Ultimately, I don’t think there’s any practical way we can undo the historical, cultural and economic situation we’re thrown into. Emphasis on practical: if one wanted to be like the Amish, that option is always there. But there’s got to be a defensible middle ground between complete refusal (the Amish option) and complete, uncritical acceptance….We could come up with a long list of ways aspects of modernity make it easier to live anti-modern lives. The only people who have no internal conflict over all this are those who have completely refused it (the Amish and their fellow travelers), and those who have completely embraced it. I submit that there are a lot of us in the uneasy middle, who have to do the best we can trying to negotiate modernity with our guilty consciences, balancing ourselves between not letting an awareness of the difficulty of our position prevent us from saying No when No needs saying, but also allowing that difficulty to keep us humble about making sweeping judgments of the compromises others make.

~ Rod Dreher

Bill Kauffman, a Batavia local and my favorite writer at Front Porch Republic, gives us some interesting Thanksgiving history. Read the entire article. It’s very funny. Here’s a teaser:

It seems that in 1939 Thanksgiving was to fall on November 30th, a matter of consternation to the big merchants of the National Retail Dry Goods Association (NRDGA). The presidents of Gimbel Brothers, Lord & Taylor, and other unsentimental vendors petitioned President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the previous Thursday, November 23, thus creating an additional week of Christmas shopping—and to the astonishment of those Americans without dollar signs in their eyes, the President did so. (Not all merchants favored the shift. One Kokomo shopkeeper hung a sign in his window reading, “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.”)

This health care debate is as painful as it gets when it comes to politics in America. I am exhausted by watching people willingly abandon critical thinking about their own beliefs in order to join a team and tear apart the other team.

Listen: Both sides are lying a little bit. Both sides have folks who are telling the truth and genuinely want to see a resolution in this debate, and both sides have morons. So please, spare us the headlines and blog posts and Facebook updates like, “Facts Don’t Matter to the Anti-Obama Camp!” and the like.

Sheesh.

I am, as usual, with the libertarians on this one, and I think the official LP response (I’ve recently joined the LP) to President Obama’s speech is right on target.

/ rant off.

My friend and Hog’s Head colleague Dave Jones is blogging away at Nowhere on the Ohio River (which now has a place on the blogroll, by the way), and he’s ventured into the realm of politics. He writes:

Both “Republican” and “Democrat” have come to be just pejorative words to me.  “Liberal” and “Conservative” are even worse — they have become smears that label an opponent as an evil “other.”  “Libertarian” has become an amorphous term that seems to designate everyone from Ron Paul to Alex Jones.  One is a serious politician that many of my acquaintances found at least interesting last year.  The other is a nutjob who thinks the world is run by an unseen “elite” cabal Illuminati.

On the whole, I’m very much in agreement with Dave’s sentiment – though I’m quite skeptical that any term or label can maintain any significant meaning for a long period of time these days. I tend to be more of a term-rescuer than a term-abandoner. So I’ll call myself a “conservative” or a “feminist,” watch as people recoil, and then try to explain what I really mean by the term. (Yes, I get a special pleasure out of telling my conservative Christian friends that I’m a “feminist.”) I use worn-out terms for the shock value, in order to open up a conversation; I don’t use them as badges of honor and pride.

“Libertarian” really is one of the best of the terms I’m using right now, because there are so many nutters out there. “Libertarian” conjures up images of pot-smokers and 9/11-Truth-ers that most people aren’t comfortable with. Well, maybe the pot-smoking.

But I can sympathize with Dave’s term-frustration. As I’ve chosen libertarian, he’s chosen “Independent,” which led me down an interesting and contradictory train of thought. I’ve always balked at “independent,” primarily because my political idea is a paradox which would, voluntarily, not let me be all that independent.

Libertarianism, aside from anarchy, is the political ideology that most champions individualism and personal freedoms. I’m a libertarian for that reason, but it’s only one reason among many, and it’s not the primary one. The primary reason I’m a libertarian is that it’s the only political system that will leave the Shire alone and let it just be the Shire.

The paradox is here: I think rampant individualism is bad news. I don’t, as a Christian, think libertarianism is God’s ideal government – that the renewed earth will be governed by a hands-off approach on the part of its Maker. As a Christian with a strong belief in the institution of the church (I actually belong to a group on Facebook called “The Most Important Thing is to Have an Institutional Relationship with God”), I think interdependence is fundamental to the Christian experience – and to the human one. So I want the church to have all the freedom it needs not to be libertarian in its government of its people.

That’s important, because there’s precisely the error that conservative, God-and-country Christians make: they equate the Bill of Rights with God’s ideal government. A thoroughly libertarian government still needs to be met with a counter-cultural stance on the part of the Church.

I simply don’t trust fallen people to create genuine community from the State level – even Christian ones. It’s an ugly history of church and state marriage. So libertarianism is the ideal set-up not only for the ardent, bootstrap-pulling individualist, but for the communitarian who thinks the picture of the early church selling all its possessions and voluntarily giving to the poor is a beautiful thing, because it gets the intrusive government out of the way and lets each local community take care of itself. It also makes room for moral choice; there’s no expectation that the government will fix it. It’s up to us. It’s up to the Church, and it’s a matter of grace and mercy, not compulsion and obligation.

Mordor has no business messing with the Shire. But neither does Gondor. Much of what drives my urban ministry hopes has nothing to do with getting the government to get involved in the Beechwood area (even the local government), but to get the church so involved that Beechwood doesn’t need the government. One of the innumerable problems with the government providing all the help with entitlement programs is that the church absorbs the culture of dependency and gives up its responsibility. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the church in America has plenty of freaking money. There’s a lot we could do.

But we’re not counter-cultural, we’ve swallowed the American Dream whole, married it to Jesus, and we think we’ve got God’s pleasure when we’re “safe and white” in the suburbs. That, of course, is the pitfall to the traditional, libertarian-type individualist thinking.

But that potential pitfall is the lesser of two evils, in my view. I’d rather the church wake up from its slumber and find that it has the freedom it needs to transform a hurting community than have it wake up from its slumber and have to file 314 pages of paperwork to make sure that what it’s doing to help the poor is legal.

“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”  ~ Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative

[The only dichotomy I might take issue with is "fact to mystery."]

We moderns are defined by constant motion rather than by sitting still. We can be anywhere in a second, but rarely stay somewhere longer than that. We have developed an aversion to fixing things—and to fixed things. We would rather discard and replace than care for and renew.

It is more and more difficult for us to imagine making Odysseus’s choice to forsake eternity for home. Liberalism’s ideas have consequences—from widespread divorce to mass marketing to spaghetti interchanges—but those consequences also shape ideas, reinforcing the frame of mind that gave birth to them. They break our ties to imagination, to craft, to the land, and to the shop, so that our cities and pastures alike are blighted. Because we have repeatedly bowed at the altar of convenience, we are isolated from the very things that would feed and nourish our imagination. It should be no wonder that civil society has largely lost its ability to mediate between the individual and society at large. It should be no wonder that people live with a vague sense of lostness. We have become a people without a place.

~ Caleb Stegall, Practicing the Discipline of Place

Oh, Jeb.   Don’t they say you’re the smart one?

How will we ever find a decent conservative candidate when the current lot can’t even get the essence of conservatism right?  Here’s what Jeb Bush said recently:

So our ideas need to be forward looking and relevant. I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia and the good old days in the [Republican] messaging. I mean, it’s great, but it doesn’t draw people toward your cause.

From the conservative side, it’s time for us to listen first, to learn a little bit, to upgrade our message a little bit, to not be nostalgic about the past because, you know, things do ebb and flow.

Conservatives who are “forward-looking” and dismissive of the past?  What does the word “conservative” even mean anymore?

I’m all for getting over Reagan nostalgia.  Given the lot we had in the 20th century, Reagan was certainly one of the best.  But his 8 years weren’t exactly a glowing victory for Goldwater conservatism.

But to turn conservatives into the “forward-looking” politicians makes me cringe.  Let’s get over Reagan nostalgia and get back to Burke, Kirk, and other conservatives who knew what conservatism meant.

Jeb continues:

We have principles, we have values. They are the values that are shared by the majority of Americans, there’s no question about it. But we have to now take those principles and values and apply them to the challenges that our country faces today and in the future. …

And then, hopefully – God willing – [we] embrace our conservative principles and take these new ideas and present them to the American people.

This is why I’m more and more convinced of small-government, localist thinking.  Abstract “principles” and “values” mean so little when not rooted in time and place.  The current “conservative” version of politics is to take these “principles” and “values” and use a big government to enforce them.  You can’t marry conservative “principles” to big-government methods and still have conservatism.

So, to the suggestion that we look at the Democrats, see what they’re doing that resonating with the American people, and make a conservative version of it, I say, “No, thanks.”

I often hear defenders of libertarianism confidently assert, “I believe people are basically good. We don’t need all this government intervention to keep people in line.” It’s a logical conclusion, of course.  But I come at it from the opposite point of view and arrive at the same political philosophy.

Anyone from a historical Christian perspective on human depravity will not accept “people are basically good” as an argument for libertarianism.  But I think “people are basically evil” is an even better argument for libertarianism.

Approach it from this question: Who has the power?

In a socialist/big government set-up, the big government has the power.  It might be concluded that because people are basically evil, we need a big government with lots of laws to restrain human sin.  But that big government isn’t some objective entity; it’s inhabited by people.  People who are evil.  Which means that instead of a small government with limited power, allowing people to freely go about their business, you have a big government with lots of power being run by evil people.  And they also have the power and resources to cover up their evil.  Not an ideal situation.

So, I think human depravity is a better argument for libertarianism, where the government’s only role is to keep the people safe and keep the currency sound.  Freedom is left for moral choice in each community, and each small community can handle its own issues.  Human depravity is a very good reason for small and local, as opposed to big and federal.  You can’t expect people who are evil to enforce the good if only you give them enough power to do so.  That doesn’t make any sense.

A friend of mine recently selected Abraham Lincoln as the worst American president in that Top 5 category on Facebook.  That’s a selection that would be jarring to the majority of Americans.

As we near the first 100 days of the current president from Illinois (which 100 days The Onion is humorously documenting), the comparison of Obama to Lincoln, which has been made many times, might need to be met not only with a dose of reality about the consequences of current policy, but with a more sobering look at Lincoln himself.

Front Porch Republic has a well-balanced article on Lincoln that would be a good intro to the not-so-shiny perspective on Lincoln.  An excerpt:

The Northern victory, which Lincoln secured by resorting to total war against southern civilians, unleashed a devastating assault on a Jeffersonian version of agrarianism that connected happiness and human well being to real communities and real places. Liberty, as defined in terms of “improvement” and “mobility,” has resulted in a rootless cosmopolitanism that has produced millions of people who claim to “love humankind,” but who do not live in one place long enough to know, let alone “love,” their neighbor. Moreover, the national infrastructure built to connect people and unify the nation economically and culturally has come at the expense of the environment. The result of a “Whig” economy has produced an ever-expanding commercialism that tempts people with products to fulfill their every desire, all in the very American quest to “pursue happiness.” Such consumer capitalism makes it all the more difficult for Americans to practice virtues of self-restraint. (emphasis added)

On a related note, all this talk of secession lately brought about an interesting and accurate response from Ron Paul:

Speaking of local, Batavia resident Bill Kauffman wrote a great little piece over at Front Porch Republic.  Excerpts:

Beyond its hometown of Nebraska City, Nebraska, Arbor Day has faded into obscurity; its historic date, April 22, will be given over this year to that dreary shower of corporate agit-prop known as Earth Day. The difference between Arbor Day and Earth Day is the difference between planting a tree in your backyard and e-mailing a machine-written plea for a global warming treaty to your UN representative. [...]

Earth Day has become a bloodless holiday for pallid urbanites, the sort of technology-dependent yuppies whose rare encounters with the unregulated outdoors usually end in paralyzing fears of Lyme disease. Earth Day is about as green as a $100 bill.

Read To Hell with Earth Day; Long Live Arbor Day!