Where Are We Going?
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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. ~E.D. Kain
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. Politics is not a time-machine, nor is anything else, and no one is more keenly aware of the impossibilities of undoing the effects of past changes than the people who lament so much of what has been lost. Central to most traditionalist critiques is the insistence that everything comes with some sacrifice, and that, as I believe Prof. Deneen said at Yale last fall, whenever something appears something else disappears. The two main questions we keep asking are: “Is this the world we want to have?” and “Is X worth the cost?” Typically, our answers are no to both, and because we say no we are said to be doing nothing more than pining for a lost past. It’s as if someone threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, and then mocked you for your “idealistic” concern for the baby or, better yet, your nostalgic attachment to the bathwater as if the baby had never existed. This would be a mildly amusing diversionary tactic, if it weren’t so painfully obvious that we are almost always talking about the present predicament and what we owe to those who will live in the future. The strangest thing about the remark quoted above is that Kain knows all this.
Ortega y Gasset said, “The inability to keep the past alive is the truly reactionary feature.” (That is, the true reactionary–in a negative sense–is the one who treats the past as if it is completely dead and cut off from us.) Nothing here below lasts forever, every thing eventually wears out and breaks (unless it is repaired and restored), and everyone dies. Where some of us think that this truth should inspire fidelity, respect and mourning for what has passed, the general attitude today about practically every change seems to be one of celebration and satisfaction. No modern, much less post-modern, person can ever re-enter a world as if the last five hundred (or however many) years never occurred, and were anyone somehow able to do so he would be very confused and disoriented when he arrived.
Instead of silly idealism, Kain refers us to Phillip Blond’s Red Tory proposals, which are challenging and exciting and every bit as “idealistic” as any decentralist and traditionalist arguments here in America, paleo or not, and they are just about as likely to be adopted, which is to say not very likely. I mean, doesn’t Blond know that politics is not a time-machine? It is never going to take us back to the economically decentralized world Blond envisions. What could he possibly be thinking with all of his localist nostalgia and Post Office romanticism? So there!
That is what I might say to Blond if I wanted to dismiss everything he says and avoid seeing the bankruptcy of the vision of globalization he is criticizing, or if I wanted to use him as a foil for my own argument, as if it were somehow discrediting that he had been making these same “idealistic” arguments for years or decades before they became suddenly fashionable. In a pinch, I could also just turn off my brain and call him a socialist, but that is something better left to others. However, I agree with him on almost everything he has been saying over the last few months, so why would I do that?
Blond discusses local finance and subsidiarity at length in both his Prospect piece and his op-ed for The Guardian. Over the last thirty years, you could count on maybe one hand the American journals and institutions on the right that discussed subsidiarity, distributism, and their foundations in Catholic social doctrine, and you could count on probably one or two fingers the journals that discussed and embraced them as something other than historical curiosities and funny details in the life of Chesterton and Belloc. One of these has been, of course, Chronicles, but it is “paleoconservative” and so we can supposedly write it off just like that. This is now the term applied to most anyone who argues for ethical restraint, conservation, social solidarity, respect for and loyalty to place and sane foreign policy, which is not a bad summary of what paleoconservatives believe, but it is just as often applied to people who would never use it to describe themselves as a way of belittling and marginalizing their very relevant and challenging arguments. There’s no reason that someone couldn’t dismiss Blond in exactly the same way (“he’s a crazy Red Tory!”), and that would be a shame, because Blond is making a lot of sense.
Blond writes:
However the global trade in credit and finance became one vast private sector monopoly where all market tiers were abolished in favour of a single homogenous conduit down which all credit and capital flowed. The trouble is that as soon as the world’s supply of asset-leveraged credit was threatened by a group of people being unable to pay their debts, the entire system shut down and the present meltdown began. In point of fact it looks as though the path to globalisation merely exchanged one form of state-engendered national monopoly for an international private monopoly founded on extreme speculation [bold mine-DL].
It is here that a financial variant of subsidiarity could have kicked in and avoided both statist inertia and the casino of monopoly capitalism. For why can we not have a subsidiarity of capital? Surely the task now is to avoid the cartels of both market and state and create a genuinely autonomous range of intermediate associations that can hold intermediate amounts of capital that we need to have loans and a life [bold mine-DL]. Why should the house or flat that you or I buy in Clacton or Cardiff be securitised and risked at the highest level of the market? Far better to have a local system of credit that is attuned to the local economy, so that ability to pay and the asset value of what is purchased are both more acutely aligned to the local economic base.
As some of us noticed during the inane “debate” over the bailout last fall, local and regional banks had by and large not fallen prey to the overleveraging that was destroying many of the major financial institutions, they complained that their irresponsible, larger competitors were being rescued from their own mistakes, and they wanted no part of the bailout because they didn’t need it. Of course, the idea that we should (gasp) interfere in The Market to build up a system of local and tiered finance rather than an overly concentrated, globalized one would be met with the same dismissive response, “Don’t you know that times have changed?” George Grant observed a long time ago that if small-government conservatives in America succeeded in shrinking the federal government and restoring state sovereignty, this would clear the way for domination by corporate oligarchy unless it was accompanied by economic decentralization. Of course, anytime someone suggests creating a more decentralized economy, he is dubbed a socialist who wants to meddle with the glorious Market, as if the current predicament resulted from anything other than collusion between centralized power and concentrated wealth. This is the false choice that defenders of the status quo love to present as a way to paralyze and halt any attempt at making sane reforms, and it is enormously helpful to them to write off as “idealists” those few who have been arguing for political and economic decentralization for decades. Since we are not going back to “an agrarian society or a totally localized economy,” and since we all know this, why are we spending any time successfully demolishing strawmen that represent the views of virtually no one alive today?
Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic
Filed under: agrarianism, economics, pessimism, politics
One part where I find the position of a “local market” less than ideal is that it implies that the same power and financial relationships we see on the bigger, globalized scale, would be better if they were just smaller. I’m not exactly enthused about going back to a kind of “It’s a Wonderful Life” era of a local Scrooge, or the kind of 1920’s days of factory and mill towns. And I can’t see how, without significant changes in the nature of the relationship between people and finance and the economy, how that wouldn’t inevitably result. While the financial crisis we have today is so deep and so large because of its scope, the failures of it are still fundamental problems that have plagued finances for century; rampant speculation and overwhelming debt.
For one thing, smaller financial firms can’t even contemplate having the debt-to-capital ratios some of these larger firms had. Most local banks hold their loans in expectation of being paid back and don’t repackage them for sale. Significant parts of the current crisis would not have been possible on a more local scale. Factory towns and Pottersville are all a function of lack of economic diversification and overdependence on one source of capital, which theoretically Blond’s proposal would tend to avoid. It’s not as if we aren’t living in Potter’s world now; it’s just that we don’t ever meet the Potters who run it.
Plus, instead of factory and mill towns, we have Wal-Mart ghost towns, which are just as overly-dependent on the decisions of a corporation but tend to benefit less from its presence. To some degree, once people become employees and debtors the sort of economic independence that would be most desirable isn’t entirely possible, but if even more radical solutions are closed off because they are deemed unrealistic and impractical I don’t see what other choice there is besides trying to reduce the scale and limit the damage.
Daniel I think you misinterpret what I’m saying here (and yes, the quotation you draw from my piece is abominably phrased. I hit publish too soon and have been quoted now twice from that one awkwardly put sentence).
Look, what I’m doing in this piece is trying to find fault with my own writing, with my own Utopianism and theories. I know you’ve been reading at least some of my writing because you’ve linked to it and I’ve been unendingly critical of globalization,free trade, etc. and writing positively about distributism, subsidiarity, agrarianism, localism, and so forth.
So what I wanted to do was to lay bare what my own feelings were regarding the shortcomings of where my own writing was going. Why is localism, paleoconservatism etc. not gaining more momentum? Because it sits so often in the realm of idealism rather than practicality. This is what I like about Blond, who tries very hard to put forth practical (albeit UK-centric) policy prescriptions to the problems we face. You do this as well, as do many of the FPR crowd. This is one reason I’m so excited about the Front Porch – finally some real, focused discussion. But then again, even there, and often as not in my own writing the idealism and wishful thinking can blind us a bit to the real problems these theories hold – namely, what’s right and good about modernity, and how the alternative vision can be applied without necessarily abandoning those things. Deneen was on to this in his “Free Riders” piece.
I certainly did not mean to ridicule or call out as “silly” the entirety of the localist cause, of which I consider myself to be a part, only to admit to some of my own failures (and the failures of those I hold common cause with) in critiquing modernity and in providing a sensible alternative. Why? Because since Chesterton there has been a steady stream of critics of modernity who are too easily cast aside by the mainstream, and often as not this is due to their inability to provide a pragmatic alternative. We localists are too easily written off as daydreamers.
For all his perceived failings as a “conservative” this is one area in which I think David Cameron really “gets it.” Call it compromise if you will. I titled my piece “Working with what we’ve got.” It is, to some degree, a matter of compromise. It must be. It always is.
More than anything this was an exercise in humility, and I see that it has been read as an exercise in contempt. This was not my intention. (cross-commented at FPR)
Thanks, Erik. My response is up in the comments over at FPR.
I’m not disagreeing that the Wal-Mart ghost-towns of today are not much different than the undiversified milltowns of the 20’s and 30’s; I just don’t think “limiting the damage” provides any substantial benefit, and is part of the reason I think the appeal of “localism” runs out of steam to people. People hate Potter AND JP Morgan, which suggests that its the relationship those in the financial world above have with those below is more important than the sheer size of them.
They may hate both, but both are not equally harmful because one is not nearly so powerful as the other. In theory, Potter could be reined in by local or state authorities if enough people organized against him. The difference is that some measure of control and accountability can realistically be brought to bear against one of the two. The larger the scale of the operation, the less realistic that accountability and control become. The benefit is the greater possibility for self-government and economic independence. Whether people take advantage of that possibility would be another question.
They may hate both, but both are not equally harmful because one is not nearly so powerful as the other.
I think the belief that sits behind that is really wrong. Or at least misdescriptive for a significant population. What’s at issue isn’t very different than the question of which you fear more: the everybody-knows-everything tyranny of small towns or the bureaucratic tyranny of big cities. At least as many people run shrieking from small towns as run pell-mell from cities. I can’t think of any reason to believe that those fleeing the small town are more likely to be wrong than those fleeing the city.
I agree with SMT; as evidenced by the inability of state legislators, or even city councils, to effectively bring force to bear on the limited scope of things they do control, I don’t think “local control” would be anymore effective. But thats no here no there.
What mechanisms can be created to allow greater control to a wider swatch of individuals over their economic lives? The fundamental question of who controls the means of production (or their broader economic life), how that control is wielded, and how we can get there? Reading alot of stuff on Front Porch, I’m struck by how much it reflects my own thinking as someone far-left to the dial on dealing with issues of building community, culture, responsible environmental use and the like. If there is a difference it must be in the mechanisms and the driving point of unity (which seems mostly to revolve around cultural or religious solidarity as opposed to one centered around class-issues).
A Bailey instead of a bailout is possible in a world of Potters. Generally you can’t compete with a huge national company, but they tend to exist only because something is being distorted, regulated, or subsidized to cause the centralization.
Somehow the greenhouse gasbags aren’t called too idealistic.
Nor are those who want everything organic or “natural”.
Nor those who somehow think they can plan and impose equality – uniformity of outcome with some kind of diversity in persons.
There are economies of scale and dis-economies.
But I’ve pointed out if you think of trade as a relationship between persons instead of a transaction between users or objects, it becomes something very different. Burger King employees never are around long enough to remember what I’ve ordered, but a local Dunkin Donuts starts filling the cup with coffee when they see me through the door.
Robots moving around items is more efficient, and this is where economics hits a paradox. The whole point of the market is to set prices on subjective wants. But subjects, persons, aren’t always rational and their desires can often change unpredictably or include something not easily done by anything robotic. The most efficient system would have robots trading in some centralized system, but then there would be no subjective value as there would not be any persons involved.
Subsidiarity is probably the closest description to what should occur, but I have trouble thinking of it other than in terms of coercive power. Prices are what transmit information in markets, so a preference for something local might command a higher price than the Wal-Mart monoculture. But the monoculture doesn’t leave room for the ecosystem. Mom & Pop aren’t getting rich, just getting by. Wal-Mart might only really satisfy a minority of their customers better, but it is enough to put them out of business.
But there is something else which binds even the separate communities together, and I think it is rapidly dying. New York, specifically wall street is getting huge aid as if Katrina hit them – or to remember 9/11. But Detroit is being left to all but die. Were two planes to crash into the headquarters of AIG and – pick another big financial target, should the people in Detroit care? Maybe they should cheer as the leadership would be ousted like at GM?
Or to echo the above paradox, why be patriotic about America when no
Because there is/was a local diversity, one can see Detroit and New York as cousins, that if one is having trouble the other should help out because of some kind of bond and the differences would insure that it would be unlikely that both would have the same kind of problem at the same time. If Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, San Francisco, Denver, etc. are all identical bricks, who cares if one gets a bad crack as long as the wall as a whole is still strong?
The doctrine of Subsidiarity is a tempting one based on organic societies. The Distributionist project that is inspired by it however is so flawed that I just can’t take it seriously.
Both it seems to me, depend on a Catholic or at least Christian culture to work. For such a system to work now, it would require the extinction of the liberal spirit of unlimited freedom and the left adoration of centralized power of atomized individuals. The unspoken element necessary in a successful Distributionist state is the presence of a Christian hierarchy to advise and breath ethical life into the deliberations of the distributing state. The state has the power to force the breakup of powerful entities and to redirect the power relations within society. Yet we seem to imagine that it will only operate for the public good. Without a sort of clerical veto this just isn’t going to happen.
This also seems to be a zero-sum system. How would such a system cope with the exasperating habit of some people to outproduce others and innovate in ways that upset the norm? How would such a system avoid technical and systemic stagnation? If such a society had existed in two hundred years ago, would it have had an industrial revolution? Would such a society have discovered America and explored and exploited it?
Personally, such a society seems crabbed and undynamic. It sounds like a society governed by the credo that no one should have too much. As the late Andrei Amalrik pointed, out this was also the mentality of the Soviet Worker. I also think it’s a bit bizarre that the fount of such thinking is the Roman Catholic Church, an organization modeled on the Roman Empire.
For those interested, I have a response to this here and it’s really been an ongoing discussion at the League lately with more to come, I’m sure.
While limiting the size of financial institutions matters, more important is limiting their scope of operations. Most of the problems we are facing now are due to a relaxation of the limitations large financial institutions have operated under since the 1930s, which prohibited them from expanding the scope of their financial involvements into all kinds of interconnected areas which lead to this kind of overleveraled collapse. The idea behind this was that it would lead to efficiencies in the financial markets, when in reality it has led to the oppose. In recent years, something like 41% of all corporate profits were in the financial sector, rather than the manufacturing or service sector, which means that finance is simply taking a larger and larger bite out of the economy, rather than a smaller one. (in the past, it was generally in the range of 20%). So it’s clear that in this case freer markets are not leader to more efficient markets, but simply more and more rigged markets. There’s plenty of reason to think that reducing the scope of individual financial firms, forcing them to specialize rather than globalize, will lead to greater efficiencies and greater profits spread accross the board, rather than being eaten up by finanical giants.
As for localizing, that too can make a difference. It used to be that banks could only serve in specific areas of the country, but as those limits have been broken down, competition has actually been reduced, and financial services have been less competitive and less efficient, increasing their burden on the economy rather than decreasing it. Many of the best banks in the country have been local banks and lenders who know their area and their clientele, and who can serve it best. Localizing doesn’t mean going backwards in time to Its A Wonderful Life monopolies on capital, it means restoring sane limits on financial enterprises that spin out of control without them.
The best thing about conservatism as a philosophical stance is its recognition that everything in this world is limited, and therefore needs to have a limit placed upon it. Anything that is unlimited will eventually collapse and destroy itself. So the goal is to find the proper limit for every human endeavor, not rigidly or by authority, but through practice, experience, experiment and common sense. We are learning from this catastrophe that there are sane limits that must be placed on finance without which self-destructive collapse becomes inevitable. The problem, of course, is that somehow conservatism has become identified with the abandonment of all limits on financial activity, which is the exact opposite of its original meaning and value.
Conradg. Bravo! I certainly like your well-reasoned prescription better than the Distributionist alternative. Having to live in the shire with the Hobbits would be pretty boring. And those low doorways!