Below the fold is a photograph Matt Yglesias took in Freiberg, Germany: [Read more →]

I stayed at a quaint bed and breakfast this weekend in a charming old mining town on a little mountain in the desert.  It’s now home to dozens of artists and artisans – painters, potters, glass-blowers, musicians, etc. – and a favorite for both bikers and tourists alike.  Lots of old somewhat dilapidated or restored houses and crumbling streets.  I thought to myself – it would be fun to live here.  Everything is so old and quirky.

After a while, though, I realized I’d quickly tire of it, run out of options and things to do, run out of choices that I take for granted now.  The aesthetics drew me in, much as the aesthetics of any old, charming place might.  Indeed, I think much of the real visceral appeal of localism has a great deal to do with the aesthetics of charming places, with our notion of what such charming places must be like rather than the often less-interesting reality. [Read more →]

So Dan Miller critiqued me and conservatives in general for not talking about health policy enough, and he’s right.  We haven’t.  Part of this is because when it comes to government planning there is just so much to talk about.  If I were a progressive blogger I could talk about how we could plan this or that development, or structure this or that plan around our education system, or shape this or that policy to use the government to at once cover more people and save money doing etc. etc. etc..

Lots of charts and numbers and predictions would be at my fingertips.  Conservatives scorn social planning and therefore dismiss a lot of this wonkishness.  So you don’t have the elaborate plans that liberals do when it comes to something like health care.  (Ironically the most effective rebuttal to Waxman-Markey was via Jim Manzi who used lots of charts and other wonkish communication tools…)

Now, this is okay up to a point – conservatives shouldn’t want to map out everything as much as liberals do, because part of what conservatism stands for is organic, market-driven growth and individual choice.  But the problem with leaving it at that is that we are in fact stuck with a pretty massive state and we do need to have an exit strategy if we want to deregulate or have a shot at changing entitlements to better fit a conservative model – because, quite frankly, entitlements are popular.  They can be better managed then they are.  They can make better use of market solutions.  But they’re more than likely not going away, and maybe they shouldn’t.  We need safety nets.

Things like vouchers, and direct-payment rather than relying on lots of red-tape-adorned bureaucracies are good ideas that need to be more fleshed out.  Viable alternatives that don’t leave people thinking their health care or their social security would be left as vulnerable to a crash as their 401k’s were are important to articulate.

Conservatives need more wonks, plain and simple.  But the job of conservative wonks should be to plan out the gradual dismantling of big government without falling prey to all sorts of pitfalls that we’ve seen in the past – like hiring private contractors to do government work, both domestically and increasingly overseas.  Deregulatory capture is something I’m interested in but don’t know much about – though I think I know enough to believe that it’s a very real threat.

In any case, not to ramble, but I think a lot of things – from conservative takes on community-building and new urbanism to health care and better schools – all have a need of more in-depth, critical thought from the right of the aisle.  Blaming those damned liberals for everything will simply not do.  I think this is what I was touching on a bit in my post on distrust of government.  Sure, we should distrust it for its inefficiency and the ease with which it is manipulated by special interests, but we should also work to figure out how the bloody clock ticks.  If you can’t figure that out, then any attempt at dismantling it will fail.

Exit question: Why didn’t the Democrats just push Medicare expansion instead of a brand new program?  Wouldn’t that have been a lot safer and cheaper?  This has been raised in the comments and elsewhere.  I’m curious to know if this sort of thing would have been acceptable for progressives.  Certainly it would have been (I imagine) more palatable for conservatives.  It’s more palatable to me – just expand existing programs to cover essentially everyone who isn’t covered now, and then maybe start scaling toward more market-oriented solutions.  Try to get those benefits taxed to help pay for it, etc.

I have to admit, I haven’t been following the dust-up between the First Thingers/ Pomocons and the Front Porchers all that closely.  But I must say, that what I have read has been some pretty compelling stuff, and this post by Peter Lawler is right on the money when it comes to a smart critique of the larger localist philosophy.  I think that for those cultural critics with a strong distaste for some aspects of modernity and individuality, localism can seem like a pretty good answer, because it seems to embody what community ought to be – what we’ve lost as we’ve modernized socially and technologically.

Lawler is right, though, local communities are often not in real life what we sometimes imagine them to be.  And modern technology in many of its forms is very much a net gain for humanity.

Where I think I’ve started to draw the line is between “localism” and the concept of neighborhood.  Neighborhoods are important no matter the size of the town or city.  They can allow families and individuals to interact – or they can lay the groundwork for isolation.  Probably the central critique that localists offer is that of the atomized individual (or individual family, I’d add.  Many families find themselves cut off from their neighbors and communities.)  But one does not need “localism” or a return to a rooted sense of place to achieve better communities and more connected neighborhoods. [Read more →]

David has some interesting musings up on the Dutch bicycle, the sublime, and the pros and cons of wearing a helmet whilst cycling.  Personally, I’m a helmet guy.  However ineffective helmets may be, I still appreciate the contents of my skull enough to do whatever I can to protect them, including donning the rather clumsy foam and plastic encasement even at the risk of forsaking the “sublime.”   Then, too, I’m a parent and one who doesn’t subscribe to the “do as I say, not as I do” approach to parenting.  When it all comes down, I’d prefer to see my daughter wear a helmet when she’s of a biking age. The “Dutch” bike after the jump… [Read more →]

So this is a neat new site for any of you who may read Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher, Patrick J. Deneen and the many other conservative writers who make up Front Porch Republic.  I’m personally very excited because it looks like this site will focus on the very issues I’m most concerned about – culture, community, the environment, and localism.

From the About page:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

Though there is plenty we disagree about, and each contributor can be expected to stand by the words of only his or her own posts, the folks gathered here more or less agree with the above assertions. We come from different backgrounds, live in different places, and have divergent interests, but we’re convinced that scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend. We invite you to read along, and perhaps join the discussion.

[Read more →]

Scott coins an interesting term: post-postmodern.  The essence of the post-postmodern man, it seems, is a sort of meshing of Reason and Tradition that eschews both the ignorance and outdatedness of many old practices and traditions, as well as the arrogance and certitude of the modern man of reason.

While it has generally been conservatives who have been associated with the embrace and love for tradition, liberals too now are looking back to see what lessons can be learned from tradition. On both sides, rather than a blind acceptance of the inherent correctness of tradition, both conservatives and liberals are re-inhabiting traditions in, as Wilson suggests, in a self-aware and reflexive manner that seeks the wisdom that endures from such grooves and rejecting the ignorance that pervaded the thinking of the time.

This, of course, can be seen in writers such as Rod Dreher who advocates tirelessly his vision of “crunchy conservatism” as well as in the hippie family that lives across the street from us, or the one that lives two doors down, selling organic honey from their home.  Or in my own family, as we struggle to evaluate the pros and cons of modernity, the traditions and time-worn practices that have been lost along the way that actually worked, whether or not they made sense–whether or not modern ways seem better at first glance.  We have abandoned the television to the scrap heap, but we can’t part with our computers.  We have covered our walls with books, and choose to spend time reading to our daughter rather than planting her in front of a screen.

The unintentional casualties of modernity are revealed subtly, after all.  All our gadgets and “time-savers” seem to keep us busier then ever.  Families have gradually become more disparate affairs.  What once was a collective, mutli-generation experience, has devolved into isolated units, often separated not only by the expanse of miles, but by a more metaphysical distance.  What has this achieved–this very American independence?  Once upon a time three generations pooled their resources to make a family work.  The old were tended to by their offspring or communities, rather than Social Security and nursing homes.  The dead were laid out in the parlor.

Yes, we saw the dead up close, and we tended to them.  We were not afraid of our mortality, and we weren’t so numb to it either.

Then again, as Scott reminds us, the past is not filled only with traditions that strengthened us, but also with horrors and ghosts.  The new world has provided us with longer lives and more comfortable beds, faster carriages and unprecedented warmth.  Yet it is a warmth without a fire–or perhaps a warmth without a need to tend to the fire.  There is a fire still, but it is so easily gotten: flip a switch, and you create heat.  “Let there be light,” and there is light.

What I’d like to add to Scott’s theme of “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should” is that just because something is easy, or sensible, or cheap, doesn’t mean it’s healthy, or wise, or aware of the long view.

This spans all subjects.  New Urbanism is a concept birthed out of the neo-traditionalist mindset.  New urbanist city planners and architects look to tradition to see how communities were built before freeways, before zoning laws separated our homes from our shops, and then attempt to intermingle these older traditions with green technology, with what came naturally long ago, but has been abandoned in favor of progress and efficiency.  Nobody used to consider building a town “walkable” – there was simply no other good option.  Now we are cognizant of the repurcussions–now we have, as Scott terms it, directionality.

And on and on, we are living in a time of self-evaluation as a society, as a civilization, as individuals and families.  Or at least we should be.  The financial crisis begs many questions of us, not the least of which should be our faith in free markets.  The rising disparity in class should force us to question the wisdom in supply side economics, or voodoo economics as George the Sr. once termed them.

We are still charging forward at a breakneck pace, conservatives and liberals alike, toward that dream of progress, freedom, choice, modernity.  Perhaps it’s best we slowed our pace a bit.  We don’t need to turn back any clocks.