After reading several accounts of the Ephemerisle Festival (for those interested, a more in-depth explanation of the event – and seasteading – can be found here), I’m more convinced than ever that I really need to attend one of these events. As I’ve said earlier, however, I don’t expect any floating cities to launch in my lifetime, and reports from Ephemerisle haven’t done much to change this assessment (The Irish Times‘ take on the conspicuous absence of nautical know-how isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring).

That said, the movement’s impressive groundwork suggests that enthusiasm for seasteading is more than a fad, and the idea of floating communities has, at the very least, provoked some incredibly interesting discussion. But I wonder if all of this enthusiasm is misplaced. My lack of engineering knowledge notwithstanding, the technical barriers to creating sustainable floating cities seem enormous. The political complications arising from seaborne secession also strike me as an important (and under-appreciated) hurdle to seasteading; if floating communities become as subversive as their boosters suggest, I think the likelihood of some two-bit dictator’s navy nipping the project in the bud increases dramatically.

The logic of seasteading, however, remains compelling. Creating a mechanism for persistent, non-theoretical political experimentation strikes me as a very worthy goal. So why not channel all of this energy into reclaiming the states as laboratories of democracy (or libertarianism)? The political barriers to a federalist revival are also immense, but they seem downright trivial compared to the challenges facing prospective seasteaders. I can’t help thinking that it would be easier for libertarians to claim Vermont as their own than to recreate Galt’s Gulch on an abandoned oil platform.

One possible objection is that experimenting within an American political context constrains the scope of potential experiments.* To be perfectly honest, I think this is a feature, not a bug. Whether through dumb luck or wise statesmanship, the West seems to have narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political systems down to variants of democratic capitalism. All that’s left, then, is to further refine the formula through more experimentation. A return to federalism strikes me as the best (and most feasible) way to accomplish this goal.

*One other possible objection is that libertarians have already tried – and failed – to jump-start a federalist revival.

Many readers are undoubtedly suspicious of self-indulgent exercises in libertarian wankery, but this excellent dialogue from Reason raises some interesting questions about the nature of governance, freedom and culture.

As someone who grew up in a pretty liberal milieu, I instinctively found myself nodding along to Kerry Howley’s comprehensive vision of cultural libertarianism. But I’m not sold yet. The reason, I think, is that I am less and less confident in my own assumptions about what freedom really means. The example Howley mentions to buttress her argument – the Chinese women who flee a repressive, patriarchal village for the bright lights of the big city – is undoubtedly moving. But not every scenario offers such a clear-cut choice between freedom and coercion.

A child raised in a religious household, for example, has some ill-defined right not to be brainwashed by fundamentalist parents. The parents, however, have some equally ill-defined countervailing right to guide and nurture their child. How do you assess these competing claims? Cultural libertarians will balk at the idea of children being indoctrinated by adults. Traditionalists may be more sympathetic to the parents’ prerogatives.

This scenario isn’t some far-out hypothetical, either. It’s an inevitable consequence of applying abstract ideas like freedom to the knotty problems of everyday life.

Maybe this is a cop-out, but instead of convening the grand counsel to decide on some unitary vision of what freedom means, I’d rather give people license to experiment and hash things out among themselves. Maybe your town is determined to become the next Las Vegas. Maybe the local zoning board is more interested in banning strip clubs and adult theaters.  I think  localities should have a lot more leeway to define their own peculiar vision of what freedom really means, precisely because the day-to-day work of marrying liberty, culture and government is so fraught with difficulty.

Seasteading – another libertarian experiment – is premised on the idea that floating city-states would dramatically lower the barrier to entry for government-creation, encouraging innovation and experimentation among seaborne communities. The end-result would be a world of competing ideas about governance that – instead of inhabiting dank classrooms or obscure Internet message boards – will actually stand or fall on their own practical merits. I am very doubtful that any floating cities will be launched in my lifetime, but the idea behind the venture is compelling: let loose the creativity of humankind on the business of government, and may the best system win.

If floating city-states don’t work, however, a return to subsidiarity may be the next best thing. We already have thousands of venues – towns, cities, counties – for political experimentation. Why not turn them loose, and may the best locality win?

(All of which is to say that I agree with Daniel McCarthy, whose response  to Howley does a much better job of explaining this pluralistic vision.)

Daniel Larison picks up arguably one of my most awkwardly worded sentences in one of my most awkwardly written posts and then writes:

It’s true that idealism would be quite heavily burdened by idealism, but if we set this odd statement aside I’m still not sure what Kain means

Quite right.  It was an odd statement.  Poorly written.  Look, I’ll reproduce it one more time:

The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision. Politics is not a time machine and we are not ever going to travel back to whichever pre-modern, small government existence that many paleos envision.

What I meant to say, I suppose, is simply that the paleo/agrarian/localist cause is often too wrapped up in its own idealism and fails largely to come up with practical solutions to the ills of modernity.  There is a lot of great writing out there on the subject.  Go spend a few hours pooring through the Front Porch Republic – Deneen, Larison, Kaufman, Stegall, Shiffman, etc. – these are all smart people writing excellent critiques of modernity, globalization, free trade, and so forth.  I find myself nodding in agreement much more often than not.

So what I was attempting to do with that post, after writing about a dozen posts in the localist, anti-corporate vein, was to try to see where the chinks in the armor were.  And quite frankly, the most glaring of these is that despite all of this very smart stuff, there is little being offered by me or anyone else that is terribly practical; or rather that offers a very concrete alternative plan by which to enact this alternative vision. Vision is all well and good, but without a map, without a plan – well, it becomes very, very difficult to implement.

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