatever one may say about the denizens of the Front Porch, I have always seen them as wholesale opponents of one-worldism and all of if its trappings. Falling back on Chomskyesque arguments about using the power of bureaucrats to rollback the Wal-Martizaton of small town America is a recipe for disaster. If the Front Porchers think that local custom and tradition is getting box-stored-to-death now—imagine how bad it would be under a multicultural regime adorned with the rubber stamp of broad based representative democracy. As Gabriel Kolko noted a half a century ago, the triumph of corporatism was the end result of the Progressive Era. For the most part, Mom and Pop didn’t survive the regulatory state. The therapeutic state would bury them once and for all.
Even worse than Deneen’s misguided endorsement of government subsidized localism (that’s real autonomy there!) is the most recent offering from the fundamentalist Distributist John Medaille. A long time critic of libertarian economics, Medaille has taken the next step in “The One Salvation of Ludwig von Mises” where he seems to argue that Michael Novak, Murray Rothbard (?!?) and Thomas Woods are all insufficiently Catholic because of their advocacy of the irreligious von Mises. Though not stated clearly (nothing in the essay is) the implication seems to be that Novak - a well known neocon symp - is an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. The American Enterprise Institute is also invoked as a kindred spirit of Woods and Rothbard and in the comments section below the original piece Medaille states that the Miseans are all “fellow travelers on the road to collectivization.”
I am not a libertarian per se, but the argument that minarchists or anarcho-capitalists are useful idiots for the State strikes me as a remarkably dishonest one. In point of fact, Medaille’s essay - like Deneen’s - seems to be a strange backdoor advocacy of statism, whereby the actual critics of state power are condemned as utopian fools unwittingly doing the devils work, while the sufficiently Catholic/localist crowd grovels for crumbs from a federal leviathan whose power it is happy to use for pet projects. That this sort of duplicity is not uncommon in politics does not make its emergence on a once promising webzine any less troubling.
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Was Richard Right About The Front Porch?
Regular readers of this magazine may recall a minor internal spat that occurred a few months ago, concerning the then new Front Porch Republic website. I wholly endorsed the project, which … [Read More]
Posted by Dylan Hales on October 23, 2009
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