A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 2. Distributism

Much of this, indeed the lion's share, could be fixed by reordering the economy to be Distributist.

That may seem extreme, but then, in the modern world, this is extreme, and frankly, we're in an extreme situation that we need to find a way out of or events of one kind or another will take us out of them for us.  

To be more extreme, we'd note what Cardinal Sarah has above, once again, the barbarians are alrady inside the city.

I've started off with agrarianism, and I mean it, but I'd also note that an aspect of agrarianism is distributism. All agraraians are distributists, not all distributist are agrarians.  We'll start with distributism.  

What the hecks is it, anyway.  We'll, we'll turn to an old Lex Anteinternet post, where we discussed that (we just bumped that post up here).

What the heck is Distributism anyway?

 The prolific writer G. K. Chesterton, who wrote novels, poetry, and philosophy in stunningly large quantities.  An intellectual giant, he was enormously influential on British writing in his era and was part of the collection of personalities that included C. K. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hellaire Belloc.  Together with Belloc he was a major proponent of Distributism.

I'm fairly convinced that part of the problem with Distributism is the name.  At least up until recently, the concept that a politician would act to "distribute" wealth has been a hugely negative on in American political speech.  I suppose with Saunders running, a person could ask if this was still true, but for purposes of our discussion here we should note that Distributism doesn't mean that sort of distributing.  Quite the contrary.

Rather, Distributism is based on the concept of Subsidiarity, which of course doesn't help much to most people as most people don't know what that means.  That too is problematic as the term is really confusing to most people. The term comes out of Catholic social thinking, and it holds that the best and most just means of doing things is to push it down to the lowest practical level.  Ironically, that's a highly American concept and the polar opposite of the large-scale statist approach to things that many conservative Americans fear.  Subsidiarity stands for local control, or control below that level if possible.

In economic terms, or rather through Distributist terms, what this amounts to is an economic system based upon a free economy that favors economic power being concentrated at the family or individual level.  It's a highly capitalist system, and one that is actually more capitalist than the Corporate Capitalism that most westerners believe to be capitalism, which is really Corporate Capitalism.

A Distributist economy, therefore, would discourage, or perhaps even prohibit, the concentration of the means of retail distribution in the hands of corporations in favor of family or individual enterprises.  So, rather than have a Walmart, you'd have a family owned appliance store, a family owned clothing store, a family owned grocery store, etc.  That's a pretty simple illustration the retail end of the economy, but that's a major aspect of Distributism. Distributism also has an agricultural aspect to it that's frankly agrarian, although agrarianism predates Distributism.  What that means is that farms would be owned and operated by the actual farmer.  That sounds simplistic but it stands contrary to much of what we see today, with agricultural land held by absentee owners, or by the wealthy who do not work it, or by agricultural corporations.

Modern Distributist sometimes get wrapped up in romantic notions of local production as well, and that's clearly an aspect of a Distributist economy.  Nonetheless any rational economist, no matter what stripe they may be, will acknowledge that in the modern world large-scale industrial production is the province of corporations.  That may be good or bad, but it's been known and discussed as an aspect of this since the mid 19th Century at least.  Rational Distributist, to include, on this topic, Theodore Roosevelt, have discussed how to handle this in the context of a Distributist economy, but that it would be one is quite clear.

In short, Distributism favors the smallest economic unit possible.  And it does this on a philosophical basis, that being that small freeholders, or small businessmen, or small artisans, should hold the reins of the economy, as that concentrates wealth in their hands, those being middle class hands.  By doing that, that makes much of the middle class more or less economically independent, but not wealthy, stabilizes wealthy in the hands of the largest number of people, and strengthens the ability of the people to decide things locally.  In other words, that sort of economy "distributes" economic wealth and production to the largest number of people, and accordingly "distributes" political power to the largest number of people, on the theory that this is best for the largest number of people.

Interestingly, almost any stripe of Capitalist will actually use most of the same words, as well Socialist, even though there's reasons to question their respective impacts.  Socialism actually concentrates power in the hands of bureaucracy and dissipates wealth.  At least to some extent, Corporate Capitalism in recent years, and perhaps in all years, tends to concentrate wealth in remote corporations and a few who lead them.

So why is that important here?

Because what people don't have, is well. . . anything.  People are consumers, and servants.  They lack something of their own, and they accordingly lack stability.  Increasingly, on certain things, including economics and science, they lack education.

And, like the ignorant and have-nots tend to be, they're unhappy and made.

The unhappy and mad masses always make for ignorant revolutions, whether it be the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the revolutionary period of the Weimar Republic that concluded with the Nazis coming to power.  Not having anything, they're willing to try something, whether that something be Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Donald Trump.

It was Jefferson who noted that republics were grounded in yeomen farmers, for the reason that they were independent men.  Through Corporate Capitalism, we've been working on destroying the yeomanry for quite some time now.

The failure of people to have their own has been significant in creating the crisis that we face today.  People who worked for other entities, and that's most people, find themselves either adrift without them or slaves to them.  People live where they don't want to at jobs and careers they don't want to, in conditions they don't want to, even if they do not fully realize it, as their corporate masters compel them to.  It gets worse, all the time, and people are powerless against it.

Indeed, not only are they powerless, but they can be compelled to act against their own best interests, and often do.  People who love one thing as their true selves, will work to destroy the ability to do it for their corporate masters.  You don't have to look much beyond the Wyoming legislature to see this, where some advocate policies that would deprive average Wyomingites to access to public lands, for example, something that only serves the interest of the wealthy.

 What does a Distributist Economy look like?

Generally, what Distributist would do is to strip away, as noted, the ability of large entities to own and operate businesses and "distribute" that down to the smallest practical element.  So, where you have big box stores you'd now have lots of small retail stores.  Where you have chain stores you no longer would. Where you have have chain services shops, a relatively new and fast developing economic entity, you would have individually owned shops.  Where you had chain service industries, such as reality brokerages, you would once again have small locally owned ones.  Where you have H & R Block, you'd have your local accountant. 

 

 Drug store in Southington Connecticut, 1940s.  This family had a shop on this corner for about 200 years at the time this photograph was taken. Do they still?  Photo from an earlier, and now linked in, thread.  This sort of sore had disappeared from many localties in favor of a consolidating the goods sold by a sotre like this in some bigger, chain, store.

Proprietor of family butcher shop, 1940s.  This industry still exists, but the butcher shop has yielded at least partially to the chain grocery store.  For people who like little clues from movies, the film "Marty" involves the story of a simple butcher who has bought such a shop from an owner who has no family.  The intrusion of the super market is actually mentioned in the film,

 

 Paint store.  It's not Home Depot.

 Colorado Bakery and Grocery, a local store of the past in Ft. Collins Colorado.  It's now a brew pub.  Local grocery stores have fallen way off, from once dominating the field to now being a boutique exception.  Brew pubs, however, are a Distributist triumph in the true sense.

This raises the natural question of what about production?  All that addresses is retail.  What about service industries, what about production, and what about agriculture.

Service is one of the easier aspect of this to address, actually, as it started remote national concentration late in the game, and its far from complete.  When we look at doctors, lawyer, and accountants, and the like, we still a lot of the old economy around, while we see the encroachment of national corporate consolidation coming in at the same time.  Something about many of these industries, however, is resistant to too much consolidation, even as we see big efforts to cause it to come about.

In a Distributist economy, quite simply, this would stop.  Law Firms, Accountancy Firms, Doctors offices, would be local.   Hospitals and the likes would be as well.

A couple of old building in Rock Spring's historic district, across from the class Union Pacific depot.  The building on the left is the National Bank building, and was built in 1892.  The one on the right has much of its "ghost signs" painted out, so I'm not sure of its identity, but it's number 18 on the historic district tour. From Painted Bricks.

Well, what about banks? They're a service industry.

Banks, under classic Distributist thought, were really taken on as a negative aspect of the economy and frankly this is one of the areas where old school Distributist, prior to World War Two, sounded a lot like Socialist.  If you look back at Distributist commentary of that period you will find a lot of references to preventing banks from charging interest, and things of this ilk.  All that was extremely unrealistic, to say the least, and it also reflects an earlier era which has really passed.  Taking  on banks is a favorite topic for all politicians now days, but the biggest problems we've had with banks are founded on banking consolidation and inadequate regulation.

Banks, as concentrations of economic maladies, usually only develop real problems when they are largely unregulated. When the old school Distributist formed their thoughts on the matter, that was the case. And the recent banking problems the United States has had largely flowed from the concept that regulation of banks was passe, followed by an actual effort on the part of the government to encourage banks in areas that they shouldn't go.  An overarching aspect of all of this is that an old policy of encouraging home ownership via home loans is a remaining nonsensical central American governmental goal that creates problems in and of itself.  Finally, the consolidation of banking into larger and larger remotely owned banks contributes to the problem. There still are locally owned or regionally owned banks, but not nearly as many as there once was.

Realistically, as banks are so heavily regulated, in a modern Distributist economy the goal would be to keep the banks local or at least no more than regional.  That keeps them focused on their locality and the local economy. The Federal government's sponsorship of home loans probably ought to cease, although that is probably a Distributist concept, or maybe even a Socialist one, in and of itself.  Encouraging any one kind of loan is something that should be really carefully thought out before its done.

Or maybe the ship has sailed with banks, like industrial production (which we'll address below), and today Distributist would have to have a mixed approach, encouraging local but tolerating national.  It's hard to see how industry in particular could exist without large banks.

Large banking has given us credit cards, an aspect of the economy wholly unknown to the original Distributist.  Of course ,they were unknown to earlier Capitalist as well, and have just sort of occurred. This too may be an area where the ship has sailed, but on the other hand, it would be one that I'd have a hard time imagining modern Distributist avoiding.  But how that would be handled in the new economy, which only saw the introduction of widespread use of credit cards starting in the 1970s, is an open question.  Credit cards now make up a huge percentage of the "money" in our economy, and they are interesting an huge unregulated sector, to a significant degree.  That is ,the percentage of interest they charge are regulated, but the creation of them is not.  It's been an amazing change in the economy.

Comedian Marty Allen making a joke of having a large number of credit cards, something that was looked down upon in the 1960s when this photograph was taken.  Now, nearly everyone in the American economy has at least one credit card.

It's an interesting topic, but one that I won't be able to address fully, which is one of the problems when discussing a modern Distributist economy (we'll get to problems in a minute). As there's been no real development of the theory in decades, and as it's never been fully implemented anywhere, some of these topics need to be completely re-thought by Distributists.

Among those topics are topics like insurance.  Americans like to complain about insurance, but by and large the insurance industry is amazingly capable and it really can't be done efficiently on a local level.  This is true of all types of insurance, to include most particularly liability insurance, which people don't think about much but which is particularly important to the economy.  Indeed, topics like banking and insurance do indeed suggest that a Distributist economy might be a bad idea.

Blacksmiths working on the iron rim of a wheel.

That leaves production.

In production, this can also be done, but only to a certain extent in a realistic modern economy.  Indeed, a surprising amount of production of various types is done this way, as nearly every major economic field features local fabrication of some sort, which is local production.  But it's quite clear that in a modern industrial economy, you can't have local production of everything.  Cars, for example, aren't going to be made in a local shop by skilled craftsmen.

How Distributist would handle this aspect of their economic theory is an interesting question, and I don't know the answer.  Some would borrow from Socialist examples, all of which are problematic.  Some might borrow from Theodore Roosevelt's progressive era suggestion and require public ownership of a certain percentage of large corporations, to give a voice in their affairs.  Some might restrict organizing in the corporate forum until a business reached a certain size.  All in all, I don't know how this topic would be approached.  It might be approached in the same way that modern Socialism tends to approach it, which is basically not to except by regulation and taxation, which really takes a person outside of the context of the theory in general and into something else.  What is clear is that in this area the example of Corporate Capitalism would have to largely suffice for Distributist as well.

Union Pacific Depo in Rock Springs Wyoming.  This surviving business from the 19th Century would never have come about except through extensive government support, something that often tends to be forgotten when the stories of large business in the United States are considered.  Indeed, nearly every very large railroad in North American had some government assistance of some sort when it came into existence.

Distribution of goods, on the other hand, is really mixed, but will probably cease to be in the future for environmental reasons.  Right now, distribution of goods in the North American economy is an interesting mixed system, using locally owned and often leased semi tractor combined with large corporate railways.  By and large, the system, if it involves distance, is corporate owned one way or another, and that probably cannot be avoided.  Transcontinental distribution, therefore, may be something like large scale manufacturing and have to be basically left as is, in a Distributist economic model.  Or perhaps it would be handled in one of the several fashions described above as theoretical possibilities for manufacturing.

Okay, I suppose that's all well and good, but so what?  Once again, lots of people note these things and then think they're bold Distributist as they buy free range Cornish Game Hens at the local market.

A person can believe that they can bring an economy about through self actuation, but that's baloney and its really only a comfortable delusion for the really well off. It's the same sort of delusion that comforted wealthy western Communists in the 1920s and 1930s who lived in countries that were never going to be Communist, as there was never any real threat of a real Communist economy to them.  A real economic system, no matter what it is, never comes about without state intervention or support of some kind.

This is most evident, of course, in real classical Socialism, in which the state owns the means of production.  Taking that one step further, as the Communist tried to, the state can end up owning everything.  Those are the most blunt examples, and by the way they're examples of massively unworkable economic failures. That's why there are no real Communist economies outside of North Korea, and that's why most Socialist don't really advocate real Socialism anymore.

But even Capitalism, of the type that we have, requires state intervention to exist. We're just so used to it, we don't notice it.

That's because our Capitalism is Corporate Capitalism.  It's based on the existence of corporations and related business forms. These entities have the status of "persons" at law.  They can sue, be sued, and are taxed, like people as we've seen.

The biggest economic advantage that they convey is the sue and be sued part, as that's where they are distinctly different from their natural fellow, the partnership.  In a conventional partnership, a person can be sued as an individual. That puts their individual assets at risk.  That's not true, however for shareholders in a corporation.  Only the corporate assets are ever at risk.

So, by way of an example, if Walmart does something bad, they don't look to the individual shareholders to make it good. They only look to Walmart.

Additionally, corporations allow for easy remote control.  Generally they're directed by boards rather than by everyone in the entity.  That's less true of normal common partnerships, where everyone gets a say.

All of this is noted as corporations, and related business forms, very obviously have a huge economic advantage over other types of business entities.  They're not natural, but legal fictions, but that legal fiction gives them enormous economic advantage. And that legal fiction is a creature of the state.  Corporations only exist as the statutory law allows people to create them. They would otherwise not exist at all.

Which leads us back to Distributism.  Rather obviously the way to bring about a modern Distributist economy is simply to limit where corporations can be formed, as we've seen. That would largely do it.  And that's a mere modification of the existing law.

If you prohibited, for example, corporations on the retail end, it would wipe out overnight entities like Walmart. There's no question about it. And in its place you'd soon find multiple locally owned stores where once the big box store had been.  And if you provided that land had to be held by the person working it, absentee landlords in agriculture and owning land as an exotic hobby would likewise be over.

There would obviously be limits to how far a person could go in this direction, however, in a modern economy.  Corporations would have to exist for large scale manufacturing.There's no earthly way that products of the type made by General Motors, or Boeing, of Apple, can be made by local entrepreneurs operating without the corporate form.  Therefore any rational system of Distributism, as opposed to a purely theoretical one, would have to accommodate itself to that just as modern Socialism also has.

Should it be tried?

So, it's pretty clear that a country could have a Distributist Economy.  It is realistic.  But that doesn't answer whether Distributism should be tried, which is quite another questions.

In other words, just because you can do something, sure doesn't mean that you should.

In order to answer that question, you have to determine what the goal of Distributism is, and whether that's something we want to effect.  You also have to determine what the negatives of it are, and whether they are worth enduring.  To even look at that, you have to first ask what the point of any economic system is.

It's pretty easy to determine the point, or thesis, of Capitalism, even in the modified Corporate Capitalist system that we have, or that anyone else has.  The general idea is that a free market is the most efficient and natural of economies and that as it is efficient, it leads to the efficient production of goods, and that creates wealth for everyone.  Corporate Capitalism's thesis is that the allowance of a legal fiction, the corporation, allows the combination of capital and management in such a fashion as to facilitate business in a capitalist model, thereby boosting productivity and hence wealth.

Before going on to Distributism, which is actually a species of capitalism, I'll note the same for Socialism. Socialism in its classic form is pretty easy to grasp, thesis wise.  Socialist argue that capitalism creates an unequal distribution of wealth favoring the owners of the means of production over the actual producers, and the solution to this is to have the state be the owner and distribute back to the worker.  As Socialism fails pretty badly in the execution, modern Socialist by and large don't actually advocate that, however, and instead focus on social activism and engineering, thereby taking themselves quite some distance from their economic theorist origins.  Indeed, many Socialist now appear to actually be some sort of capitalist, but of the state intervention variety.  The interesting thing about that is that it takes them in the direction of the "managed economy", which is basically what most western nations had, including the United States, from about 1932 through about 1980, when corporate capitalism reasserted itself.

Socialism was a reaction to early laissez faire capitalism, which was really early Corporate Capitalism.  It's undoubtedly the case that early industrialization lead to a very unequal distribution of wealth, but taking the long view, any early Capitalist economic enterprise does that.  Sure, factory owners of the 19th Century were vastly wealthy and their workers on the edge of poverty, but then the creators of electronic and internet based enterprises have become vastly wealthy in our modern age as well.  This is not to say that things were not unfair on the factory floor, but often missed in that story is that those jobs attracted a steady stream of applicants in any event, indicating that they were better than whatever they were fleeing from, which was probably rural poverty for those who did not own their own land.  At any rate, Socialism was an attempt, and a radical one, to address the ills of Corporate Capitalism of its day.  Ironically, Socialism in its real forms turned out to be worse, and the antidote to that nearly everywhere was Corporate Capitalism to at least some degree, often with a fair amount of state management in the old Communist countries.  

Put another way, where you don't have rich people, you tend to have all poor people.

Corporate Capitalism, however, was itself sort of a reaction to mercantilism.  Capitalism is a natural form of economics, but Corporate Capitalism clearly is not.  It came about in order to attempt to efficiently handle the scale of modern business, with the only prior way to do that being the unwieldy system of mercantilism, which  granted state sponsored monopolies to big business enterprises, such as the East India Company.  Mercantilism at least allowed for big business endeavors, but at the expense of discouraging competition, and hence it was inefficient and more than a little unfair.

Distributism came about as a reaction to both Corporate Capitalism and Socialism, back in the first half of the 20th Century when Socialism in its extreme form, Communism was strong (as was its socialist/autarkic competitor, fascism).   Coming up out of Catholic social thought, as it did, it was focused on the plight of the common man, but with a distinctly different viewpoint of Socialism.  It did not oppose the private ownership of property at all, but rather sought to vest it under the principals of subsidiarity, as previously noted.  This, it was thought, would address the unequal distribution of wealth (hence "Distributism") in a natural way, for the benefit of common people.

It's easy, of course, to find examples of Corporate Capitalism (just go downtown anywhere) and Socialism, but as Distributism is a younger theory in modern terms, and as Distributist shelved their ideas during World War Two in order to work for the common good, it's much harder to find examples of it.  You actually can, but you have to be able to recognize bits and pieces when you see it, and quite frankly it's often the case that the drafters of anyone proposal that went into law didn't conceive of themselves as Distributist, although sometimes they did.

A good example of it is provided by various European farming laws which disallow corporate or absentee ownership of farmland.  France is a good example, which is how the rural sector of France has remained fairly strong. Post war Germany also had a farm sector that was intentionally designed to be Distributist, by a Distributist.  At least one US state, however, also has a variant of such a law, and would probably be pretty surprised to find itself described as Distributist.  Various state and city ordinances restricting big box stores in some localities are also clearly Distributist, although the backers of those laws are no doubt largely ignorant of that.

Okay, so that's what it is, but that still doesn't answer the "so what" question.  Should Distributism be tried, or advanced as an economic theory?

Well, that probably depends upon how you view an economy in general. The Corporate Capitalist model, which has existed since the 17th Century, has certainly had its ups and downs, but over a very long course of time, and when braced by some state management, but not too much, it clearly is highly efficient.  It drives prices down and floods the market with  nearly endless options.  It's brought wealth to the nations that employ it. All of this is good, so the question could be, why tinker with that?

An answer to that might be to note that Distributism really is tinkering with that.  Not wholly replacing it. That's because Distributism is also a form of capitalism, just a more natural one.  Or potentially a more natural one. As Distributism is much poorer formed than Capitalism as a theory, some Distributist flirt with Socialism and high degrees of social activism, while others do not.

If we take the simply notion of Distributism, however, it's merely another type of Capitalism, and an older one, as by implication it would have to rely less on the corporation.  No modern capitalist economy can avoid corporations, but as previously noted they could rely on them less. But why would that matter?

It would matter, if it does, because the net effect would be to push down the economy to a much more local and personal level.  To be blunt, is it better to have really cheap prices, but remote ownership, and lower wages (Corporate Capitalism) vs. higher prices and locally owned self sustaining middle class business (Distributism)?  That's pretty much what it boils down to.  Under a Distributism model, assuming that it would actually work, there'd be fewer very rich people and more middle class business owners. But even being in the middle class would be probably at least somewhat more expensive than it current is, and it'd be more the middle class of fifty years ago, which most people in the middle class were in the middle, or bottom, of the middle class back, with few in the upper areas of it.  Now, quite a few in the middle class are upper middle class, and of course we have more super wealthy than every before.  So, by getting more in the middle, on both ends, we take some out of the bottom and some out of the top.

Some would argue that the depression of economic classes from the upper end down, while taking the bottom and bringing it up, was a good collateral byproduct from a social point of view, although that really takes us out of economics, and Distributist economics, into something else.  Certainly bringing the bottom up undoubtedly has it merits, and is the point of any economic theory really.  Depressing the top down is another matter when it extends into the middle class, and very few in our economy would openly admit that. Even modern Socialist always claim to be acting on behalf of the Middle Class, when formerly they would have condemned as being bourgeois.  The arguments on that would vary, but basically it would be that there's something bad about having too much wealth in an economy, which again really gets beyond economics and into social theory. That's a problematic theory, but it is interesting to note that wealthy societies do tend to become effete. 

Of course, everything would also be much more locally focused, with is an additional point advanced by Distributist as an advantage.

The answer to our question, therefore, I suppose, might depend on how you view your role in the economy, but there are some serious things to consider here.  Corporate Capitalism has brought vast wealth to the world, and we no doubt live in the wealthiest period of time the world has ever seen.  Indeed, by world standards, the United States has virtually nobody who would qualify as truly poor, although by our standards we clearly do and that is not to be made light of.  Anyhow, why would anyone want to mess with that?

Well, one reason may be in that in the long history of Corporate Capitalism it seemingly goes through stages over time where it truly does concentrate vast wealth into the hands of very few, with bad results for almost everyone else.  The mid 19th Century history of Corporate Capitalism heavily featured that, which as we know gave rise to Communism and hardcore radical Socialism.  In the US, it gave rise to Progressiveness, a movement that flirted with Socialist ideas (and which flirted with some Distributist ones).  The ills of the mid 19th Century ended up being addressed, one way or another, and in most localities that ended up with labor coming out pretty well. But in our new highly global economy that does seem to be not so much the case anymore, at least if the arguments of individuals like Thomas Piketty are to be believed.  Indeed, individuals like Piketty argue that the economy is yielding to a new type of oligarchy, at the expense of everyone except the oligarchs.

Added to that, a prior feature of Corporate Capitalism was to alter the nature of a locality fairly heavily, and sometimes an entire society, but often not so much.  Now, however, Corporate Capitalism in its current form, in the US, seems to be driving everyone to the cities in a fashion not seen since the early British Industrial Revolution.  There's no good evidence that this really suits everyone, it merely suits the economy itself.  So, it has to be seriously asked if the economy is serving the people, or are the people serving the economy.  Looking at contemporary choices that people have, or don't have, it seems more and more that people are serving the economy.  Put another way, is a life of cubicles and clerking really all that nifty?

As part of that, the high state of development of Corporate Capitalism like we know have has very much worked to divest people from business. That is, localism has really suffered as a result of it.  People have little connection to the stores that provide much of their goods, and for that matter the people providing them have little connection with the people they're providing them to.  In some agricultural sectors the people owning land have next to no connection with the states where they own them.  Indeed, one of hte more amusing, and at the same time sad, aspects of modern Western ranching is that sooner or later everyone doing it is going to run across a photo in some journal of a smiling wealthy man whom the journalist writes up as a "rancher", when what he really is a hobbyist with clothing that makes him look a bit absurd to locals. But that same individual keeps those locals from actually being ranchers, as they cannot compete with him economically. All of that hurts the local, and over time people become divorced form their own localities, with negative results.

For these reasons, I suspect, we're starting to see some really serious flirting with Socialism for the first time in about thirty years, which is interesting, and scary to anyone who has any passing familiarity with the history of Socialism in actual practice.  By and large, people are doing well economically but there is something they don't like about what their seeing, maybe.  Bernie Saunders now stands a real chance of being the nominee of the Democratic Party even though he's an avowed Socialist, the first time that a Socialist has advanced in Democratic politics since the late 1940s.  While none of this may have anything to do with economic thought, as earlier noted Australia and Canada have taken slight left turns in recent parliamentary elections, and Greece took a huge left turn.  Of course, some nations, like Denmark and Hungary, have taken sharp right turns.  We can assume that all of these voters don't know what they are doing, but that's not a safe assumption.  Some state of general discontent on something seems to be lurking out there, with some pretty radical solutions in the mix here and there.

And for that reason, it's to be lamented that there aren't any Distributist candidates in any party, anywhere.  Distributism is a subtle economic theory, but it's clearly more of a realistic one than Socialism is, and yet it seems to address many of the aspects of discontent that drive people into leftist economic theories.  As with our national politics, in which everyone has to be a Republican or a Democrat, no matter what they actually think, in our economy it seems you have to be a (Corporate) Capitalist or a Social Democrat, which makes very little sense.  There's no reason to believe that these two camps are the only natural ones, and taking a look at some Distributist ideas seems to be well overdue.  It's clear that no purely Distributist economy is going to come about in our day and age, but that doesn't mean that some of the ideas do not indeed have merit.  Some should be looked at.  Indeed, that's where the disappointment in a lack of such ideas being floated, except by some theorist and seemingly the Pope, is a shame.  It isn't as if any modern country is going to wholesale adopt Distributism.  But maybe some Distributist ideas are worth seriously considering, and right now they aren't getting any air.  It would be nice if they could, particularly when we see the failed theory of Socialism getting some, amazingly.

So, what about agriculture, and this agrarian thing?

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 1. How the barbarians took over the city.

 As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West! The barbarians are already inside the city.

Robert Cardinal Sarah

Alaric entering Athens, 395.

On August 6, 1979, Newsweek came out with a surprising cover depicting Theodore Roosevelt leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill.  The caption was "Where Have All The Heroes Gone".  I can remember laying on the couch in the living room looking at the issue.  I would have been about fifteen.

That was right about the time the nation was getting ready to see Carter square off against Reagan, and if the author of that article thought the choices were uninspiring, I have to wonder what he'd think now.

Anyhow, in reading about the contest between Reagan and Carter I was compelled to ask my father, "What's the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?", trying to figure out what it was, and what I was, in that context.  I'm actually surprised, in looking back, that I was asking this question at that age, as in my mind, this was earlier.  And in fact I may very well be remembering this inaccurate, as to when I asked this question and what brought it about.

I do recall his answer.  He informed me that "the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats".

It was an interesting answer.  He didn't say that the Republicans were conservative or that the Democrats were not.  He said the Republicans were more conservative than the Democrats, implying that they were sort of in the middle.

I decided at the ripe old age of 12, or so, that I was more conservative, and therefore I was a Republican.

When I registered to vote six years later, I in fact registered as a Republican, which is what I thought I likely was.  It didn't last a real long time, however, as by age 20, I was registering as a Democrat.

Conservation was the reason why.  Even by my late teens I as clearly a conservationist, and I teetered on the edge of, and crossed into, environmentalism.  While I didn't see myself being on the political left, those around me did. I recall one friend of mine in junior college, who had known me since high school, remarking in a conversation about the Vietnam War protests that if I'd been college age at that time, I'd be in the protesters, a comment that really surprised me as I was in the National Guard at the time, and I was a defense hawk, part of the reason I'd originally registered as a Republican.  The now late mother of a friend of mine loaned me The Monkey Wrench Gang on the basis that I'd like it, and while I was surprised by that when I read the cover about a group of fictional who were basically environmental terrorists, I in fact did like the 1975 Edward Abby novel.  It probably didn't hurt that I had a crush on the daughter of that lender, the sister of one of my friends, and that entire family were obviously environmentally centered, eccentric, Democrats.

It wasn't a facade, however.  I wasn't a DINO, if there is such a thing.  Going through my undergraduate years and through law school, and into at least my first decade of practicing law, I remained a Democrat.  It was rural issues that did it.  The Democrats were for preserving the wilderness, at a time that the Reagan Republicans never saw a tree they didn't want to cut down.  The Democrats were for keeping Wyoming's wildlife a public resource when a Republican legislature wanted to give it to landowners in a bill, I'd note, that our current Congressman's father promoted.  The Republicans always saw wild lands as something to be exploited, the Democrats normally saw them as something to be preserved.

Ultimately I left the Democratic Party for the Republicans as I couldn't stomach being in a party that embraced death so closely.  I wasn't alone.  Really significant Wyoming Democrats, like Ray Hunkins, who had campaigned as Democrats, left the party and became Republican politicians.  The overall impact was a good one, however, for the state's GOP.  It took a party that was already highly independent and frankly middle of the road on most things, and made it more so.  It was a Wyoming Party.

Those days are dead and gone.

It's hard to describe where we are politically in this country today, and that's in no small part because it's hard to explain where we are culturally.  The absolute insanity of social movements in the Western World, unleashed since the annus horbillus of 1968, but with roots dating back at least to the 1790s, has created as sort of cultural hellscape which now, very late in the day, average people are reacting to, but reacting in way that expresses their ignorance of their own culture and existential nature.  It's been a long time in the making.

Some thirty years ago I was at a not very well done bachelor's party, no not one of that type, that I hosted for a friend getting married. At the party was a young man who had just been admitted to a university in New York.  He was pretty impressed with getting into it, and had already taken up calling New York City, "the city", even though he knew just about as little about NYC as I did.

At the party he raised the question of whether the United States was existentially a liberal, or conservative, nation.  In thinking about it there in my late 20s, when I was somewhat more liberal than I am now, I thought the country basically existentially liberal.

I'm not certain that I think that now.  But then, back then, in the late 1980s, being liberal didn't mean I had to pretend that biological truths weren't just that, truths.

Educated people, including educated conservatives like me, as that's basically what I am, are to a large extent baffled by the phenomenon of Donald Trump.  How, we wonder, could anyone vote for a person like him, particularly after he attempted a coup to overthrow the 2020 election?

The Judicial Coup of 2015 has everything to do with that, as we warned that it would, in 2015.

Why Americans, irrespective of position, ought to cringe over Obergefell

Yes, we warned what was in store:

The common wisdom right now is that the public will now accept this, where it hadn't.  I doubt it will, and already those who appeared defeated are beginning to resist and rally, with proposals that will have to be taken seriously in short order.  A real reaction is likely to be a massive level of contempt for a Court which was already not particularly well liked by much of the nation, and which now shows itself capable of acting in a Napoleonic fashion

And we warned about it more than once.

We educated people, including we social conservatives, had acclimated ourselves to accepting that an unelected body of jurist could decree social liberality on the society, and everyone had to accept it.  To a large extent, frankly, we grew comfortable with being conservatives of varying stripes, but not getting much of what we wanted.

Obergefell was clearly a bridge too far, and it was right from the beginning.  And what liberals promised, that "this would never mean", very rapidly turned out to be a whopping lie.

The Supreme Court tries a bit to mop up a dog's breakfast. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

An argument on what you can and cannot think about stuff that people don't understand with implications you just don't expect but maybe ought to.. Fallout from Obergefell

The line from Kennedy to Trump. . and from democracy to the reeducation camp. Judicial blunderng and its impact.

The contempt that's come for evolutionary biology and basic nature out of the American left, and indeed, the European left, since 2015 has been epic.  But it didn't start in 2015.  It started well before, with major events marking the path.  May 9, 1960, the entire year of 1968, 1969, 1973.  What marked it all, during the very period in which the left embraced everything in nature outside of ourselves, was the rejection of our natures.  We didn't see ourselves as men in nature any longer, but like gods, outside of it.

What the left apparently they didn't grasp is that no matter what the educated conservative "establishment elite" was willing to accept, the rank and file, instinctively conservative middle, wasn't, and isn't, once things went too far.

For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.

If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.

Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.

For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.

1 Timothy, Chapter 6.

At the same time, however, a combination of two of the oldest malevolent forces in the world had already united to make any reaction abhorrent.  Ignorance had combined with greed.

People like to spout a lot of babble about the settlement of North America, and the United States, that is just that.  People imagine that hardworking benighted immigrants came in and built a new land out of the sweat of their brows.  Yes, there's an element of truth in that, but the larger truth is that they were massively assisted by their governments, which removed the native population by force at public expense, and then sold or gave the land to the settlers for no value or grossly undervalue.  It's impossible to look at what occured and not regard it as deeply immoral, and claims to the opposite as deeply hypocritical. When Wyoming politicians today proudly declare that they're fourth generation Wyoming rancher who built their enterprises from nothing but their own hard work, they're deluding themselves.  Their ancestors were, as a rule, dirt poor people who benefitted from what was effectively a government hand out, in part, and in part from a program that made that possible by what today would be regarded as ethnic genocide.

There's really no two ways about it.

Nonetheless, in being honest about it, we can also be honest about the fact that the beneficiaries of those programs did not have in mind killing people.  

They also largely didn't have in mind getting rich.

The goal was to have a family, and provide for it.

We recently spent a lot of time on our companion blog looking at the laws and social conditions prior to the fateful legislature of 1977.  Those laws were geared towards that end.  And, prior to the 1970s, the laws in the country largely were.  Laws  on "domestic" topics were geared towards the preservation of the family and the protection of children.

And before Ronald Reagan, the tax structure and the structure of the Federal Government was aimed at regulating excessive accumulation of wealth and reigning in big business. It was widely held, and correctly, that people needed protection against large business and that vast accumulation of wealth could result in the wealthy paying their own way.  The wealthy were not worshiped, and big business was not seen as the little man's friend.  

A figure like Donald Trump was not regarded as admirable.

Reagan came in and changed that, selling the public the lie that as the wealthy got wealthier everyone else did as well.  It made some sense, until you thought it out.  And to a certain degree its true, as the wealthier a society becomes, the wealthier everyone in it is.  But it only goes so far, and it didn't go nearly as far as its backers claimed.  Moreover, the advance of technology, accelerated by World War Two and the Cold War, marched on irrespective of tinkering with the tax rates, and that is likely what made the reason difference.

Something that didn't withstand the tinkering was the assault on education.  The Great Depression, followed by World War Two, followed by the Cold War, had emphasized the need for science and engineering like nothing else.  World War Two, in turn, flooded universities with servicemen after the war, making college educations common.  But with Reagan came a reduction in support for science and engineering.  University remained important, but degrees suffered value erosion.  Degrees like law, which could be societally beneficial, or destructive, evolved towards the latter, as a Reagan era emphasis on greed set in.

Just as societal structures started to break down due to the battering rams of the left, therefore, they were replaced by a lack of education and an emphasis that everything was about money.  It was not a combined intentional attack.  The left would not have made everything about money, and the right would not have broken down societal structures, but the combined assault of both had that effect.  This left an American, and Western, culture with no existential values and nothing to measure individual self-worth other than economic success.  Like the concurrent assault of Germanic, Slavic, and Eastern tribes in the Middle Ages, the damage on the American metaphorical Rome was too much to bear.

Rome, of course, had the Church. And as Rome fell, the Church stepped in, preserving what was worthwhile of the existing culture, and educating the Barbarians.  The United States is not, however, Imperial Rome.  When Rome fell, which was over time, the Roman culture could look towards the Church and realize that it held existential truths Roman civilization did not.  As the American culture falls today, it has instead the adulterated American Civil Religion, a light and reduced content variant of original strict Protestant sects that reflected the product of the Reformation.  And people retain their native instincts, although not in a restrained or educated fashion.

This has left the reeling street level populist reacting against things they know are wrong, but mixing them with ignorance and confusion.  That it's absurd that some claim there are more than two genders is self-evident, and wrong, and that steps like Chloe's law must be taken to combat it is apparent.  What is not is that this depraved state of affairs stems from one that divorced sex from marriage, or the concept that marriage is natural, and not a set of highly advanced sexual dates which allow for discarded partners.  Hence, you have some railing against sexual mutilation, who practice chemical sterilization, or who are serial polygamists themselves.

And the substitution of money as the supreme value over family remains in the same class, with some seriously believing, as some have asserted since the 1980s, that God basically endorses their occupations as surely he must.  It can't be the case, they think, that their occupations could do harm. Therefore, you have those who, like James Watt, can't grasp the thought that natural resources must be conserved, and that this is conservative, let alone that there are things that are being economically exploited which may very well destroy the ability for us to exist.  In their heart of hearts there are those on the populist right who believe that the use of fossil fuels is Divinely sanctioned, just as there are those on the left who believe that altering our psychological and physical natures is some sort of existential, if not Devine, right.

This sort of thing has put us in the untenable position we now find ourselves it.

It ought to be possible, in other words, for a thoughtful conservative to oppose infanticide, genocide, and ecocide.  That is, it ought to be perfectly possible to oppose abortion, gender mutilation, Russian aggression in Ukraine while supporting conservation and indeed be concerned about the environment. That would, in fact, be thoughtful conservatism.

There's no need, and indeed no sense whatsoever, in feeling that because you are worried about gender disorder, that you need to support Putin in Ukraine, or hail a serial polygamist as somebody who presents as a modern Cyrus the Great.

But where to go from here, especially for a thoughtful conservative.

It's clear at this point that neither the modern Republican Party or Democratic Party are going to do anything to solve this. They are both too far corrupted in an existential sense. The Democratic Party is virtually at war with Human Nature and the Devine, while the GOP is at war with intelligence, Science and thought.  Between the two parties, the Democrats have revived a belief in democracy they lost in 1973, however, whereas the Republicans view everyone who doesn't agree with their Caudillo as a class enemy.

The populists know that something is deeply amiss with the assault on human nature. The progressives know that there's something deeply wrong with the assault on science and nature.  Progressives sense that a worship of money is wrong, whereas the Republicans are outright worshiping it.  Populists sense that a worship of yourself as a demigod is perverse, but only embrace that up to the point that it's not personally inconvenient.

National Conservatives and their fellow travelers claim they're the answer.  C. C. Peckhold, a university professor who seems to be in this camp, gives about as good of a justification of this as can be given in an episode of Catholic Answers live that's well worth listing to, but also  a little disturbing in some ways as well.  Like Patrick Dineen, he's big on "order".

What he seems to be missing, in so far as that interview goes, is that corporate capitalism has imposed its own order.  He regards "liberalism", as in the classic meaning of this word, to be the problem, and seeks a "post liberal order", and is one of the contributors to the Post Liberal Podcast whose blog we've linked in our companion site as its interesting.  What they miss, however, is that what they are seeking is effete, which to a large degree is what took down "post liberalism", by which them mean the pre liberal ancient regime, and that it was also corrupt, as concentration of order encourages corruptness.  Indeed, that's what we have now, to a degree, concentrated in capitalism.

Only in a Distributist Agrarianism, by whatever name, is the solution to this found.