(h/t: Tim Lilburn for the title)

I’ve been a bit off the map of late due to a pick up of busyness in my personal life. As some have read in a variety of places, I am getting married in seventeen days and am moving into a condo that my soon-to-be-wife and I recently closed the deal on two days after the nuptials. Getting married and buying your first home is a lot to take on in the same time span, admittedly, and it has kept us running pretty fast from place-to-place and task-to-task for the past couple of weeks.

We chose to overlap the two in the way that we did because if you’ve got the work and the down payment to swing it, now is a pretty good time to be in the market for a home. And, well, the wedding has been scheduled for some time now. So I guess we represent one of the few bright stories from this economic catastrophe: we were able to take advantage of a depressed market to maximize our equity and leverage ourselves into a pretty fantastic home that has pretty much everything that we were looking for (including more than 1100 square feet of space).

More than a few people have commented that for the price we paid for the condo we could have bought a perfectly lovely house, which is true. We chose not to buy a house because we couldn’t afford one in the corresponding neighbourhood in which we wanted to continue living and so went about finding a condo in which it would be feasible to begin raising a family (hence the relatively monstrous square footage).

Now, there is more going here than just a snobbish desire to live close to downtown on our part and it relates back to our ongoing discussions around g/localism. Granted my soon-to-be-wife and I have a loathing for the idea of having to move ourselves out to the suburbs if we want to start raising a family that is perhaps only rivaled by our loathing for the community association in the neighbourhood we are moving just outside of. It is fair to say that we like our neighbourhood and were not prepared to give up for the promise of a house. But we also happen to be philosophically opposed to the notion that for younger people, having a family means leaving the downtown core. [Read more →]

So last week I posted a piece saying that Republicans and conservatives were missing a golden opportunity to engage in a full-throated  reconstruction dialogue under the Obama administration and noted that to date Republicans seemed to be presenting themselves as nothing more than the Party of No. The presentation of what is by all accounts an extremely flimsy budget alternative seems to indicate that not much has changed. In that post, I said that conservatives and Republicans needed to put themselves to the formulation of a conservative movement for the twenty-first century, particularly given the tide of demographics working against them. “Old-timer” Bob rightly asked for some details on what I meant by twenty-first century conservatism and while I’m a bit late in getting back to him, I’ve been tossing the idea around in my head. Below is what I’ve come up with (in no particular order or ranking):

Go populist without going populist: I’ve spent some time warning against the dangers of populism in regards to the AIG scandal and generally, but the fact of the matter is that there is smoldering populist sentiment out there that is not completely off-base in terms of its raison d’etre. People rightly believe that their government has gotten away from them and increasingly has little to do with their everyday lives and addressing the issues present in those lives in a positive fashion and a movement/party that can present a believable narrative about how they care about the challenges facing Americans and are interested in focusing on those issues in a collaborative fashion stands a decent chance of capturing a sizable proportion of the national imagination.

Look, John McCain and Sarah Palin were on to something with their decision to go hyper-local in how they addressed supporters and finished in what was a respectable place given that this election was the Democrats’ to lose and they did very little to actually lose it. The problem is that Palin and McCain practiced actual, base-line populism that appealed to people’s lowest common denominator inclinations. Such traditional populism generally winds up looking pretty ugly as a result and will get you a certain segment of support, but doesn’t offer the means for developing a broad base of support. But if conservatives can find a way of walking the walk of populism without necessarily talking the talk of populism, they might have a recipe for success sooner than we all tend to think. Walking the walk but not talking the talk to me means eschewing notions of appealing to peoples’ lowest common denominators and meeting people where they are but challenging them to bring the angels of their better nature to the game. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s arguments around Sam’s Club Republicans come to mind in this regard, as does the kind of localism/regionalism/integrity of living articulated by the likes of Daniel Larison, John Schwenkler, and particularly Rod Dreher (though Rod runs in to his troubles in other areas). [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 →]