The author of The Moviegoer would make a fascinating subject for a movie, or at least a documentary.

So reasoned filmmaker Win Riley. His Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, which I have had the privilege to preview, is excellent. It’s a great introduction to Percy for those who haven’t read him, and even better for those who have.

Riley’s documentary will be shown on many PBS affiliates later this fall. But if you are in the Phoenix area, you are cordially invited to come to a special screening of the documentary on Saturday, October 1. Win Riley will be present to take questions from the audience.

The event, cosponsored by Catholic Phoenix, will take place at Xavier College Prep’s Virginia G. Piper Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $10, which you can purchase through Paypal at the above link or at the door. Let me put this part in bold: wine and beer will be complimentary. And while the free booze is sure to draw my fellow papists, this is not a “Catholic” event, and you definitely needn’t be Catholic to enjoy the film (Riley isn’t Catholic) — or to enjoy Percy, for that matter.

A friend of mine once opined, to a group of college students: “There are two groups of people who don’t get Walker Percy: 1. Well-brought-up Catholic boys from large families. 2. All women.”

I’m not sure about that, but come to the screening, and we’ll ask Win Riley what he thinks.

(Any questions or issues buying tickets, please feel free to e-mail me at beerjeremy [at] hotmail.com.)

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Dear friends of FPR,

Please join us at the inaugural Front Porch Republic conference on Saturday, September 24, at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Co-sponsored by the Mount and the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy at Georgetown University, the theme of the conference is “Human Scale and the Human Good: Creating Healthy Communities in a Global Age.”

Bill Kauffman, Rod Dreher, Christine Rosen, Patrick Deneen, Caleb Stegall, John Schwenkler, Joshua Hochschild, and other FPR types will be among the speakers. It will be interesting and informative, theoretical and practical. It might change your life. Also, it will be a lot of fun. (We’ll post a full schedule here shortly.)

Registration at the door will be $25. That will include a little bit of breakfast (coffee, tea, some pastries) and your lunch. Students can get in for just $15.

You can also pre-register for just $20 — and, by the way, help us a lot with our planning. Just hit the donate button on the upper-right-hand corner of this website, and make a $20 donation. Just before you submit your donation, you’ll see that there is an opportunity to include “special directions to the seller.” Click on that, and type in “conference registration” (or something like that). You’ll get a receipt, and we’ll sign you up for the proceedings.

For hotels, you might try the Sleep Inn in Emmitsburg, the Super 8 in Thurmont (301.271.7888) or the Wyndham in Gettysburg (171.339.0020), among others.

Now — some special opportunities. If you donate $100 or more between now and September 1, we’ll invite you to a special dinner on Saturday night with some of the speakers and FPR editors. We’ll also recognize you for your generosity on the conference materials.

Or perhaps you’d like to sponsor a student; to do that, simply make a gift of $25 and type in “student sponsorship” in the special instructions. We’ll let in a deserving student for free, and we’ll use your support to offset the costs.

Finally, we want to acknowledge the special support being provided for this conference by the Van Horn Foundation. All of us at Front Porch Republic are grateful for the foundation’s generosity.

If you have any questions — or if you would like to make a special gift in support of this conference or any other aspect of FPR’s work — please write me at beerjeremy [at] hotmail.com.

Thanks, and hope to see you in September.

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Spring training is over, and I find myself at loose ends. Since moving to Phoenix a few years back, this has become the saddest time of the year for me. Over the last five weeks I’ve been going to as many games as I can — laid-back, sun-filled, perfect-temperature affairs featuring plenty of hope and gentle Sonoran desert spring breezes, not to mention washed-up veterans and fresh-faced, can’t-miss prospects. That’s over now. The inferno of a Salt River Valley summer looms. Baseball here is, ideally, a spring and autumn affair, and it is lovely. Summer: not so much.

And yet Opening Day still inspires a certain amount of excitement, the fruit of spending my formative years compulsively collecting baseball cards (Topps only — Fleer and Donruss were for kids who didn’t understand tradition) and religiously scanning box scores in the Warsaw Times-Union. Random memories come flooding back, like that fantastic 1982 Brewers lineup, the 1984 Cubs’ collapse, youthful debates with my best friend as to whether Eddie Murray would ever make the Hall of Fame (a debate that fifteen years later would cost me ten hard-earned dollars). And so, while I know it’s not exactly FPR’s usual fare, the arrival of Opening Day tomorrow compels me to share with you my Certain Knowledge as to this year’s division winners. With playoff predictions thrown in as well.

I’m calling out my fellow editors Wilson, Kauffman, and Peters — at least — to join me in this exercise. Bill, though, also needs to predict the order of finish in the NY-Penn League. If he gets it exactly right, I pay him $100. A generous offer. Because that’s the kind of guy I am.

And of course you, dear reader, are invited to give your predictions in the comments, should you care to engage in a little friendly competition. Here we go:

AL East: Red Sox. Yankees finish no higher than 3rd.

Al Central: White Sox. Royals with shocking 3rd-place finish.

AL West: A’s. Am actually looking forward to the Moneyball flick this fall. So is my wife, who tells me that Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane.

NL East: Braves. Pains me to say it, but Darryl Hart man-crush Chase Utley doesn’t see the field this year for the Phils, I’m afraid.

NL Central: Reds. With the Cubs putting up a surprisingly good fight for 2nd. Cardinals finish 4th. Goodbye to Pujols.

NL West: Giants. And the D’backs will be pretty awful — fewer than 70 wins.

Al Wild Card: Rangers.

NL Wild Card: Phils. I do love me some Cliff Lee.

ALCS: White Sox over Red Sox.

NLCS: Braves over Reds.

World Series: Braves over White Sox.

Anyone who picks the World Series correctly gets a free dinner if and when they roll into Phoenix.

And remember to support your Local Nine this summer. That’ll be the AZ Rookie League and the Tucson Padres for me. And hey, Fall Ball starts in just six and a half short months.

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A lawyer friend who specializes in this kind of thing alerts me to this decision, handed down earlier this week in the Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court, ruling that no American can opt out of Medicare without also forfeiting all Social Security benefits. My friend explains the significance:

This is an outrageous result.  The judge held that because once you begin collecting social security benefits you are “entitled” to begin receiving Medicare as well, if you fail to sign up for Medicare, you forfeit your social security that you paid into your whole life. Nothing in either the Medicare Act or the Social Security Act justifies this result.  At bottom, the judge essentially ruled that the word “entitled” means “must sign up for.” So when you and Kara begin drawing on Social Security, know that the Big Plantation will force you to also get on Medicare.  If you don’t, it will actually make you pay back every cent you received from social security.

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Readers on the Porch might want to check out The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, edited by Ken Deutsch and Ethan Fishman and published by the University Press of Kentucky (perhaps the only nonreligious academic press consistently to publish titles by and of interest to conservatives).

The point of the volume is to explore the contributions to conservative thought made by nine thinkers representing various schools and traditions, including old stand-bys like Eric Voegelin, Kirk, Hayek, Nisbet, and Weaver; the relatively obscure James Hallowell; the questionably conservative John Courtney Murray; and the often splenetic Willmoore Kendall.

I’ve just obtained a copy. The editors’ introduction, in my opinion, concedes far, far too much to the continuing aptness of the “Nash narrative” (however slightly modified) of conservatism’s varieties. Thus, they claim that there is currently a raging “battle . . . for the soul of conservatism.” (When has there not been?) The “combatants,” they claim, are “traditional conservatism, laissez-faire conservatism, and neoconservatism.”

I’m highly skeptical of the usefulness of this framework. It applies old categories that are no longer particularly descriptive or useful. For one thing, most everyone, especially at the grassroots and popular levels — the kinds of folks who read and write for Pajamas Media and Townhall and NRO, etc. — holds views that are essentially a higgledy-piggledy blend of these three types, combined with strands of populism and nationalism that have their roots outside of any of these sources. There are some old-school traditional conservatives still flying the flag, and good for them, but the fact is that the smartest members of the post-Reagan generation(s) with more “traditional” leanings are going in unpredictable directions that the older traditional conservatives don’t necessarily understand or approve (ahem). And what of the reform conservatives — Douthat, Salam, Friedersdorf, and The American Scene folks? What about the pomocons and pomoer-cons at the League? What about Larison and Kauffman and the civil-libertarian, anti-empire types gathered around TAC?  The list could go on for a long while.

The simple tripartite framework doesn’t illuminate much, if anything, about any of these new “schools.” It obscures more than it reveals. All praise to George Nash for performing such keen analysis back in 1976. But we need a new analysis today, new language. No scholar that I know of has yet assimilated, considered as a whole, what the younger “conservatives” have been up to for at least ten or fifteen years now. But I do know that what they are up to is not helpfully described as “traditional conservatism,” “neoconservatism,” etc.

The Deutsch/Fishman volume is helpful here. The 45-and-under crowd needs to be introduced to Kendall and Hallowell and Nisbet and Murray. There’s a lot of wisdom and insight there. Just don’t read them with Nash-narrative eyes only. Fortunately, Dan McCarthy does not do that in his wonderful chapter on the complex and problematic Kendall, the philosopher of “constitutional majoritarianism.”

I urge you to support regional, non-trade publishing and buy the book, in any case. Perhaps we can convince Kentucky editorial director Steve Wrinn to let us run an excerpt from McCarthy’s essay here on the Porch.

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Porch frequenters know well that there are remarkably few places on the World Wide Interweb where one may encounter intelligent, thoughtful, non-ideological conservatism. And in print? You can count ‘em on one hand — and you’d probably not need to extend all of your digits in doing so.

All of which is to say: support The American Conservative. TAC’s web-a-thon is in full swing. Their goal, I believe, is to gain enough support to keep the print version of the magazine alive.

Listen: I need that. And you need that. You can’t take your iPad or your Kindle or your laptop everywhere. You don’t want to. Like me, you come down with a case of screen sickness every day about 5 or 6 p.m. On Fridays it becomes a near-crippling disease. Looking at a screen, touching a keyboard, moving a mouse — the very thoughts produce nausea, dizziness, intense ennui. But the thought of picking up a good floppy magazine, lounging on the patio, lighting up a cigar, pouring a whiskey and soda — it immediately enlivens. And to make the thought a reality immediately restores. Birdsong again enters your consciousness. You begin to re-engage physical reality. Man was made for this kind of thing, you think to yourself, and you resolve to one day become a lazy forest ranger. A forest ranger who lazes around reading magazines in a hammock.

Without TAC, none of it can happen. Newsmax is no substitute. You need Bacevich, Kauffman, Larison, McCarthy, Deneen, Gottfried, Antle, Walker, Doherty, and Dougherty — and you need them in print.

Make an investment in your future happiness. In the world’s happiness. In the good America. Support TAC today.

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Reader alert: FPR editor Bill Kauffman’s latest is now available. Titled Bye Bye, Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map, it is vintage Kauffman. It also sports a splendid cover and carries a blurb from James Howard Kunstler. My blurb, had I been asked, would have been, “This is the book that will finally land Kauffman on the No-Fly List!” And with that, let me be the first to say hello to all the good folks at Homeland Security and the FBI who may be reading this. Glad to have you aboard.

In case the title isn’t sufficiently descriptive for you, the book is about America’s many secession movements — including movements to separate parts of states from other states, and movements to separate certain states from the Union. The individual portraits, the history lessons, the vocabulary enrichment — so many reasons to pick up the book. And you may be surprised at where Bill’s sympathies do and do not lie. In any case, the efforts he discusses are certainly worth trying to understand. They are full of people — honest-to-God patriots — worth taking seriously, and they make arguments worth considering.

We’ll have more coverage here at FPR as time marches on, including, I hope, an excerpt.

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Calling all academic Porchers, especially those in political science, theory, and philosophy. The following may be of interest. I should add that I can vouch for Dr. Haworth, especially as pertains to the quality of his drinking- and cigar-buddy company. (Anyone interested in joining us for our monthly Porcher night at Magnum’s cigar bar in north Phoenix, just let me know, and I’ll put you on the invite list.)

Letter Requesting Participation:

Dear Colleagues,

My name is Peter Haworth, and I am launching a new interdisciplinary related-group, which will be affiliated with American Political Science Association (APSA). Our group will be called the Ciceronian Society, for Cicero symbolizes both the important republican tradition that opposed a centralizing empire and the rhetorical tradition of criticizing abstract rationalism. Such a society will allow us to control panel formation at the APSA and, hence, ensure that traditionalist and decentralist perspectives get a sufficient venue at the conference, which they currently do not. This presence at the APSA, which is a relatively interdisciplinary professional conference, will allow young traditionalist-minded scholars to develop their CVs. It will also provide an opportunity to develop traditionalist and decentralist thought via facilitating the presenting and critiquing of papers.

To make this effort successful, we need to have 50 persons both sign up as a member of APSA and be willing to sign the application for our Ciceronian Society by our application deadline of August 15th. In lieu of your signature on the Ciceronian Society application, you can simply give me your name and email.  Participation in the Ciceronian Society is free of charge. For those of you who are not political scientists, you can register as an APSA member for approximately $56.

Please contact me about your interest. My email is peterhaworth[at]me.com, and my phone is 602-820-5343.

Best Regards,

Peter Haworth, Ph.D.

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I hope that a Porcher will react at length to today’s dispiriting, but not too surprising, Supreme Court ruling in CLS v. Martinez, which upheld a public institution’s — the University of California’s, in this case — right to exclude groups that impose “viewpoint” limits on membership. I have reacted a bit about the case over at Philanthropy Daily, where I connect it to Florida’s recently passed AB 998. That law, discussed by Naomi Schaefer Riley here, essentially blocks politically motivated interest groups from forcing foundations to engage in a preferred-minority head count — in terms of their board make-up, their staffs, and the organizations they choose to support.

Here is my take:

Critics of the law seem not to understand — or perhaps do not care — that its impact is precisely to protect philanthropic diversity. The effect of forcing all foundations to honor a highly particular, and of course ideological, definition of “diversity” would, after all, have been to make them more and more the same; at the very least, it would have forced all of them to subscribe, at least implicitly, to the same contested definition of “diversity” and its alleged benefits. In other words, the law would have made things more uniform.

As things stand, nothing impedes Florida’s — and the nation’s — private foundations from pursuing their diverse charitable goals in diverse ways and according to the diverse beliefs that animate them. And that is precisely what they do; no one who honestly examines the giving patterns, goals, and beliefs of America’s 75,000 foundations can fail to be impressed by Americans’ charitable pluralism. In other words, freedom of association — besides being an ancient, pre-political right — leads to diversity. But diversity ideologues, as we are reminded today by the Supreme Court’s decision in CLS v. Martinez, actually want uniformity. . . .

Bradford Smith, president of the Foundation Center, has weighed in with a tad more reserve. Much to his credit, he defends the principle of philanthropic freedom. At the same time, he makes much of the Center’s efforts to promote the kind of “transparency” that activists like Pina would like to see enshrined in law. Foundations’ voluntary disclosure of data pertaining to diversity, as the term is politically defined, is much preferable, I suppose, to involuntary disclosure. But if we are going to ask for such information, shouldn’t we also have an open and honest debate about what we mean by diversity, and why? And shouldn’t that discussion include those who remain skeptical as to the concept’s usefulness (not to mention its coherence), including its helpfulness precisely for those whom it allegedly is meant to serve: the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable?

After all, following CLS v. Martinez, the “marginalized” and “vulnerable” may soon include Christians and others who cling to views unpopular with American elites. . . .

There is much fodder for reflection in the majority’s CLS ruling, starting with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s contention that requiring all groups to take all comers is “viewpoint-neutral.” Really? One would think that Justice Ginsburg could at least see that with respect to CLS it isn’t neutral!  One could build an entire book out of discussing and destroying this self-evidently false but comforting liberal canard.

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Dearest FPR readers,

Should you have, for some reason, an interest in goings-on in the world of philanthropy and civil society (or as the rest of the English-speaking world writes it, Civil Society), I invite you to lumber on on over to Philanthropy Daily, a new website that I have recently helped to launch, and where I shall be found to blog from time to time.

It is a venture that is not entirely unrelated to what we are doing here at FPR. The goal at Philanthropy Daily is to promote real civil society — the kind not ginned up by, or wholly a subsidiary of, or under the boot of — the government, especially the blood-sucking beast in Washington, D.C. Sounds innocuous and uncontroversial, you say? Alas, alas. There is a reason that Civil Society is capitalized in the U.K., and why we hear about “NGOs” but not “charities” or “nonprofits” when the discussion turns to international affairs or Europe or South America or wherever. Outside America, the Tocquevillian tradition of voluntary associations recognized but not controlled by the state hardly exists. Elsewhere, still much more than here, the “third sector” sucks from the teat of Mother State and engages in the usual whiny rent-seeking that one would therefore expect. It also serves to reinforce the ideology of globalist, secular liberalism and to demand conformity from the often-intractable, embarrassingly traditional peoples that the sector supposedly represents.

I exaggerate, but only a little. Big Society is OK, if it’s the best you can hope for; but authentic civil society of the localist variety we promote here on FPR is much preferable. Gradual government takeover of the philanthropy/charity sector, however, looms. Since cutting spending is hardly imaginable to the typical American pol and voter alike, the privately owned funds of charitable foundations are looked at with longing eyes by governments drenched in red ink. The still more-or-less vibrant sector of mediating institutions looks like a nice potential vehicle for the delivery of “services” — and the creation of new interest groups dependent on the state for support. And why should foundations not be forced to help bring about social progress? They are “tax-advantaged,” after all. You get the idea.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the notion of civil society is itself a creation of the modern nation-state, as Peter Leithart and Bill Cavanaugh argue. But let’s not over-complicate things, shall we?

I hope to see you over at Philanthropy Daily sometime. (Kauffman may pop up from time to time, and Hart, maybe even Deneen.) And bring along your Porcher sensibilities and ideas.

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Sean Scallon at TAC recently directed our attention to this fellow, Dan Mielke, who is running for Congress in Wisconsin’s 7th District. I’ve no idea if he has a chance of winning — apparently he is not the choice of the DC conservative establishment — but my goodness, I think he might take 80 or 90% of the Porch vote. From his bio:

Facilitator for the Stevens Point Farmers Market.

Dan is a strong advocate of “buy local, buy fresh”, an effort to help small farm families increase the profitability of their farms in a world where farmers have been losing out to corporate farming practices.

Has been an aggressive proponent for the protection of property rights and served as a public speaker throughout the state in this regards.

Has been a promoter of sustainable agriculture serving on the USDA SARE grant review committee and as an educator in the field of sustainable farming practices.

Has been a strong advocate for constitutional government and has been publicly active over the years in fighting for the protection of our Constitutional rights and freedoms.

On the issues, he is pro-life and if not quite anti-war, openly skeptical of using the U.S. military to advance and protect the empire.

Unless he’s as poorly educated and just plain dumb as Mrs. Palin (which he doesn’t seem to be), this is about as good as you’re going to get, my friends. Go get ‘em, Mielke.

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I just received my copy of The American Conservative’s most recent issue. It’s a very porchy issue indeed. Includes my interview with Greg Wolfe, editor of IMAGE; an essay by Phillip Blond on Red Toryism, adapted from the speech he gave at Georgetown under the auspices of the Tocqueville Forum; Bill Kauffman on To Kill a Mockingbird; and much more. Really, please support the only magazine devoted to thoughtful, non-ideological conservatism by subscribing. And if you find a magazine devoted to thoughtful progressivism, subscribe to that, too (and let me know what it is).

Perhaps the best piece is Dan McCarthy’s on the growth of arbitrary authority. Perhaps he’ll let us reprint it here, in a while. One paragraph will give you the gist:

You can sleep with whomever you want, but there will be no legally binding commitments, and whether you keep your house or your children will be up to a judge. You can quit your job at any time, but good luck finding another. You can vote for the Republican or Democrat of your preference, and they will both give the country bigger government and mroe wars. Even which church to attend is a consumer choice, as self-interested and trivialized as which soft drink to buy. For all the fetishization of choice, Americans are taught by their institutions that there is only one way to live: casually, unconcernedly, without strong connections to anything but the provider state and its flag.

I’d say that last sentence, in particular, is insightful, wouldn’t you? But we are not just taught this; it is a dogma that is thoroughly culturally (and often enough legally) enforced.

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