On this day, Henry Clay argued for a protective tariff and in support of the American System in the House.
James Monroe argued on the same day, before Congress, for the resettlement of Native Americans on the Western Frontier, with the thought being they could continue their way of life there.
Last Prior Edition:
Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part XIV. Wishful Thinking.:
March 12, 2024
North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley was chosen by the RNC to serve as the party's new Trump sycophantic head, and Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair in unanimous votes.
The Republican Party has died, which makes up my mind in my earlier "shall I stay or shall I go" question I posed here.
Positions with the RNC are being slashed as the party merges with the Trump campaign organization so that it can more effectively apply the Führerprinzip.
The Republican Party, founded on March 20, 1854, nearly 170 years ago, has died. Donald Trump killed it. Ronald Reagan, who was a Republican, and Newt Gingrich, who was too, gave him the weapons and ammunition to do so.
The GOP was founded as a left wing progressive party that embraced Federalism and the economic thoughts of the American System. It opposed a party, the Democrats, that was racist, nativist and provincial. The GOP used the absence of the Democrats during the Civil War to expand the nation's railroads and agriculture through direct government involvement. It retained its essential views through the Taft Administration, after which it entered the political wilderness and stood for "business". It became isolationist during the Great Depression, but returned to its traditional views, which it retained throughout the Cold War, at the start of World War Two.
It became, in the post Taft era, the conservative party due to in part its economic views, which were not laissez-faire, and in part due to its social views. The social views became much more paramount following the Democratic Party's lurch to the left starting in 1968, causing the rise of Ronald Reagan, who obtained the Presidency by making a deal with Southern Democrats, bringing them and their laissez-faire, extreme populists, ideas into the party.
Though a combination of factors, which we have dealt with elsewhere, that wing of the party has now supplanted the party itself. Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Hoover, and Eisenhower couldn't recognize this party, nor would they wish to be part of it.
With the co-opting of the RNC, there's no going back. The current Republican Party doesn't resemble the party of old at all. It's more Francoist than Buckleyite.
If Trump fails to win the Oval Office in the Fall, it'll destroy the new GOP. It's already throwing itself apart. If he does win, that'll destroy the GOP, as the next four years will be ones of totally unpredictable turmoil. Nobody really knows what Trump believes in, other than himself. His followers apply the Führerprinzip to what they believe he reflects in their beliefs and belief that he reflects them back.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Wyoming politician Bob Ide is saying he's going to sponsor a bill to take the Federal domain into state hands, requiring, as if Wyoming can require the Federal Government to do anything, the fulfillment of a promise that the Federal Government never made at the time Wyoming became a state.
In fact, the opposite was true. Wyoming promised not to seek any more Federal land than it was getting.
But a promise was made regarding those lands. . . to the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Sioux tribes. . . that being that they could keep them for hunting grounds.
And a larger reservation than they currently have was originally given to the Shoshone.
In her campaign to displace Liz Cheney, Harriet Hageman emphasized the hardworking nature of her family and forebearors, and has been a standard-bearer of conservative and populist values in her brief time in Congress. She's from, she related, a fourth generation ranching family.
But most families that have been in agriculture in Wyoming that long, outside the descendants of British remission men, are remote beneficiaries of a gigantic government system which used Federal agents, in the form of the U.S. Army and Federal Indian Agents, to dispossess the occupants of that land, sometimes by force, and remove them to where they did not want to go, so that the land could be transferred free or cheaply to European Americans. Those original European American occupants, we might note, in the case of homesteaders, were not the wealthy and were perfectly willing to take advantage of a government program.
My point?
Well I don't mean to be one of those who are going to engage in hagiography of any one group of American people, Natives nor European Americans, but on this day it might be worth remembering something.
The "pull up by the bootstraps" argument that the middle class, or lower upper class, so frequently states, or imagines about themselves, fails pretty readily upon close examination. Almost every class of American with longstanding roots in the country that have been here for quite some time benefitted from a government program, whether that be homesteading, Indian removal by the Army, the mining law of 1872, the Taylor grazing act (which saved ranching in the West), the GI Bill, and so on.
That is, in fact, the American System. Not the Darwinian laissez-faire economics that libertarians so often proclaim.
I'm not demanding reparations, or that injustices committed to people of the past be retroactively lamented. Indeed, that's pointless. What I’m suggesting instead is that justice be done for those now living, and that as part of that we admit when we are vicariously beneficiaries of some Federal program in the past, as I am.
And as part of that, I'm also suggesting that we don't engage in myths or hagiographies about our own predecessors. Nobody carved a civilization out of an empty wilderness, unless we go back in North America 15,000 years. Nobody promised that Wyoming could have the public domain. None of us are as independent or virtuous as we pretend, if we pretend that we are, and nobody's ancestors were hearty bands of go it alone giants.
Shoot, even Columbus, if you prefer to ponder him on this day, was on a state funded mission.
Interesting episode of NPR's politics which actually has a somewhat deceptive caption:
This discussion on the Internet having become a necessity is probably correct. It's also, frankly, at least to me personally, depressing.
The comparisons to the Eisenhower Defense Highway funding or the New Deal programs is interesting. The comparison that came to my mind was with the cooperation with the railroads to build the Transcontinental Railway, which I guess is something we've just forgotten about. An interesting example, I suppose, of the American System.
This is really a major political and economic development, but it hasn't received much press:
The Oval Office has released a budget. It's not balanced, but at least it's done that.
The Republicans have not.
Nonetheless, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, in an effort to pitch to the base on why holding the debt ceiling hostage is a good idea, is busy spouting off on Twitter.
And hence one of the major problems with American politics.
It's packed with liars and deceivers.
And, apparently, people who can't grasp an analogy.
Let's start there. Here's one McCarthy put out this past week:
Kevin McCarthy@SpeakerMcCarthy Apr 21
If you gave your child a credit card and they kept maxing it out, you wouldn’t blindly raise their limit—you’d help them change their behavior and figure out where to cut back on their spending.
The approach to our national debt should be no different.
First of all, for that analogy to make sense, the Executive branch would have to be a kid and Congress the parent, which is a weird analogy to start with. It's make a lot more sense to view the two coequal branches of government as spouses.
Indeed, for this analogy, it really would.
Looked at that way, the spouse who does the family budget is looking at the credit card the family uses and debating, and that is what Congress is debating, not paying the credit card bill.
Go ahead and try that, Kevin. Rack up a huge credit card debt, declare yourself fiscally irresponsible, and see if that means your budgetary problem magically gets better.
Of course, he doesn't think it will, which makes this more like an enraged drunken husband yelling at his wife that if she doesn't quit spending on shoes, he's going to let the house's household income go down the tubes, and probably beat her black and blue, while the child, in this case the American public, stands by and watches in horror. All why he racks up credit card debt for sporting goods or something.
That's abhorrent.
But that's the real analogy.
Some budget basics which serve, sadly, to point out that we're dealing with liars and deceivers.
Balancing the budget and starting to pay down the debt is perfectly possible. Here's how you do it.
1. Decide what the Federal Government really needs to do for us.
The dirty little secret of the Federal Budget, or one of them, is that people like it when somebody like McCarthy says we need to cut expenditures, until they realize the expenditures he's going to cut are the ones they really like.
Then they hate it.
School lunches? Local problem.
Bad bridges? Local problem.
Highways? Local problem.
Department of Defense? Way too big.
Entitlement? Let's not even go there.
Now that list probably makes people gasp, or some people gasp. That's because like it or not, 100% of Americans have some things that they like the Federal Government doing that aren't really the Federal government's job, and where they are the Federal Government's job, they don't want the Government doing less of the job.
And that's the dirty secret of what the Republicans tried to do here. They knew that many such things were popular with the public, and years ago they adopted the strategy that if they cut taxes as much as possible, only the absolutely necessary things would be paid for, and the rest would whither and die. Starve the government of money, the thought went, and programs will die all on their own, and we'd return to the mythical golden age of fiscal Nirvana.
The problem with that strategy was that it was idiotic and anti-historical.
Apparently the Tea Party, Club For Growth folks didn't relieve that if they were budgeted for, the Government would just borrow the money.
Indeed, it had no other choice. Things are budgeted for, it can borrow, so it has to.
D'uh.
So unless you pass a law that precludes the government from borrowing, all the crap about lower taxes is just that, a steaming pile. No tax money? The Federal Government will borrow. It actually must under those circumstances.
So here's the first chore. What do we really want the Federal Government to do?
Contrary to what the GOP likes to say, the Federal Government has been involved in the economy since the beginning of the 19th Century. As the Senate's website notes:
Henry Clay's "American System," devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire "British System."
OH MY GOSH!
Subsidizing things to avoid subservience to free trade?
Pack of dirty Communists!
Well, whatever. That's the system we've had now for 200 years. Apparently, all those folks who want to "Make America Great Again" skipped history.
But that doesn't mean we need to pay for everything we currently do.
We need to keep paying for things we've promised and people rely on. Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, Veteran's benefits, etc. People rely on them. If we didn't want people to rely on them, we shouldn't have created a system they'd immediately come to rely on.
Which is, I'd note, why the concept of a Universal Basic Income is insane.
We need to decide if we want to pay for other things. Do we continue to subsidize, for example, the highway system at a national level, or pass that on to the states?
As part of the latter, we need to decide what part of the system can pay for themselves. Some things, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and its programs, already do. Maybe the Park Service can. Highway systems certainly can. Those would involve excises and user fees. So be it.
And there are a lot of things that the Federal Government really doesn't need to do. Free and reduced lunch programs it doesn't need to do. The National Labor Relations Board has overgrown itself.
But after we do all of that, the budget still won't balance, and that's because of the Defense Department and entitlements.
They're most of the budget.
2. Raise the cash
Using the family analogy again, our Federal parents are like two well-educated people who have intentionally taken part-time jobs, so they can spend the rest of the day blogging from the basement while day drinking. They need to get out of the house and get real jobs.
Which is to say, they need to raise taxes.
There is no way to balance the budget without raising taxes, and anyone who claims that there is, is lying. That's where guys like Kevin McCarthy are completely full of bullshit. He knows that he can't cut his way out of the deficit unless he's going to wipe out entitlements and have a military of three men and a Boy Scout.
American taxes have to be raised. At the very upper wealth category and corporate category, there's plenty of room for it.
And at the tariff level there is too. Tariffs have had a bad name ever since the Great Depression, but that was before everything we bought came in through the Port of Los Angeles from China. If we put on stout tariffs now, reflecting the added cost to American industry for environmental and labor laws, it would not only raise a lot of money, but encourage the rebirth of American industry as well.
3. Create a Liars Penalty.
This, I admit, simply won't happen.
Republicans know that if you admit you have to raise taxes, some semi employed fool wearing a MAGA hat is going to yell at you, even though his taxes aren't going to be raised. But the GOP is beholden to interest that are tax hostile.
Democrats know that not only will they get yelled at if they cut school lunches, but that guys like Robert Reich and Bernie Sanders cry if the Federal Government won't pay for free plates of kibble for stray cats.
So they'd rather cash their checks while things go down the tubes and post crap on Twitter.
Maybe a balanced budget Constitutional Amendment is a necessity.
While it's a pipe dream, what I'd like to see is a provision that nobody in Congress got paid if the budget wasn't balanced. There's a cut we can all get behind. And, if not balanced, their personal assets and property is attached for the debt forever for that year.
I'd bet that we'd have balanced budgets.
Chuck Gray's recent fantastical editorial in the Tribune brought this to mind, along with letters to the editor every week accusing somebody of being a "RINO".
Parties evolve, but the parties themselves, and their members, don't seem to recognize this. This causes endless ironies in finger pointing exercises.
To listen to the current GOP in the state, everyone who is not a Trumpist is a RINO, a secret liberal Democrat or maybe even a Communist bent on the destruction of the nation. The populist right doesn't seem to realize here that 1) it's the new arrival in the state party; and 2) it's the new arrival in the GOP. Trumpist/Populist could in some ways be accused of being DUYs. . . Democrats Until Yesterday.
A quick look at this, using the unfortunate blue/red color scheme adopted by the American press as an example of misbegotten American Exceptionalism.
The History of the GOP
The Republican Party, had it not adopted that name, and had the "Liberal" "Conservative" monikers been around in 1854 when neck beard (truly) Horace Greeley gave them that name, was originally a center left to radical left party, and could have called itself the Liberal Party.
The party was anti-slavery (liberal) and pro-American System in terms of economics (liberal). That is, it took a radical view on human liberty, siding with natural law, and was in favor of state participation in the economy.
We'll skip the big early example of its policies, the prosecution of the Civil War in order to end the bondage of slavery, and go right to other examples. The GOP used the Civil War as an excuse to advance the American System, with the Transcontinental Railroad and the Homestead Act being the big early examples. It entered public life with the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862. Free of Democratic blocking, it could charge ahead with its concepts of equality and government sponsorship of industry. Following the war, it kept at it, with it being the party that sponsored civil rights and favored government interaction in the economy all the way up until the death of Theodore Roosevelt in January 1919.
During that period, it wasn't uniformly on the left. It was center left in the majority, with the far left in the party struggling to rise. The only time it really did rise was with the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 to 1909. That brought Progressives to the forefront and they dominated the party. The split with Taft however caused a rift in which the Progressives bolted, and the Democrats adopted a Progressive platform.
Former mainstream Republicans came back in the party and even Roosevelt himself did, but the ball had been passed. With Roosevelt's death in 1919, the chance to revive it died as well. Dedicated Progressives became Democrats, where the movement was strong in the northern party, or joined more radical parties, with some becoming Socialist and some even joining Communist parties. The flame having burnt out, the party became a Conservative Party with the rise of Harding, dedicated mostly at that time to maintaining an imagined pre Great War sort of nation.
That's what the party became in earnest with the collapse of the Hoover Presidency and the Great Depression. The GOP was "conservative", but mostly in the sense of being against stuff. It was against the New Deal, it was against foreign involvement. It was against most of what Theodore Roosevelt had been for. It retained that basic instinct, which is in part why it lost elections in the 1930s, until the fall of China in 1949 when it was shocked into realizing that being against foreign involvement meant supporting the rise of Communism. At that point, it became anti Communist and supportive of foreign involvement. That meant supporting big government.
From 1949 until the election of Ronald Reagan, the GOP was mildly conservative, but only barely so. Discerning the difference between Republicans of the era and Democrats was not all that easy until around 1968 when modern Conservatism began to rise.
It was thinkers like William F. Buckley who began to give intellectual weight to the GOP in the 60s, with those individuals having a concrete philosophical concept of what being a Conservative meant. Still, it was the "Country Club Republican" who dominated the GOP from the onset of the Depression until some point in the 1970s. They were fiscally conservative, and in the 30s and 40s they were opponents of foreign entanglements. That was pretty much the extent of their ideology. Starting, as noted, in 1949, their anti Communism lead them to be in favor of taking on the Communist around the globe, although the Democrats were in favor of the same thing at the same time. In spite of Buckley and his fellow travelers, it wasn't really until the late 60s that an ideology really developed.
The first time it really showed up was in 1968. That's the same year the Democratic Party nearly split in two over the Vietnam War at Chicago. Republicans didn't split, they continued to support the war, and they were increasingly opposed to the rising liberalism in the Democratic Party, most particularly the rising social liberalism. The extra judicial opinion of Roe v. Wade in 1973 increased the party's discovery of Buckleyite conservatism and the financial crisis of the early 70s, fueled by the spending of Country Club Republicans and Democrats, increased it. The result was Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was the first really ideological Republican President since Theodore Roosevelt, although his wing of the GOP was not completely dominant. Country Club Republicans remained hugely influential in the party, and in essence they governed together as a more or less friendly coalition. Reagan Republicans yielded to Country Club Republicans again with both Bush's, who were also heavily influenced by Neo Conservatives, who were largely former Democrats or in some cases actually former Trotskyites.
Reagan, however, also brought into the Republican Party Southern Democrats, who were populists. Making a political calculation that this remaining body of conservative populists would abandon the Democrats as the Democrats had abandoned them brought the GOP into the South for the first time. It also, however, brought populist into the GOP for the first time since the late 1890s.
Populists would be a noisy distraction in the Republican Party throughout the Reagan and Bush years, but it was really the coalition of Country Club Republicans, Buckleyites and Neo Conservatives who controlled it. Starting with the second George Bush, it began to run into real problems as it could no longer gain the majority of the popular vote. It also tended to only give lip service to the populists, which tends to be the case for populism's history.
Donald Trump, whatever his merits or demerits, tapped into the populists, knowing that Republican and Democratic Populists, and they remained in both parties, were angry and completely disaffected. He brought them wholesale into the GOP, and they are his base. And now, for the first time in the country's history, they're able to control large parts of a political party nationwide.
Given the history of populism, the GOP should be worried.
Before we do that, however, how can we sum up the history of the Republican Party, so we can tell who are the dreaded RINO's and who are not. Well, thus:
As it was Saturday, the Saturday Evening Post hit the stands. On this occasion it had an illustration of children playing music, probably loudly but badly, by Alan Foster.
For some reason, uploaded versions of period illustrations from the Saturday newsstands are a lot harder to find after late 1922 for a while. Probably the drama of the war and the comparative lack of drama of the early 20s was the reason. The Country Gentleman hit the stands with an excellent illustration of Independence Hall. Judge had a fascinating, nearly photo realistic painting of flappers in a club.
The Canadian Northern Railway and the Canadian Government Railways merged into the Canadian National Railway. The merger of the CNR and the CGR was forced by the government due to the financial failure of the CNR, although at one time the railroad had steamships as well as trains.
The CNN is one of the world's great railways, spanning all of Canada and the Eastern United States.
You'll note that the creation of this system is either an application of the American System of economics, albeit in Canada, or of Socialism. At one time the nationalization of railroads was not the controvery it would be now.
The French arrested twenty-one German mine operators for failure to cooperate in the occupation, and Essen's banks all voluntarily closed.
The London Daily Mirror ran this cartoon:
American democracy is in real trouble right now, there's no doubt. The evidence is everywhere.
From 2016 to 2020 the President was a boorish multimillionaire whose early history was that of a New York Democrat. Picking up on the anger in the country, he converted himself into a populist Republican and ran the nation in a semi unhinged manner restrained only by as set of advisors that reigned him in, or simply just didn't do what he wanted right up until when he tried to retain control through a coup. On the plus side, however, Mitch McConnell basically ran the judicial nomination system, and after decades of Democratic picks who regarded the Constitution as more of a loose set of guidelines than a law, and weak kneed Republican nominees who turned out to be disappointments, some real jurists were finally elected.
Now we've reached the point where in Arizona there's a serious chance the next Governor will be an election denier, in Pennsylvania a quack doctor may be their next Senator, and in Wyoming we're going to elect a Congressional candidate who stabbed her predecessor in the back and claims to believe, although I very much doubt she does, that the election was stolen. Indeed, if she doesn't believe it was stolen, that makes her all the worse for promoting lies. In the Secretary of State's office the current interim occupant is another election denier, and in January Chuck Gray, who based his campaign on nothing else, is going to be elected to an office he shouldn't be holding. The state's GOP, meanwhile, is led by an extreme right wing Trumpite.
Democracy, truly, is in peril.
How did this happen?
We've dealt with this before, but if we really look deeply at this election, what we're seeing is 1) a hardcore group of Americans who feel their culture is being attacked, and not without merit for that belief, and 2) a group of fellow travelers who would probably, quite frankly, join in any political movement as they either don't think their claimed beliefs through or they want to be on what seems to be the winning side.
Note that I didn't say that it was because people believe the election was stolen. Some do, but what is really the case for most of those people is that they want to believe the election was stolen.
And they want to believe that, as they want to believe their nation was stolen.
Was it?
The culture wars have been going on in the US for a lot longer than pundits would have it. Indeed, the United States has always had some sort of culture war going on, and It's always had more than one culture. But by and large, its culture as a whole has been a Western European Christian one.
And by and large, it still is.
Attacks on that go back quite some time as well. Indeed, one way it is sometimes dated is to go October 31, 1517, when Monk Martin Luther ostensibly nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door. In doing that Luther, who temperamentally should really never have been a cleric, unintentionally ushered in the age of individualism, which is always an attack on a culture as it ultimately must mean that an individual can define a culture himself, and sooner or later that leads to a sort of rampaging societal narcissism.
Which we have now.
Which means the 1517 date isn't a bad one from which to track the decay of Western European society, of which we are part.
Whether that's correct or not, we see larger, more radical attacks coming about in the late 18th Century. The celebrated French Revolution, a massive failure, was one such example. The following of Communism and Communist Revolutions, which were ideologically and historically children of the French Revolution, are more recent examples which did real damage.
But through it all, the basic tenants of society remained. Two genders. Conventional relationships. Marriage. A broad Christian concept of society, held even by non Christians. All of this was part of Western European, and more particularly, American, life.
That's been under attack since at least the 1920s, and very much under attack since the 1950s.
And that's what people are reacting to, albeit, much too late, and often on an instinctive level that ignores their own hypocrisy.
We just ran an item entitled Cis. That doesn't explain it all, but in the conversion of the GOP into a sort of Populist-Fascist Party, we see part of the reaction to that. When people say the 2020 election was stolen, what they really mean, on an instinctive level, is that they want their culture back as the cultural norm, and any result contrary to that is a species of theft, as it's illegitimate.
Put another way, they don't accept that homosexuality is normal. They aren't accepting the damage done to marriage. They don't want a multicultural society of any kind.
They also want Detroit of the 1950s back, and American industry back. They want Dayton Ohio back before it was modern Dayton. They want blue collar jobs that you work at all day long without a lot of thought, and when you knock off at 5, you go to the bar with your buddies, hit on the bar maid, and then go home to your wife.
They want to set the dial back.
But they don't want to set it all the way back, and that's what's so ironic. Only parts. They probably just want to set it back to maybe 1985. Not 1885, or 1485.
And they don't want to impose the societal rules that apply to themselves personally. That is, other people should not be openly acting on self identified sexual concepts, but the disgruntled voters, assuming their inclinations are conventional, doesn't really want to return to a day when Playboy was still capable of being banned in some places, divorce required fault, and living in sin was heavily frowned upon. Going back, in other words, is fine for me, where I like it, but shouldn't have to bind me otherwise.
And, in setting things back, you have to really honestly ask what you are setting them back to.
This isn't going on just in the United States. It's going on elsewhere in the Western World. Hungary and Poland provide two such examples, and they're not alone. Just the other day, Sweden elevated to power a party that has its roots as a recent Neo Nazi movement.
So do they really believe the election was stolen?
I don't think they care. And if they do mean that, they probably really mean that the election was stolen when Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms became law in the early 1970s, and when the results of the Stonehill Riot didn't come out as expected.
Getting here was a long road. Part of it was an American inability to really restrain the negative implications of technology that started to come in during the early 20th Century. Film, in particular, brought a leveling impact on society nationwide, but it also brought in a depressing one. Prior to the initial introduction of movies, a person might be able to indulge in their prurient interests, but it wasn't a very safe thing to do, and it'd become widely known, or risk becoming widely known, and condemned. After movies came in, it was at first easy to indulge in that just by going to them. There were no laws that precluded anything from being shown on film, and some early silent movies were outright pornographic. That brought in the Hayes Production Code, but the influence of money meant that was only able to hold back the tide.
Even while the production code was in effect, the improvements in film of all kinds, and in medial production, meant that leaps and bounds were taken in regard to the portrayal of women in society, and not in a good way, by the 40s and 50s. Playboy broke the door down, and the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s did what all wars do, destroy.
The Great Depression of the 30s played its role by bringing in the Federal Government in ways it had never operated before, and by effectively destroying the American System of economics, which had always blending government assistance with private, and often localized, economics. Even by the mid 30s some were complaining about the impact of The New Deal on localized economies and cultures, such as "The Southern Agrarians" in I'll Take My Stand. It was a losing battle, however, due to the great crisis, which was followed by a second great crisis; World War Two, and a third great crisis; The Cold War. A nation that had to engage in that sort of struggle, or rather ongoing struggles, for a period of sixty years was one that was going to be geared towards economic magnitude and emphasize it above all else.
It had to.
This was also the glory years, truly, for American industry and therefore for American blue collar workers. European industry had been destroyed by the Second World War. The British and French Empires collapsed. The Soviet Union was our only contender in the world, but it wasn't that much of an economic contender.
So no harm in relaxing the standards a bit, eh?
Legal standards certainly relaxed. A Supreme Court which had taken the Lochner view prior to Franklin Roosevelt's threat to pack it relented and then, during the long Democratic period in power, followed by Republicans who were economic conservatives but were in the middle of the road, became effectively a third branch of government in the way it never had been before. And again, at first this was necessary, as the Supreme Court smashed through the vestiges of legal color barriers and forced the country to live up to its founding documents of the Revolutionary and Civil War period for the first time since the 1870s.
All that was necessary, but like most things, if the first helping is good, a second or third is warranted. The large size of the government did not abate at any point. The Court, having addressed concerns that it really needed to, went on to things which it neither had a need to nor really had any legal ability to address. The ever expansion outward of the economy was never reigned in, and Americans were converted from people into consumers. And, finally, a Democratic Party that had struggled between liberalism and reaction, freed itself of its reactionary wing but launched into first its New Deal wing, and then following Watergate, it's very liberal wing. While the latter occurred, the Republican Party largely stood by the wayside until the mid 1970s, when the reaction started.
The party reaction started then, but there had been reactions all along, and they spread and changed during the 1960s. It was also during the 1960s that the Baby Boomer generation, all over the Western World, enjoying economic largess on an unprecedented scale, began to adopt in a large way the more radicalized, in every sense, features of the 1950s. This eroded social institutions from below while the Courts eroded them, in the US, from above. Governments in the West attempted to address this, but largely post 1968 by accommodations. Social institutions of all types began to try to react during the 1960s as well, with many that had traditionally been very conservative in their outlook moving towards the left.
The reaction didn't begin to develop until the mid 1970s, but by that point so much had changed that finding a point on the compass was difficult. In the United States, Reagan came in and moved the needle back towards the right. In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher did the same. But even as that occurred, most of the progress, if viewed that way, was fairly limited in real terms to economic matters on a large scale, with very little on the small scale. Social conservatism rose in the late 70s and early 80s, but not enough to really disrupt the overall direction of things, and the Court moved only from left to left center.
Given this, real systemic and social problems that set in soon after the end of the Vietnam War never ended up being addressed. Industry began to flood overseas without any effort to arrest it. Social changes brought about by the courts continued on. Social change at the local level was adopted wholesale by certain "elites" and the entertainment industry, to some degree in ways that would be regarded as shocking today. Damage to social structure was ongoing. Immigration reform brought in by Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats that reflected a concept of global social justice and 1950s style unabated economic opportunity set in so much that it's never been capable of being addressed.
While this occurred, the hard hat class lost their jobs. Men who had provided incomes for their families no longer could. Man and women had to go to work to support their families. The concept of simply abandoning women and children to the support of the government fixed in. Institutions long held sacrosanct were attacked.
So, in essence, Baby Boomers who grew up in their parent's 1950s and early 1960s (with the early 1960s really being part, culturally, of the 1950s) and then attacked it, looked back to that past and hoped to live in it, finding they could not. But not just that, the "Greatest Generation" that fought World War Two, looked back at the glory of the 40s and 50s, and the social support of the 1930s, and couldn't figure out how this had happened.
The World War Two Generation, once condemned by the Boomers and now universally praised by them, has largely passed away. But the Boomers, elderly though they now are, has not, and many of them are irate. And their children, who grew up in the broken world the Boomers created struggle as well, kept down in various real ways by the Boomers, but also looking for a raft in the flood.
And then entered Donald Trump.
Like Adolph Hitler of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Trump has a message to deliver to his followers and it is that you can go back, and that this is not your fault. Hitler told the Germans that losing World War One was not their fault, even though it certainly was, and that they'd been betrayed by the Jews. He would take them back, and not back to Imperial Germany, but to a Germany far beyond that which existed only in myth, when the Germans were rising out of the forest to conquer the world by right.
Trump promises to take Americans back, to Make America Great Again, and to take it back as well. Back to an era when we were the only power on the globe, the only one making things, and when all was right in the neighborhood. And, implicitly, just as Hitler promised to restore German greatness to the exclusion of all others whom the Volk had to deal with, Trump implicitly does the same. Trump's America is a white, male, Protestant one.
This narrow view of the United States doesn't reflect a country that actually ever existed, but it does completely buy off on two foundational myths of the country, one being the country was founded in much the same way betrayed in The Patriot, and the other being the less Puritan one of the 1950s. As odd as it may seem, Trumpist Americans see the country as a combination of strongly endowed with Puritan heritage while enjoying the pinups on the wall at a working class bar.
You cannot, of course, have both, which is the further irony. Every Trumpite who wants to "make America great again" and sees the country, as many strongly do, as a result of Manifest Destiny, would need to first consider that those early forebearors would be horrified by much personal conduct exhibited by average Americans today. Trump himself is basically a serial polygamist, something that up until recently was regarded as beyond the Pale for public figures outside of the entertainment industry. Divorced and remarried Americans who are populist standard-bearers are bearing a standard which, at its core, would not sanction that. We could go on.
Much of this is, we'd note, a failure of Conservatism. This all should have been something that Conservatives addressed, but they failed to effectively do so. Perhaps at least through Reagan they simply lacked the power to do so. They do lack the power to do so now, which explains the abandonment of democracy by a surprising number. But make no mistake, Conservatism and populist, let alone espousing Illiberal Democracy or fascism, are not at all the same thing. Conservatives are failing right now, as they have not taken on the illiberalism of the Trump forces that have stolen their banner.
We should hope they recover the courage to do so. Otherwise, large sections of the American public are falling into delusion, and the fate of the country rides on them being awakened from it.
Conservatives have good and valid points about the antidemocratic nature of the left that got us here. Only recently, it seems, have American progressives woken up to the need to support democracy. Before that, rule by a legal aristocracy was fine with them. But resorting to exclusion and denial of the vote, and the will of the voters, will not be the long term answer to anything. Rather, it sews the seeds of ultimate destruction, first to the true Conservative cause, and secondly to democracy itself.
I have a love/hate relationship with the modern "homestead" movement, right down to the use of the word "homestead".
Allow me to explain.
First, I'm an agrarian.
What's that mean?
Well, it can mean of or pertaining to agriculture, but that's not generally what is meant in the American context. Indeed, it's hard to define, even if it's easy to know.
The problematic 1930s agrarian tract, I'll Take My Stand, [1] defined it as thus:
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
Well, that sort of gets it, but only partially. At least to Western Agrarians, there's another element, and that is what Aldo Leopold called the "Land Ethic". He wrote a great deal about it, but perhaps defined it most succinctly as follows:
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Now, Leopold had a great deal more to say about it than that, but the basic gist of his thought was that man was part of nature and things were ethnical if they served all of nature, including man. Leopold was a hunter and a farmer, so he was not a cubicle dwelling urban vegan or anything of the sort. Indeed, he took his land ethic from being a hunter, as he made plain when he stated:
Perhaps no one but a hunter can understand how intense an affection a boy can feel for a piece of marsh…. I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the help of the Corps of Engineers had dyked and drained my boyhood hunting grounds on the Mississippi river bottoms…. My hometown thought the community enriched by this change. I thought it impoverished.
Indeed, that the hunter's view of the world.
And that's the Western Agrarian's view of the world as well. The two Weltanschauug combined make up the ethic of the Western Agrarian.
But what about the "homesteader"?
I don't really think so.
Let's take a look at the work "homestead" for just a second. It originally from Old English but its roots go all the way back to Saxon. It's a German combination word, as so my German words are, combining "home", meaning a dwelling place, with "stead", meaning, basically, a location. Stead is used in at least one other surviving English word, that being "farmstead", although it's not used a great deal.
Where the word really took off in modern American English is with the Homestead Act of 1862, which was a Civil War era radical act which was designed to vest settlers in the West directly with real property, if they worked the land for a time. We note this as a "radical" act, as it could have only came about due to the Civil War, which makes our citation to the Southern Agrarians a bit ironic, as they Southern Agrarians didn't understand the irony of the Southern historical pattern of land ownership.
The South of the 1860s was largely populated by yeomen farmers, i.e., agrarians, but the power in the South was vested in the planter class, which was a class that was making money from production agriculture. The average Southern yeoman of, let's say, 1859, was consuming with his family most of the production from his farm and selling the surplus. That gave him a fair degree of independence, as those who have lauded yeomanry have celebrated, but it also never made him rich. Indeed, that's one of the social benefits of agrarianism, the masses are independent but neither rich nor poor. So agrarianism vests them in decent family lives, but it never allows them to really lord it over their neighbors.
The planter class, however did just that. Planters were engaged in production agriculture as their focus, producing first tobacco and then later cotton. Yeomen also produced cotton as a cash crop, but not really much of it. In comparison, planters produced a lot, and both tobacco and cotton depended upon slave labor, as is very well known. It also depended upon land being continually available further west, as cotton is a soil destroying crop, at least when grown in the 18th and 19th Century manner. Planters had the capital to buy land further west by selling their land that was depleted.
If the land, however, was going to be given away to those who worked it, that crated a big problem in that it meant that planters would never be able to buy land economically. Yeoman couldn't afford to buy land from governments like planters could, but planters really couldn't afford to amass land from prior individual occupants either.
Often missed in this story is that yeomen were the dominant class in the north too. Indeed, so much romantic slop has been oozed out about Southern yeomen over the years its been nearly completely missed that in the North most farmers were yeoman as well, and more prosperous ones. This was in part because the planter class had never really grown powerful in the north and, by the time of the Civil War, it had been supplanted. Northern farms, therefore, were bigger, better, and wealthier, while also being agrarian units.
Leading up to the Civil War the US engaged in an enormous struggle on what the country was going to be, and how the West fit into that. The Southern political class simply imagined it going forwards as before, developed by private enterprise, with that private enterprise larger planter driven. In the North, however, there was not only opposition to slavery, which allowed the planter class to exist in the form in which it was found, but also a budding desire to apply the American System to the West. We've dealt with that elsewhere, but the quote from the Congressional website on it remains well worth reading, as does the earlier post:
Henry Clay's "American System," devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire "British System."
The American System remains very much with us today, and the recent passage of the massive Biden Infrastructure bill gives a good example of it. Its interesting that we understand our own history so poorly that we tend to accuse people of "socialism" while still lauding events and people who directly took advantage of the American System. Homesteaders provide one such example.
The Homestead Act of 1862 read:
APPROVED, May 20, 1862.
CHAP. LXXV. —An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and. sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres.
SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the person applying for the benefit of this act shall, upon application to the register of the land office in which he or she is about to make such entry, make affidavit before the said register or receiver that he or she is the head of a family, or is twenty-one years or more of age, or shall have performed service in the army or navy of the United States, and that he has never borne arms against the Government of the United States or given aid and comfort to its enemies, and that such application is made for his or her exclusive use and benefit, and that said entry is made for the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation, and not either directly or indirectly for the use or benefit of any other person or persons whomsoever; and upon filing the said affidavit with the register or receiver, and on payment of ten dollars, he or she shall thereupon be permitted to enter the quantity of land specified: Provided, however, That no certificate shall be given or patent issued therefor until the expiration of five years from the date of such entry ; and if, at the expiration of such time, or at any time within two years thereafter, the person making such entry ; or, if he be dead, his widow; or in case of her death, his heirs or devisee; or in case of a widow making such entry, her heirs or devisee, in case of her death ; shall. prove by two credible witnesses that he, she, or they have resided upon or cultivated the same for the term of five years immediately succeeding the time of filing the affidavit aforesaid, and shall make affidavit that no part of said land has been alienated, and that he has borne rue allegiance to the Government of the United States ; then, in such case, he, she, or they, if at that time a citizen of the United States, shall be entitled to a patent, as in other cases provided for by law: And provided, further, That in case of the death of both father and mother, leaving an Infant child, or children, under twenty-one years of age, the right and fee shall ensure to the benefit of said infant child or children ; and the executor, administrator, or guardian may, at any time within two years after the death of the surviving parent, and in accordance with the laws of the State in which such children for the time being have their domicil, sell said land for the benefit of said infants, but for no other purpose; and the purchaser shall acquire the absolute title by the purchase, and be en- titled to a patent from the United States, on payment of the office fees and sum of money herein specified.
SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the register of the land office shall note all such applications on the tract books and plats of, his office, and keep a register of all such entries, and make return thereof to the General Land Office, together with the proof upon which they have been founded.
SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That no lands acquired under the provisions of this act shall in any event become liable to the satisfaction of any debt or debts contracted prior to the issuing of the patent therefor.
SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That if, at any time after the filing of the affidavit, as required in the second section of this act, and before the expiration of the five years aforesaid, it shall be proven, after due notice to the settler, to the satisfaction of the register of the land office, that the person having filed such affidavit shall have actually changed his or her residence, or abandoned the said land for more than six months at any time, then and in that event the land so entered shall revert to the government.
SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That no individual shall be permit- ted to acquire title to more than one quarter section under the provisions of this act; and that the Commissioner of the General Land Office is hereby required to prepare and issue such rules and regulations, consis- tent with this act, as shall be necessary and proper to carry its provisions into effect; and that the registers and receivers of the several land offices shall be entitled to receive the same compensation for any lands entered under the provisions of this act that they are now entitled to receive when the same quantity of land is entered with money, one half to be paid by the person making the application at the time of so doing, and the other half on the issue of the certificate by the person to whom it may be issued; but this shall not be construed to enlarge the maximum of compensation now prescribed by law for any register or receiver: Pro- vided, That nothing contained in this act shall be so construed as to im- pair or interfere in any manner whatever with existing preemption rights : And provided, further, That all persons who may have filed their applications for a preemption right prior to the passage of this act, shall be entitled to all privileges of this act: Provided, further, That no person who has served, or may hereafter serve, for a period of not less than fourteen days in the army or navy of the United States, either regular or volun- teer, under the laws thereof, during the existence of an actual war, do- mestic or foreign, shall be deprived of the benefits of this act on account of not having attained the age of twenty-one years.
SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That the fifth section of the act en- titled" An act in addition to an act more effectually to provide for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States, and for other purposes," approved the third of March, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, shall extend to all oaths, affirmations, and affidavits, re- quired or authorized by this act.
SEC. 8. And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act shall be 80 construed as to prevent any person who has availed him or herself of the benefits of the fir8t section of this act, from paying the minimum price, or the price to which the same may have graduated, for the quantity of land so entered at any time before the expiration of the five years, and obtain- ing a patent therefor from the government, as in other cases provided by law, on making proof of settlement and cultivation as provided by exist- ing laws granting preemption rights.
There were later expressions of this act that were somewhat different, such as the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916, but they all worked in a similar fashion.
Okay, so what's that have to do with modern homesteading?
I don't think very much, really.
Mountain West Farm Bureau, trying to answer the question for its members, has published the question, and tried to answer it thus:
What is Homesteading?
Homesteading is a way of life based on self-sufficiency and the idea of living off the land. It's been around for hundreds, even thousands of years – but most people in the US associate homesteading with Westward Expansion and pioneers. Your mind’s eye might picture something like “Little House on the Prairie” when you think of homesteading, and you aren’t wrong. A homestead is all about people living and working together to do things like grow and preserve food and do other things without being so dependent on modern amenities.
This way of life is fruitful and rewarding, as what you make and what you do directly benefits and impacts you and your family. It can also be incredibly challenging. Thankfully, there are plenty of successful homesteaders out there who have put in the work themselves and are now helping others on their homesteading journeys. More on that later!
Modern Homesteading
Homesteading is becoming increasingly popular; and it's no wonder why! In today's modern world, the idea of getting back to ones' roots and living off the land is attractive to many people. Modern homesteaders tend to be focused on self-sufficiency through growing, raising, and preserving their own food. Many homesteaders today use renewable energy sources, too; like wind or solar. The homesteader lifestyle can be incorporated in small pieces or big chunks, and ranges from getting off the grid entirely to keeping backyard chickens or a rooftop garden. If you or your family is working towards becoming more self-sustained, you just might be modern homesteaders!
Does this define it? Well, maybe. . . but I think while MWFB got the recollection of the 19th Century right, something else is at work here.
Indeed, while modern homesteaders like to call themselves that, and I think are trying to make an intentional association with 19th Century homesteading, they really owe a lot more to the 1960s "back to the land" movement. [2]
And that's what's wrong with it.
Modern homesteaders are highly romantic concerning what they are doing, while also seeming resistant to knowing about the past, although they'll deny that. Now, a person has to be fair about that as there is no central set of tenants that homesteaders subscribe to, so they vary a great deal. But one thing that seems to really be a distinct aspect of it is a rejection of the land ethic, combined with a "me and my own against the world" type of mindset.
These both come through, I think, by the constant posts, if you follow any homesteading thing at all, based upon the concept of "here's where I (or perhaps more often, me and my 'partner') are going to build our homestead!", by which they tend to mean that's where they intend to plop a house and outbuildings, with little foreknowledge on how to do things, in a pristine pasture. That's bad farming, and its contrary to the land ethnic. A yeoman wouldn't do that.
Which gets to the irony that there are some agrarians in towns who exercise the land ethic better than "homesteaders" out in the sticks. [3]
Additionally, and this is really hard to define, there's a rejectionism that seems to infect homesteaders that doesn't agrarians.
Perhaps that's best summarized, in away, by the concepts of G. K. Chesterton, the famous polymath, who was an English advocate of Distributism. All agrarians are distributists, even though not all distributists are agrarians. [4] Chesterton advocated for "three acres and a cow" for English agrarians, which was based upon the high production of English farmland which, at the time he poses this, still featured large-scale aristocratic ownership. His advocacy wouldn't have really changed the viewshed of English agriculture much, but it would have allowed for Jeffersonian yeomanry independence for English yeomen including, in the case of English Catholics, the freedom to practice their religion independently. What it wouldn't have done, however, is to free them from being English. They would have still been participating in village and national life.
Modern homesteaders, however, heirs to the "turn on, tune in and drop out" culture of the 1960s, don't see things that way. Indeed, they're often trying to create a world of their own, rather than live in tune with the world.
If we take the example of modern agrarians, for example, both great and small, we see how they were still part of their world, at least in a letter to Diognetus fashion. [5]. That is, agrarians are independent and agriculturally focused, but as we've defined it, and indeed as their example shows, cognizant of the land ethic. They're also aware of and part of things outside themselves. In all true Western World Agrarian societies, and we're really only dealing with those here, they've all been deeply religious.
Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.
Tradition is true conservatism, we'd note, the conservation of what's worthwhile. Not everything is worth preserving, whether it's a tradition or not, but before tossing any tradition out, it should be given the same test that tools should be given. Does it serve a purpose or not, and what is that purpose?
Now again, this doesn't apply uniformly, and you see varying degrees of this, but the rejection of tradition aspect of things is definitely there in the homestead community. You can see it in some of the links that I link in here on agricultural topics that are homestead oriented, and a tour of Reddit's homestead subs shows it really clearly as well.
All sorts of expressions are there, both great and small. On the large end, homesteaders often seem to have a blistering ignorance of agricultural practices and no concept of learning them from the locals. I've actually seen this in print, and heard it otherwise, from self professed homesteaders who went in to an area convinced that they knew how to grow all organic whatever, often to find that Farmer Bob who lived three miles down, and who is engaged in production agriculture, already knew all about how to grow free-range kale and what the pluses nad minuses are. For this reason, homesteaders often fail, after ruining a pasture and building on it, going back to their former cubicle lives, often with the odd observation that "farming is hard work".
Yes, it really is.
A real ignorance of animals is often part of this.
This is not to say that they lack animals. They don't tend to. Indeed, you'll frequently find sort of an eclectic mix of them, some of which speaks to ignorance on the topic they're engaged in, and some of which does not. Boer goats, Dutch Belted Cattle, Donkeys, and more frequently chickens and rabbits. Indeed on the latter, I'm frequently surprised by how many homesteaders opt for rabbits which, in my part of the country, are so prolific some years that they can genuinely be regarded as a nuisance.
And I'm not criticizing that. Rather, what I'm criticizing is the lack of knowledge that sometimes accompanies the acquisition of the animals, but more than that, the lack of knowledge on the usefulness of large animals.
Features:
Barns on the Move for Horses and Hogs
Pack Saddle Building
Facing Problems with Soil Health in Mind
A Sweeping Success at Horse Progress Days
Cowboys and Indians
2021 Summer Suffolk Gathering
Tales from Carter County - Old Lily
Midwest Ox Drovers Association Gathering
Horse Progress Days Field Equipment
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Horse Health
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Pond Management
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Maple Syruping
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Logging
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Horses and the Amish
Horse Progress Days Seminar: International Meeting
Footnotes:
1. I'm always leery of quoting I'll Take My Stand as it was by the "Southern Agrarians", written in the 1930s, and it really shows it.
The context of its being written is particularly interesting in comparison to today, as in fact it's a good mirror to modern times. The writers thought, with good reason, that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies were wrecking Southern Agrarianism. They were, accidentally, but in fairness they'd really be polished off by the farm policies of the early Cold War.
Roosevelt had no such intent, of course, and he had a massive economic crisis to deal with and, by definition, dealing with it was going to help some and hurt others, with the thought being that at least you were helping the many and hurting the few. What the Southern Agrarians recognized, however, was that the policies were, no matter how phrased or conceived, industrial capitalist at their heart.
That's significant as many "progressive" policies of today also are. It's a bizarre byproduct of left wing social thought that it tends to reinforce a capitalist economy. By removing hazards, economic, personal and moral, the risks of capitalism are essentially insured against and the need to fully participate in it dramatically increased.
Anyhow, the real problem with the Southern Agrarians is that they were Southern or Southern in sympathies and still living in the Lost Cause era. It's not the main focus of their work, but they tended to be apologists a bit about Southern racism in some instances, although again it wasn't the focus of their writing. There's no excuse for that, but it comes through and taints them, and it continues to taint some of their followers today.
The full introduction to the work states:
THE authors contributing to this book are Southerners, well acquainted with one another and of similar tastes, though not necessarily living in the same physical community, and perhaps only at this moment aware of themselves as a single group of men. By conversation and exchange of letters over a number of years it had developed that they entertained many convictions in common, and it was decided to make a volume in which each one should furnish his views upon a chosen topic. This was the general background. But background and consultation as to the various topics were enough; there was to be no further collaboration. And so no single author is responsible for any view outside his own article. It was through the good fortune of some deeper agreement that the book was expected to achieve its unity. All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book's title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.
But after the book was under way it seemed a pity if the contributors, limited as they were within their special subjects, should stop short of showing how close their agreements really were. On the contrary, it seemed that they ought to go on and make themselves known as a group already consolidated by a set of principles which could be stated with a good deal of particularity. This might prove useful for the sake of future reference, if they should undertake any further joint publication. It was then decided to prepare a general introduction for the book which would state briefly the common convictions of the group. This is the statement. To it every one of the contributors in this book has subscribed.
Nobody now proposes for the South, or far any other community in this country, an independent political destiny. That idea is thought to have been finished in 1805. But how far shall the South surrender its moral, social, and economic autonomy to the victorious principle of Union? That question remains open. The South is a minority section that has hitherto been jealous of its minority right to live its own kind of life. The South scarcely hopes to determine the other sections, but it does propose to determine itself, within the utmost limits of legal action. Of late, however, there is the melancholy fact that the South itself has wavered a little and shown signs of wanting to join up behind the common or American industrial ideal. It is against that tendency that this book is written. The younger Southerners, who are being converted frequently to the industrial gospel, must come back to the support of the Southern tradition. They must be persuaded to look very critically at the advantages of becoming a "new South" which will be only an undistinguished replica of the usual industrial community.
But there are many other minority communities opposed to industrialism, and wanting a much simpler economy to live by. The communities and private persons sharing the agrarian tastes are to be found widely within the Union. Proper living is a matter of the intelligence and the will, does not depend on the local climate or geography, and is capable of a definition which is general and not Southern at all. Southerners have a filial duty to discharge to their own section. But their cause is precarious and they must seek alliances with sympathetic communities everywhere. The members of the present group would be happy to be counted as members of a national agrarian movement.
Industrialism is the economic organization of the collective American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even with the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists of industrialism do not like to meet this charge directly; so they often take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, It is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but really is not either.
The contribution that science can make to a labor is to render it easier by the help of a tool or a process, and to assure the laborer of his perfect economic security while he is engaged upon it. Then it can be performed with leisure and enjoyment. But the modern laborer has not exactly received this benefit under the industrial regime. His labor is hard, its tempo is fierce, and his employment is insecure. The first principle of a good labor is that it must be effective, but the second principle is that it must be enjoyed. Labor is one of the largest items in the human career; it is a modest demand to ask that it may partake of happiness.
The regular act of applied science is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is a benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save the labor The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain, and that the more of it the better. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is good. On this assumption labor becomes mercenary and servile, and it is no wonder if many forms of modern labor are accepted without resentment though they are evidently brutalizing. The act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned, and is practiced solely for its rewards.
Even the apologists of industrialism have been obliged to admit that some economic evils follow in the wake of the machines. These are such as overproduction, unemployment, and a growing inequality in the distribution of wealth. But the remedies proposed by the apologists are always homeopathic. They expect the evils to disappear when we have bigger and better machines, and more of them. Their remedial programs, therefore, look forward to more industrialism. Sometimes they see the system righting itself spontaneously and without direction: they are Optimists. Sometimes they rely on the benevolence of capital, or the militancy of labor, to bring about a fairer division of the spoils: they are Cooperationists or Socialists. And sometimes they expect to find super-engineers, in the shape of Boards of Control, who will adapt production to consumption and regulate prices and guarantee business against fluctuations: they are Sovietists. With respect to these last it must be insisted that the true Sovietists or Communists-if the term may be used here in the European sense-are the Industrialists themselves. They would have the government set up an economic super-organization, which in turn would become the government. We therefore look upon the Communist menace as a menace indeed, but not as a Red one; because it is simply according to the blind drift of our industrial development to expect in America at last much the same economic system as that imposed by violence upon Russia in 1917.
Turning to consumption, as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness. The modern man has lost his sense of vocation.
Religion can hardly expect to flourish in an industrial society. Religion is our submission to the general intention of a nature that is fairly inscrutable; it is the sense of our role as creatures within it. But nature industrialized, transformed into cities and artificial habitations, manufactured into commodities, is no longer nature but a highly simplified picture of nature. We receive the illusion of having power over nature, and lose the sense of nature as something mysterious and contingent. The God of nature under these conditions is merely an amiable expression, a superfluity, and the philosophical understanding ordinarily carried in the religious experience is not there for us to have.
Nor do the arts have a proper life under industrialism, with the general decay of sensibility which attends it. Art depends, in general, like religion, on a right attitude to nature; and in particular on a free and disinterested observation of nature that occurs only in leisure. Neither the creation nor the understanding of works of art is possible in an industrial age except by some local and unlikely suspension of the industrial drive.
The amenities of life also suffer under the curse of a strictly-business or industrial civilization. They consist in such practices as manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love-in the social exchanges which reveal and develop sensibility in human affairs. If religion and the arts are founded on right relations of man- to-nature, these are founded on right relations of man-to- man.
Apologists of industrialism are even inclined to admit that its actual processes may have upon its victims the spiritual effects just described. But they think that all can be made right by extraordinary educational efforts, by all sorts of cultural institutions and endowments. They would cure the poverty of the contemporary spirit by hiring experts to instruct it in spite of itself in the historic culture. But salvation is hardly to be encountered on that road. The trouble with the life-pattern is to be located at its economic base, and we cannot rebuild it by pouring in soft materials from the top. The young men and women in colleges, for example, if they are already placed in a false way of life, cannot make more than an inconsequential acquaintance with the arts and humanities transmitted to them. Or else the understanding of these arts and humanities will but make them the more wretched in their own destitution.
The "Humanists" are too abstract. Humanism, properly speaking, is not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition. And, in the concrete, we believe that this, the genuine humanism, was rooted in the agrarian life of the older South and of other parts of the country that shared in such a tradition. It was not an abstract moral "check" derived from the classics-it was not soft material poured in from the top. It was deeply founded in the way of life itself-in its tables, chairs, portraits, festivals, laws, marriage customs. We cannot recover our native humanism by adopting some standard of taste that is critical enough to question the contemporary arts but not critical enough to question the social and economic life which is their ground.
The tempo of the industrial life is fast, but that is not the worst of it; it is accelerating. The ideal is not merely some set form of industrialism, with so many stable industries, but industrial progress, or an incessant extension of industrialization. It never proposes a specific goal; it initiates the infinite series. We have not merely capitalized certain industries; we have capitalized the laboratories and inventors, and undertaken to employ all the labor-saving devices that come out of them. But a fresh labor-saving device introduced into an industry does not emancipate the laborers in that industry so much as it evicts them. Applied at the expense of agriculture, for example, the new processes have reduced the part of the population supporting itself upon the soil to a smaller and smaller fraction. Of course no single labor-saving process is fatal; it brings on a period of unemployed labor and unemployed capital, but soon a new industry is devised which will put them both to work again, and a new commodity is thrown upon the market. The laborers were sufficiently embarrassed in the meantime, but, according to the theory, they will eventually be taken care of. It is now the public which is embarrassed; it feels obligated to purchase a commodity for which it had expressed no desire, but it is invited to make its budget equal to the strain. All might yet be well, and stability and comfort might again obtain, but for this: partly because of industrial ambitions and partly because the repressed creative impulse must break out somewhere, there will be a stream of further labor-saving devices in all industries, and the cycle will have to be repeated over and over. The result is an increasing disadjustment and instability.
It is an inevitable consequence of industrial progress that production greatly outruns the rate of natural consumption. To overcome the disparity, the producers, disguised as the pure idealists of progress, must coerce and wheedle the public into being loyal and steady consumers, in order to keep the machines running. So the rise of modern advertising-along with its twin, personal salesmanship-is the most significant development of our industrialism. Advertising means to persuade the consumers to want exactly what the applied sciences are able to furnish them. It consults the happiness of the consumer no more than it consulted the happiness of the laborer. It is the great effort of a false economy of life to approve itself. But its task grows more difficult even day.
It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could ever as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants. There is evidently a kind of thinking that rejoices in setting up a social objective which has no relation to the individual. Men are prepared to sacrifice their private dignity and happiness to an abstract social ideal, and without asking whether the social ideal produces the welfare of any individual man whatsoever. But this is absurd. The responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society.
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
These principles do not intend to be very specific in proposing any practical measures. How may the little agrarian community resist the Chamber of Commerce of its county seat, which is always trying to import some foreign industry that cannot be assimilated to the life-pattern of the community? Just what must the Southern leaders do to defend the traditional Southern life ? How may the Southern and the Western agrarians unite for effective action? Should the agrarian forces try to capture the Democratic party, which historically is so closely affiliated with the defense of individualism, the small community, the state, the South ? Or must the agrarians-even the Southern ones-abandon the Democratic party to its fate and try a new one? What legislation could most profitably be championed by the powerful agrarians in the Senate of the United States? What anti-industrial measures might promise to stop the advances of industrialism, or even undo some of them, with the least harm to those concerned? What policy should be pursued by the educators who have a tradition at heart? These and many other questions are of the greatest importance, but they cannot be answered here.
For, in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence.
2. It's rarely noticed that the peak year for homestead entries was actually 1919 and the various homestead acts were not repealed, and even then not fully, until 1932. There was more 20th Century homesteading than 19th Century homesteading.
The back to the land movement was a pretty big part of the hippie movement, although it doesn't seem to be all that well recalled in the history of the 60s generally. The degree to which it shares similarities with the current homesteader movement, as will be noted, is pretty pronounced.
3. American farmsteads usually feature dwellings on the farm, but this isn't the case everywhere and indeed it isn't the case everywhere in the United States.
Irish farms, for example, often have traditionally featured a house in town, although not always Many Irish farmers walked to their fields daily, and they did not want to ruin valuable farm land by building an unnecessary house on it if they could avoid it. In some regions of the US where farming and ranching was initiated by Irish immigrants, that pattern remained. Indeed, in central Wyoming there were quite a few ranchers of Irish descent who always lived in town, not on their ranches, with some traveling considerable distances to their outfits daily. I still know of one descendant of an Irish rancher who still does so.
While this no doubt is inconvenient in all sorts of ways, it did and does offer some advantages as well. For one thing, such ranchers were part of their communities. It's notable that Irish American ranchers in Wyoming tended to be quite active in their local communities and retained their Faith, while out in the hinterlands both is much less true of the ranching demographic. Town headquarted Irish American ranchers also placed a high value on education, with many of their children ending up in the professions.
4. As a Distributist as well as an Agrarian, I'd note that the modern Distributist community is flat out weird, or perhaps contains a fair amount of weirdness. Having said that, everything in current American economics and politics is pretty weird right now.
Anyhow, while all agrarains are distributists, some distributists pride themselves on not claiming to be agrarians, in large part because they don't grasp what agrarianism is. That's understandable enough, as distributism also tends to attract a lot of romantics who envision returning the economy of the globe or perhaps their region of it to Medieval monarchies, something that at least G. K. Chesteron would have laughed at.
5. The letter:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself
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