Agrarian Hypocrisy and the Evils of Distributism

One thing that has amused me in these first three years of FPR’s existence is the tendency of some readers to single out one or two articles and lament that FPR was once a promising venture but has now taken a sad turn toward, well, the list is long: socialism, distributism, libertarianism, Catholicism, monarchism, populism, statism, and communism (remember the Commie-dems?).

The fact that FPR has been written off for such disparate transgressions is suggestive. Ultimately, I think this indicates more about the particular reader than it does about FPR. From the beginning we have been committed to a big tent approach. We decided early on that if we were going to err it would not be in the direction of exclusion, narrowness, or some dogmatic localist creed. We emphatically don’t want to be easily pigeon-holed; although, some have called us neo-traditionalists and new localists, and I suppose those hit fairly close to the mark.

The danger of a big tent is being so broad that there is no coherent center, but I think the attentive reader will find at FPR a genuine commitment to the ideals of place, limits, and liberty in various configurations. In more concrete terms, this amounts to the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. Of course, there is plenty of room for disagreement as these ideals are articulated, and these points of disagreement crop up regularly.

As I see it, we at FPR are exploring the limits and defects of liberalism in the context of contemporary America. In the course of that exploration, we’ve had a variety of individuals push in various directions. Early on we published a piece by Kirkpatrick Sale on secession. Does that mean FPR is committed to secession? Well, no; although, one of our editors, Bill Kauffman, has written an engaging book on the topic and anyone who reads it will be made aware that the subject is as old as the republic and does not simply refer to carving up the Union but can also indicate a desire to carve up the states within the Union. A legitimate discussion? I think so.

We ran a couple of pieces by an author advocating an American monarchy. Does that mean FPR is a monarchist site? The simple fact that no other writer at FPR bought the arguments and as a result we have not revisited that topic suggests that this particular foray fell decidedly flat. While some critics see the fact that we ran these pieces as evidence that FPR is a cabal of romantic monarchists, it seems clear that the exact opposite is actually the case. Outliers are just that, and to identify an outlier as the norm seems to be a careless error.

In this attempt to probe the limits and defect of liberalism, FPR writers often find themselves pushing against a political culture in ways that create real and difficult tensions. We Americans are, after all, products of a liberal society and to question both the grounds of liberalism as well as its ends is to question much about our own lives.

In November Joe Carter over at First Things published a piece critical of the distributist economic ideals often discussed at FPR. Indeed, from the beginning we have sought to explore the contemporary relevance of distributism (see, for example, here and here). Part of the problem with distributism (beside the lousy moniker) is the fact that few people take the time to define it carefully and this results in plenty of misunderstandings. For present purposes, we can define distributism as simply the notion that a healthy polity, especially a healthy democracy, depends on real property widely distributed among the citizenry. Of course, the mechanism to achieve this end is a central question that must be addressed, yet most would agree (certainly conservatives of a Burkean stripe) that property is one of the lynchpins of an ordered freedom.

Carter’s challenge to distributism (as an aesthetic ideal born of hobbits) turns into a criticism of agrarianism when he levels the following accusation:

Agrarian conservatives are charmingly anachronistic and mostly harmless since even they don’t take their ideas too seriously. (When the agrarian professors give up their tenure at Ivy League U, move back to the farm, and teach at Wendell Berry Community College, I’ll believe they mean what they say).

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