Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.

Thinking About Wendell Berry's Leftist Lament (and More)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Wendell Berry’s sprawling, uneven, brilliant, and sometimes frustrating The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice will likely not, I think, be widely remembered after he leaves us as his greatest, most important work. But it is undeniably his longest, and arguably his most ambitious as well. Very late to the party, I have finally read through his wrestling with the entangled ideas of racism, history, patriotism, religion, public discourse, agrarianism, and more, and I’m glad I did. It is a book crammed with insights, thoughts that Berry has, as he makes clear in the book’s introduction, considered and re-considered, written, scratched out, and re-written, over many years. “I am surprised, slowly of course, by the slowness of my mind” he writes as a kind of apologia (p. 5). However, I was surprised as well to have retroactively discovered, long after completing the book, a through-line to his argument, one that mostly ties together most of its nearly 500 pages, despite the many zig-zags and dead-end observations (a few of which probably could have been eliminated or perhaps deserved further integrative reflection of their own) along the way. And surprisingly (or perhaps not), it was a work of Marxist economic history that helped me see it.

In my observation, conservatives who celebrate Wendell Berry's ideas deal with the seemingly leftist elements of his thought—his condemnations of corporate power, finance capitalism, and libertarian individualism most obviously, but his highly selective and somewhat distanced engagement with the traditionalist pre-occupations that define so much of our never-ending culture war is perhaps even more important--in a variety of ways. Some downplay those elements, some appropriate them into a post-liberal framework, and some insist that the localist or distributist character of the agrarian beliefs which he holds aren’t in any substantive sense leftist at all, but rather are actually conservative, properly understood. All of these approaches have their value—though given that Berry never makes, in all this massive book exploring prejudices in America, an explicit Burkean defense of prejudice, I am doubtful how far any of them can go in their attempt to claim these ideas of Berry's as "conservative" in any formal sense. Rather, while The Need to Be Whole will probably never be much read or appreciated by contemporary (and overly statist) socialists, I think his overarching intentions are clearly most at home with anti-capitalist radicals of the left. It is they, after all, who have most consistently lamented the destruction of the commons, and lamented all the divisive consequences which have followed its ruination at the hands of an expansionist capitalism which has, tragically, characterized American history from its beginning; their complaint is Berry's as well.

The destructive horror of slavery and its still-abiding legacies are, to Berry, not best understood in explicitly racialist terms, though obviously the primary way those horrors and those legacies were and are elaborated is via racial categories. Still, the millions whose lives were destroyed by the Atlantic Slave Trade and slave economy of the American South is, to Berry, of a piece with the—primarily socio-economic, though often also literal as well--destruction of millions of farming lives and hundreds of farming communities (which provided settled environments of provision and membership to families both black and white) by industrial agriculture. This is not some Heideggerian sublimation of human suffering to the logics of technology; Berry is excruciatingly particular in the way he talks about the ways in which Southerners of all races dealt with the Civil War and its aftermath, with reverberations that affect our historical assumptions and linguistic pre-occupations to this very day. But nonetheless, if Berry's book is to be understood as providing an alternative to the history of racial exploitation told in the 1619 Project, it isn't anything similar to then-President Trump's celebratory 1776 Commission; rather, it's a long, sad tale that begins with 1225's Charter of the Forest, and all the ways in which the fundamentals of common provisioning, which the gift of land makes available to all those willing to work it, have been continually whittled away in the name of profit. 

Some might question giving Berry even this much credit when it comes to his dealings with race, pointing to the sympathy he expresses towards Robert E. Lee in the book, and his dislike of those who attribute some kind of genetic trauma to any depiction or memorialization of those Southerners who fought for an understandable yet still evil cause from 1861 to 1865. All this attracted a fair amount of criticism when the book came out in 2022, and I’m not entirely unsympathetic to it. But an understanding of how Berry grounds his overall argument in the requirements of membership and community-building work should enable open-minded readers, I think, to see that he’s not minimizing the horrors of slavery when he shows some contextual sympathy for those born into its web of enveloping prejudices. Rather, he's extending the tragedy of those horrors and the devastation they justified, situating all Americans in the same destructive shadow that slaves and their masters were implicated in alike. 

He does this by way of an impressively wide rage of arguments, including a thoughtful consideration of the Sermon on the Mount, a critical reading a Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a reflection on the origin of Kentucky's state anthem, "My Own Kentucky Home," and much more. But the clearest elaboration of his entwining of moral, environmental, and socio-economic themes in his treatment of race in America comes through the lengthy consideration he gives to a conversation with the famed defender of both white supremacy and states’ rights, John C. Caulhoun, recorded in the dairy of John Quincy Adams in 1820—a conversation which Berry calls “essential to the sense of this book." He writes:

Calhoun’s significant distinction is between work that is not degrading, and therefore suitable for white people, and degrading work fit only for slaves. Adams defines the trouble exactly—“mistaking labor for slavery, and domination for Freedom”—and he clearly thought that the trouble affected both races….By assigning specifically to slaves the manual work considered degrading, the slave-owning aristocrats degraded that work for everybody, black or white, who did it. By degrading the work, they degraded the workers….It became possible for people who could not escape hard manual labor to despise themselves for doing it, and, from that, possible to despise the land that required it of them. Thus the set of values and attitudes by which the Old South aristocrats placed themselves above the fundamental work of the world in their time, values and attitudes meant to define the superiority of a class, instituted a (so far) illimitable cycle of degradations. It degraded the fundamental work itself, in both status and quality. It degraded everybody, black and white, who did that work. And inevitably—provided that the workers consented to the aristocratic values and attitudes—it degraded the land on which the work was done….

In his argument with Calhoun, Adams was speaking in affirmation of the value to the country and to democracy of “the plain freemen who labor for subsistence,” presumably on their own farms or in their own shops. Calhoun, speaking self-consciously as an aristocrat and in defense of his class and its values, divides human life and work into the permanent grades of higher and lower. (He clearly could have granted no standing to Jefferson’s “aristocracy of talent and virtue,” with which Adams might have concurred, though he did not like Jefferson.) Perhaps the greatest irony of our history so far is that in our public life we have favored and democratized Calhoun’s values and pointedly disfavored Adams’s….We all, black and white together, want to be John C. Calhoun….

The superiority of Calhoun’s social class rested upon Negro slavery—which, if we understand slavery as the lack or the want of freedom, was only one kind of slavery…Consumers of industrial products participate in the industrial economy virtually as captives, because of their total dependence on the products, and because of their lack of responsibility for the quality of what they buy. The condition of industrial consumers is of a piece with the condition of industrial workers, who are captives of the “labor market” and their need for jobs, and who have no responsibility for the kind and quality of their products….Slavery did not begin with the capture and sale of African black people, and it did not end with their legal emancipation (pp. 298-300, 301-302, 374).

In retrospect, much of Berry’s meandering book is revealed as an explicit exploration of the many and perverse ways the “democratization” of Calhoun’s aristocratic prejudices have deeply warped American social and economic life. In his view (and mine as well), without consistently prioritizing a participatory, democratic, egalitarian respect for work--including both those who do the work, and the land upon which they do it--one will be invariably left with a divisive competition to separate oneself from manual labor, and a greedy desire to impose on those you have separated yourself from to make sure they continue to do it for you. While there have occasionally been successful efforts to arrange and maintain the environments within with such work can flourish throughout American history, Berry mourns how rare they have been. Rather than the ideal of seeking common membership in a particular context of work—the “American Dream” of “economic democracy,” of “self-sufficiency based upon ownership of a family farm or ‘forty acres and a mule’ or a small store or a small shop” (p. 98)—we have a public realm that “is not, except in the most remote and theoretical sense, a membership…. It is nobody’s home … the realm of extremely powerful, wealthy, childish, and badly spoiled adult humans typified by Mr. Trump, his allies, and his rivals” (p. 136). Why this Calhounian triumph, in Berry’s view? Well, at one point he observes that human beings are “most at peace with one another when they are reasonably prosperous” (p. 87). That might seem a brief and materialist aside, but it is echoed in dozens of similar asides throughout the book, when he remarks on the fecundity of well-respected land, on how even oppressed populations (including the slaves of the American South) could find some degree of independence through the natural provisions that wise observers could obtain from said land, and so forth. When one reflects upon the common resources that lay at the heart of prosperity, and how capitalist expansion throughout history consistently begins with robbing the people of those common resources, economic explanations emerge as a framework for understanding how all the divisive and racist prejudices which Berry is exploring take root.

Ian Angus’s The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is a short and dense book, one which lays out in close detail both the centuries-old tradition of commons-based agriculture through most of human history (Angus’s research is explicitly focused on the development of expansionist capitalism in England, the United Kingdom, and its imperial territories, but it is clear that similar data patterns can be found around world), and the way that tradition came to an end. Many are at least vaguely familiar with the story of the “enclosure movement”—the repeated, and always expanding, efforts by aristocrats and early capitalists from the Middle Ages through the 18^th century to dispossess the peasants who farmed, hunted and gathered in, and provisioned their families and villages from the streams, forests, and fields that they may have had any nominal ownership of, but by centuries-old common law had access to. Leveling woods to establish fenced in sheep pastures, leveling homes to oblige those who lived there to hire themselves out as laborers in cities—the sociological and economic consequences of the history of enclosures have been debated (and, depressingly often, defended) for centuries, with Angus’s Marxist analysis being just the latest contribution of the argument (though an excellent one). I strongly doubt that Berry and Angus are at all aware of each others’ writings; yet, Angus’s argument about the centrality of dispossession to understanding the roots of imperialism and slavery enables me to see their work as complementing each other in a small but essential way.

In a way, it’s not a Marxist argument at all, but one that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Second Discourse: all the pathologies of division and competition which plague humankind, according to him, begin with “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, said to himself, This is mine." But Rousseau’s philosophical jeremiad against economic inequality and private property is hardly a rigorous argument—and it certainly isn’t Berry’s, or Angus’s (or even, when you think about it, Marx’s either, as he was far more concerned with bringing to an end exploitation than he was with imposing any kind of propertyless economic sameness; he and Friedrich Engels explicitly stated in The Communist Manifesto that it was property employed in the process of bourgeois production, not personal property, which they were targeting). What Marx, and Angus’s use of Marx’s analytic framework, actually provides in this context is simply an understanding that dispossession—using competitive acquisition, whether legal or financial or military, to end the common access to landed resources which communities had for millennia learned (and sometimes, in some places, still do learn) to share and shepherd together—was and remains at the heart of creating the economic disruptions upon which plantation slavery in the American South, and so many other forms of economic imperialism today, were and are maintained. Angus’s quotes Marx, who in this light sounds downright Berryesque (though, unfortunately, not nearly as lyrical):

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil….Capitalist production, therefore only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker (pp. 186-187).

Marx’s opinion about agriculture’s place in his vision of the historical inevitability of a workers' revolution is complicated. It is easy to assume that the above passage is merely descriptive of what he saw as an economically determined process, but there are also notes and letters from Marx (which Angus quotes at length) which reveal that Marx himself recognized the social power of the cooperative relations which existed among farmers and other small-holders, where the mutually sustaining and shared commons had not yet been absorbed in the name of elite profit. This, obviously, open up the possibility for a socialist conception of property and community that is leans in a more localist, republican, or anarchist direction, and decidedly away from the Marxist-Leninist assumption that overcoming capitalism can only be achieved through forcing workers--dictatorially, in necessary--down the path of industrial socialization.

But either way, seeing in Marx’s observations above a parallel to Berry’s concern about how economic competition introduces class distinctions, which in turn introduce a contempt for the economically poor or legally enslaved who are obliged to engage in manual labor on the land, and thus result in a degradation of all landed work as well as the land itself, isn’t difficult. Hence, my original description of The Need to Be Whole as a leftist lament. The kind of respectful and cooperative and forgiving communities of work and fair membership that Berry locates in the civil religion of America, as well as within the Christian vision, were (and still are being) undermined, with depressing rare exceptions, by the legacy of labor degradation and slavery, America’s original sin. That legacy was most prominently and destructively embodied in the chattel slavery of the American South, but it is tragically more accurately reflected in the acquisitive stifling—both at the beginning of the American experiment and today--of the “land need,” the “sensible need for independence” which common resources provide, a need expressed by “early settlers and freed slaves” alike, and which is felt today by anyone who wishes, as they search the want-ads and punch the clock, “not to be a starvling, a pauper, a scrounger, an underling, a peon, a slave” (p. 365). For us all to be economically free and respected by our fellow human beings, free of prejudices that stigmatize and separate us from one another and from the land and from the labor of our own hands, and for there thus to be no truly poor among us—what could be more leftist than that?

Putting the Demos on a Pedestal

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

In the preface to Why Liberalism Failed, the manuscript of which “was completed three weeks before the 2016 presidential election,” Patrick Deneen wrote that “the better course”—at least for all those persuaded by his book’s arguments about the philosophical flaws, contradictions, and corruption of modern liberalism—“lies not in any political revolution but in the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order” (WLF, 2018, pp. xiii, xv). That perspective reflected well the constellation of localist ideas which Deneen has contributed to over the years. By seeing in liberalism an affirmation of individualism and pluralism that invariably leads to the rise of a contractarian state, an economic materialism, and an attendant technocratic elite, all of which actually undermine the demos rather than empower it, the response by anyone concerned about the flourishing of democratic communities has to be focused on the local. WLF didn’t, in my view, engage seriously enough with the broad range of republican arguments which have similarly challenged the liberal order over the decades, making some of its conclusions too easily arrived at, but the questions it implicitly raised about local democracy along the way were valuable ones, and WLF received much balanced praise for articulating a particular kind of post-“fusionism” conservative discontent (even former president Barack Obama, while disagreeing with the book’s diagnoses, was apparently a fan).

Within a year of WLF’s publication though, Deneen appears to have changed his mind about pretty much all that. Writing in the preface of the paperback edition, Deneen explained: 

I know believe I was wrong to think that [the project of developing a political theory which would succeed philosophical liberalism] could take generations….Instead of imagining a far-off and nearly inconceivable era when the slow emergence of liberalism’s alternative might become fully visible from its long-burning embers, we find ourselves in a moment when “epic theory” becomes necessary….[I]n mere months—having seen the American political order assaulted by two parties that are in a death grip but each lacking the ability to eliminate the other, and observing the accelerating demolition of the liberal order in Europe—I now think that the moment for “epic theory” has come upon us more suddenly than we could have anticipated. Such moments probably always arrive before we think we are ready (WLF, 2019, pp. xxiii-xxiv).

The transition from “patient encouragement” to “epic theory” encapsulates well the thrust of Deneen’s new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (which is being officially released today). WLF was a good book, but Regime Change is a better one, and I think will be recognized as such—as well as one that will gain notoriety in a way that the earlier, more academic book mostly did not. Given Deneen’s new focus in RC, that notoriety may well be welcomed by him. Few books are actually “dangerous,” despite the paranoia which censorious activists, clerics, and politicians delight in spreading about them, but the epic—and profoundly unconservative, at least in any sense by which Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, or Russell Kirk would have understood the term—reach of Deneen’s arguments absolutely crosses over into that territory. 

After all, when a book written in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, after hundreds of protestors confusedly but sincerely aimed to violently subvert the constitutional procedures of a presidential election, nonetheless speaks seriously of the need for a newer, better sort of elite to employ “raw assertion[s]” of “demotic power” to challenge American institutions, and blithely quotes Machiavelli praising “discord and division” in his Discourses on Livy, arguing (perhaps facetiously, perhaps not) that “mobs running through the streets” were actually a sign of the vitality of the Roman republic…well, “dangerous” seems to be a fit description (RC, pp. 164-165). Reading Regime Change, it is hard to avoid concluding that Deneen has run out of patience, at least when it comes to what he sees as the wreckage of our present condition. To build upon what Deneen wrote on the first anniversary of the Capitol attack, the ultimate aim of RC appears to be the development of a better, more radical elite, one that could guide the people, unlike former president Donald Trump, towards a “genuine populist revolution.”

The elites which Deneen’s epic theory invokes would be the products of what he calls “aristopopulism,” an elite committed not to the often false (as Deneen effectively documents throughout the book) egalitarianism supposedly as work in the managerial liberalism so prevalent in our late capitalist moment, but rather to what he considers to be a more accurate, classical understanding of “democracy.” On his reading of Aristotle, Polybius, and Aquinas, the regime which gives greatest credence to the needs and wishes of the people as a whole is one of mixed classes, in the classical “Great Chain of Being” sense. Under such a constitutional order, a virtuous elite would wield the responsibility to govern a community through the intentional writing and enforcing of laws, while the demos would articulate over time customs and norms which would have their own quasi-governing power, one which the elites, in their virtuous wisdom, would recognize and help sustain through positive law. Deneen strongly doubts that a direct reconstruction of such an arrangement would be possible through the corrupt institutions of the Western world today, dedicated as they are, according to him, to the social reproduction our progressive culture and globalized economy. Hence the need instead to be disruptive, and possibly even violent—Deneen speaks of the necessity of “the force of a threat from the popolo”—in changing the rules of the game. As he puts it, we must employ “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” (pp. 167, 185). 

The key philosophical assumption behind Deneen’s epic theorizing is his near-total rejection of egalitarianism as it has unfolded over the centuries of liberal modernity. Throughout the early sections of Regime Change, he uncomplicatedly stipulates as a natural fact the “ancient divide that pits the ‘few’ against the ‘many,’” a divide which he describes as “the ‘normal’ condition of politics”; it is, in his view, “an endemic political feature of the human condition” that “there is inevitable inequality in the world,” reflected in either “the ongoing presence of arbitrary social differences, or their replacement by natural inequalities due to differences of talent and self-direction” (pp. x, 7, 21). A constitutional arrangement which constructively deals with this division will not attempt to paper over its facticity with promises of equal individual rights—especially since, under finance capitalism, those promises have mostly, according to Deneen, been formulated in terms of a (in his view, presumably hopeless) educational dream of turning “’the many’ into ‘the few’” through a “notional redistribution of managerial status to every human” (pp. 37-38). Rather, a better constitutional regime would turn to “the tradition of the West itself,” which looks not to any kind of transformation through either individual development or collective action, but instead to “[c]ontinuity, balance, order, and stability, grounded in the unchanging truths knowable through human reason and also present in the Christian inheritance of the West”—a “common good conservatism,” one which requires “a virtuous people…maintained through the energies and efforts of virtuous elites” who are “oriented to supporting the basic decencies of ordinary people” (pp. 68, 124).

Deneen admits that the aristocratic-populist elites that he hopes will emerge concomitant to the disruptive, “demotic” challenges to the current order--which they, according to his theory, must simultaneously orchestrate in unspecified Machiavellian ways--wouldn’t be able to play this virtuous role immediately.  But he holds out hope that, once the dominant actors in the present order have been mocked or frightened or voted (or pummeled?) into retreat, “a genuine aristoi might arise… through a kind of Aristotelian habituation in virtue” (p. 185). This new aristoi, in the midst of the ruins of a liberal order whose collapse had been accelerated through decisive action, would theoretically be capable of modeling for the people their proper role, and thus enabling an eventual return to the mixed constitution of the few and the many which the classical tradition elaborated. 

The dangerous potential--and to those who share his traditionalist conservative sentiments, the dangerous appeal--of Deneen’s epic, revolutionary theory of regime change is thus pretty obvious. It has been standard for radicals of various stripes, infuriated by the economic inequality, the bureaucratic incivility, and/or the juridical injustice of so much of the liberal capitalist state as it emerged over the 20^th century, to call for either a retreat from or revolt against it. The kind of “conservatism” that has historically emphasized the virtues of community (which, it must be remembered, is as often found on the left as the right) frequently opts to express its radicalism via retreat--that is, via turning towards the patient tending to of one’s own democratic, collective space, conscious of the harms which more systematic aspirations often involve. Hence the localist spirit of so many animated by these concerns, whether it be Wendell Berry’s defense of regional food systems, Bill Mckibben’s push for genuine (not corporate-subsidizing) energy independence, or a hundred other examples. But Deneen’s Regime Change, with its calls for revolutionary change, shifts away from such patient work--which, therefore, also suggests that the postliberal shift may be (as Adam Smith intuited in a recent Front Porch Republic essay) a shift away from localist concerns entirely. And to my mind, that means, inevitably and frustratingly, a shift away from actual democracy as well.

Deneen has elsewhere written thoughtfully—though I also think somewhat tendentiously—about the “crisis of democracy,” asserting that the turn to a framework of moral pluralism and pragmatism in the social sciences in the 20^th century resulted in an “institutionalized relativism,” which itself could only result in attacks upon the “absolutism” present in “the mass of humanity who retained conservative beliefs due to unexamined prejudice or hostility to change.” Deneen’s understanding of pluralism in this particular case could be seriously contested, but leaving that aside, just consider his focus: he sees a crisis not relevant to democratic practices and procedures, but rather pertaining to the beliefs of the demos (though not the whole people, however defined: only “subcultures” of it). Deneen’s concern is apparently with the demos, the people, as a category which holds certain beliefs, not with how (or to what degree, or even if) the people, whatever their beliefs, actually govern themselves, which is the usual meaning of “democracy”--that is, rulership by the people.

Regime Change does lay out a positive vision of the demos, defending “the wisdom of the people,” and showing how liberalism—including both the individualism which produced mass democracy and the materialism which produced post-Industrial Revolution liberal capitalism—has tended to marginalize the virtuous capacities of, and undermine the sustaining social conditions of, communities of people in the name of “progress.” (Deneen’s reading of John Stuart Mill is particularly intriguing here.) But that positive vision depends upon the persuasiveness of his affirmations regarding the source of that wisdom, and that persuasiveness is lacking. He does not deny that what he various calls “the people,” “the working class,” or “the many” are currently in bad shape, writing that “[r]eams of statistics demonstrate that they are far less likely to exhibit certain kinds of virtues related to marriage, family, work, and criminality than the ‘elites’ that they often disdain” (p. 17). But that data does not stop him from constantly hypothesizing about their traditionalist potential, speaking repeatedly of the “instinctual conservatism of the commoners,” who “tend not to view the world as fungible launching pads, but rather, one of inherited homes” (pp. x, 60). (He holds out hope that they are “potentially more numerous” than their hypothesized opposites as well—p. 159).

Repeated incantations, however, are not arguments. Millions of voters (though not a majority) supporting Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 is hardly dispositive support for his insistence upon the immanent existence in the United States of what he curiously calls a “nonaspirant” demos: a people collectively longing for an elite to, through their governing behavior, situate and contextualize and thus perhaps validate their presumably stable routines. As regards those routines, he waxes agrarian in depicting them: “grounded in the realities of a world of limits…in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tides, sun and stars” (pp. 27, 23). His repeated formulation of the masses as being perversely victimized by elites who present the “remnants of traditional belief and practice… [that inform] the worldview of the working class” as the views of society’s true oppressors (p. 28), makes it clear that (given that a slight but nonetheless real majority of even those Americans lacking a high school diploma consider the legalization of same-sex marriage to have been good for the country, in the same way that a majority of voters with lower incomes voted for Joe Biden in 2020) that the “working class” which Deneen has in mind is probably very much a “subculture” indeed.

That isn’t to deny that a liberal democratic society ought to enable subcultures to organize and collectively articulate their own communal norms (at its root, that's what any and every "populist" movement, from the People's Party to Occupy Wall Street, have always been about). The atomization inherent to liberal capitalism absolutely should be resisted, and there are important ways in which the organization of local and regional democratic practices and procedures, as both socialist and subsidiarian thinkers have argued, can help accomplish those ends. (It is perplexing that when it comes to the actual political organization of the demos, Deneen gives almost no thought to cities or counties or states; he is critical of what he sees as liberalism's tendency to breakdown "the onetime solidarity of subnational communities," but nonetheless his national conservatism basically leaps from the family and neighborhood--with a nod to the communitarian truth of Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village" manta--to the nation-state and the international society beyond--pp. 221, 225-226).)

While even just thinking of the American demos as simply national, Deneen’s recommendations for establishing a foundation for his theorized revival of a true mixed constitution between the few and the many—such as increasing the scope of democratic representation by expanding size of the House of Representatives, or strengthening the power of labor by putting workers’ councils on the same level as corporate boards when it comes to determining company policies and wages, or dramatically mixing the American people across regional and class differences by re-instituting the draft (pp. 168-171, 173-174)—include many excellent suggestions that would promote civic strength and identity, and thus counter the less democratic elements of our current order. But the content of that civic identity—which is, today, profoundly urban and pluralistic—is simply not what Deneen imagines it to be. Nor will it be, not unless his revolutionary aspirations actually include using state power to forcefully inculcate inegalitarian attitudes upon the people, which isn’t something he ever mentions. (He does allows that, in the midst of other imagined, Machiavellian disruptions, “forms of legislation that promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption, should be considered,” but as during a recent debate Deneen participated in alongside Diedre McCloskey, a widely respected transgender economist, he demurred from voicing specifics as to what those forms should be—p. 181). 

In the end, I think that if Deneen wants the demos to find his theory of regime change at all plausible, his articulation of it should show less uncomplicated assurance in the enduring accuracy of what Aristotle, Polybius, or Aquinas wrote about the culture of “the many” in the centuries before the rise of industrial technology, mass consumerism, and urban patterns of life made possible the movement of yeomen into a professional, specialized middle-class, and more explorations of the way that a constitutional order beyond our own would address the demands for greater democratic and socio-economic empowerment. Because such demands are there. As John Médaille observed as part of a response to Deneen years ago, “culture is downstream from breakfast,” and it was the demand for breakfast—not just the ability to obtain it, but also the ability to make decisions about how and where and with whom one should be able to obtain it—which truly gave birth to liberal modernity, far more than John Locke’s philosophical abandonment of the classical mixed constitution. Locke’s ideas, and those of subsequent liberals, arguably served the needs of those seeking breakfast quite poorly in the long-run, making it increasingly easy, over the centuries, for an individualism which prioritized efficiency over community, and progress over common sense, to warp our understanding of the democratic authority which the people came to believe should be equally shared among all breakfast-seekers. But that warping cannot be simply wiped away, much less mocked or frightened or voted (or pummeled?) into hiding by the potential threat of some angry mob.

Deneen’s epic, dangerous, anti-egalitarian theory shows great love for “community,” but it is a love which places the demos of the community on a pedestal, presenting their supposedly static traditions and routines as enacted beliefs that will inspire and guide the governing elite, but which denies them any formal ability to make decisions for themselves, or at least not any beyond what Deneen calls “the slow accumulation and sedimentation of norms and practices over time” (p. 132). Deneen has always been suspicious of overly romantic, quasi-religious idealizations of democracy, preferring instead what he once called “democratic realism.” Well, democratic realism has to include, I think, dealing with the people as they actually and presently exist, in all their busy, urban, depressing, glorious, subcultural plurality. Nothing in Regime Change suggests that Deneen places himself in the position of the East German apparatchik mocked in Bertolt Brecht’s famed poem "Die Lösung": Would it not be easier….To dissolve the people / And elect another? Still, one hopes that he will make the effort, in subsequent writing, to make it clear that any postliberal readers who draws that unfortunately not unreasonable conclusion from his book are in the wrong.

On Latimer, Localism, Liberalism, and Democracy

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Trevor Latimer’s Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism deeply engaged me, but not in a positive way, at least not initially. As one already inclined to respond defensively to his j’accuse against localism (one which he levels because, in his view, “localism can do and has done real harm to real people”—p. 15), I admit I found the book, despite its occasional strong arguments, too much like a meandering whine. Basically, it seemed as though that Latimer had decided—on the basis of a good deal of anecdotal observation but little systematic assessment—that American society is suffering from an “idolatry of localism” (p. 229), and was annoyed by it. His disparate responses to that supposed idolatry in turn annoyed me.

Fortunately, I then read Adam Smith’s much more complimentary take on Latimer’s work, and that gave me pause. Not because Smith's review of the book provided persuasive support for Latimer’s anti-localist assertions, but because Smith found in his arguments an occasion to rethink why he, or I, or anyone so inclined, might identify with localism in the first place. And such rethinking is always helpful, because localism is admittedly a strange beast—it can be understood (as Latimer observes—p. 25) as a theory, an idea, a doctrine, an ideology, a phenomenon, an activity, and/or a process, and hence requires much critical thought. And Smith’s particular rethinking is more clarifying about the project of localism than Latimer’s criticisms of it.

Latimer’s criticisms are, I think, very much a product of his self-confessed pragmatic, and therefore unavoidably utilitarian, individualism. He insists that his explicitly “consequentialist and welfarist” perspective isn’t necessarily utilitarian, in the sense that he allows that the consequences of any particular policy or position should be judged on the basis of more than simple utility; when it comes to assessing the welfare of persons, “complex values count too.” But it’s not clear to me just what the “complexity” of those values might consist of, since the notion of assessing the consequences of any given policy or position on the basis of anything other than that welfare which can be materially observed or surveyed in the lives of specific individuals is simply irrelevant to his analysis. Quoting the philosopher T.M. Scanlon, he dismisses any reasons or values “that are not tied to the well-being, claims, or states of individuals in any particular position” (pp. 15-16). No res publica, no commonweal, no public interest for him (though he will make use of the latter term when it suits him, only without any kind of communitarian framework that might give it a moral or philosophical heft).

Consequently, the definition of localism that Latimer reiterates throughout the book—”prioritizing the local by making decisions, exercising authority, or implementing policy locally or more locally” (p. 27)—is always employed in terms of the practical benefits which it may or may not provide to particular individuals. This makes it impossible for Latimer to accurately assess, or even to really fully acknowledge, what seems to me a key component of localism, however construed: the philosophical anthropology that builds upon the kind of love which human beings routinely have, and in localist thinking normatively ought to be able to have, for those people and those natural and social forms and patterns and practices most immediate to their lives.

The love of, or the affection for, or the attachment to, the particular that I’m talking about is grounded in our existence as physically embodied creatures, whose awareness of and reflection upon the world can never be (at least until the transhumanist revolution, and maybe not even then) entirely separated from the tactile and the sensory and the circumscribed. Given this historical—even evolutionary—reality, developing an affection for one’s physical and social environs, for one’s place and one’s community, for a context that is both materially present and publicly knowable, has been recognized (and not just by convinced defenders of localist political arrangements) as constitutive of our persons and of our capacity to publicly act and reason and create and judge, in a way unlike any other pedagogical or experiential development.

This classically republican insight into the nature of human beings and human sociality is, admittedly, not always well articulated by those drawn to localism, perhaps in part because many localists grasp at it as a political foil for liberal modernity and not because of any deep civic commitment to local communities as a moral reference point. (This idea is well-addressed in Smith’s review.) Whatever the superficial motivation involved, however, this kind of thinking, with its emphasis upon the ties between local knowledge, local attachments, and human virtue that we can find in Aristotle and Wendell Berry and a thousand thinkers in between, is I suspect nearly always nonetheless assumed by all those—call them “conservatives,” whether left-leaning or otherwise—who recognize that a world circumscribed solely by rationally derived principles of the self or law or the market provides fewer and fewer spaces for such development. That Latimer does not engage with this thinking, preferring to stipulate a “normative individualism” instead, limits much of his philosophical and policy analysis (p. 109).

True, Latimer mentions both Aristotle and Berry (as well as many other localist and communitarian thinkers), but primarily only in two chapters of the book, those addressing arguments for localism (as he understands them, at least) from “belonging” and from “nature.” Some of those critiques are solid, directly posing challenges to the philosophical anthropology of localism, and thus should give localists pause. But many others go frustratingly awry. His attack on belonging boils down to an attack on the partiality which such attachments involve, while his attack on nature denies that there is any moral valence to natural sentiments anyway. In both cases, by working from within his welfarist and individualist frame, Latimer fails to fully grasp what it is localists are even talking about when they focus on the particular, and hence most of his arguments never fully connect.

Consider his attack upon the common localist concern with the size of those communities within which we live. He asserts that those who point out that large, complicated agglomerations of people are an unnatural site for the aforementioned development are confused: even if it is the case that certain elements of human nature are resistant to bigness, nonetheless “it is human nature to exceed itself” (p. 112). Leaving aside the potentially problematic implications of that assumption, it is striking that the size of a sphere of civic action and potential attachment is for Latimer relevant solely in terms of its level of welfare-provision. Berry’s articulation of affection as a virtue at least partly bound up with sticking to a definable place and a knowable people, or Aristotle’s insistence upon a definable polis or patria as crucial to the virtuous telos of the human being, make no appearance in Small Isn’t Beautiful, and that is no small oversight.

The idea of affectionate, tactile, even routine civic belonging, so crucial to the case that bounded communities and neighborhoods and other localities make for themselves, is cast by Latimer into a cost-benefit analysis as to whether one may justly “prioritize one’s own locale”—which, again, is for him wholly a matter of whether that prioritization will contribute to the material flourishing of disaggregated individuals. Since some localities enjoy resources and levels of social trust greater than others, justice might demand “that residents of flourishing communities disfavor their own communities and instead favor struggling locales” (p. 71). In support of this judgment, he asserts that being “agent neutral” is simply “a fundamental commitment of modernity,” which is an odd assertion, considering how elsewhere he dismisses “commonsense morality” as insufficient without supportive reasons to believe it (pp. 68-69).

To actually spell out the problem here in his own language: it is, I believe, simply an anthropological reality of human sociality that the community-building “favors” which individuals provide to and receive from their localities—the taxes paid and the governmental services and programs received, obviously, but also the volunteering, the civic participation, the local commercial activity, the pride, the social interaction and involvement, and so much more—cannot be regarded as discreet bundles of individual acts. Rather, they are all tied up with an affective and collective character formation process. But this claim is illegible in Latimer’s analysis; for him affection, like any utility, must be fungible. If one prioritizes that set of relationships closest to where one lives, simply because they are the relationships one knows best, then you are acting in a “morally suspect” way: “we are not entitled to beggar thy neighbor” he insists, weirdly reading the feeling of local attachment as a zero-sum drain upon all inputs that human beings may make to one another (p 75). He quotes Adam Smith’s classic insistence upon the importance of sacrificing private interest for that of the public (though his presumption that “private” equals “local” and “public” equals “non-local” is neither explained nor defended), acknowledges that Smith also insisted that universal cares “can never be an excuse for neglecting the more humble department,” but then quickly insists that “the critic of localism hardly demands ‘neglect' [of the local]’’ (p. 77). Why the same can’t be said for advocates of localism who might well also care about various universals is not explained.

Latimer is not wrong in noting that, to the extent one can identify specific prioritizations which really are zero-sum—city and county governments taking tax dollars away from more general funds so as to lure corporations and employers away from other localities with tax incentives and write-offs, all in the name of local development, for example—the arguments for them are extremely poor. In these cases and others like it, Latimer’s attack on local attachments are on point: some localists do indeed present communities as “unstructured, undifferentiated blobs” (though far fewer in my experience than seems to be the case for him), and by so doing make principled arguments about the need for nested, federal arrangements more complicated than they need to be; similarly, his use of critical political geography against simplistic conceptions of subsidiarity should be taken to heart, allowing us to see that, in certain matters, a fetishization of spatiality in thinking about decision-making can only “confuse and distract” (pp. 94, 111). But it is frustrating that such legitimate, pointed criticisms are used to prop up a broad, often internally inconsistent attack on what is, fundamentally, a deep and complex aspect of human history and anthropology—one that, at different points in the text, Latimer seems willing to acknowledge the reality of anyway, which at the very least made me wonder just where his annoyance with localism truly rests.

Other chapters of the book, addressing arguments for localism dealing with “tyranny,” “knowledge,” and “efficiency,” generally do not go as deep into the philosophical forest, and thus end up missing fewer trees. As regards localism as a response to the threat of tyranny, Latimer helpfully distinguishes between the centralization and concentration of governing power and correctly points out that localism is “a response to centralization, a special kind of concentration of power, not concentration as such” (p. 63). His claim that localism and centralization are parallel vices is weak, though; stipulating that moving away from centralization and towards localism invites fragmentation and anarchy requires at least as much argument as he gives to the problem of concentration, and that he doesn’t provide.

As regards localism as a response to the problem of knowledge, he freely grants the insights of such thinkers as F.A. Hayek and James Scott and allows that local knowledge is often essential to effectively serving the welfare of individuals—as he puts it, “that local governments and local people have an indispensable role to play in policy development and implementation” (p. 161). But he also insists such an argument is obvious today, and that localists go too far in insisting that the remote collection of knowledge and perspectives by non-local agents and the centralized processing of such does not change it or compromise its integrity, which makes me curious to understand Latimer’s theories of bureaucracy or knowledge, or if he has any.

And as regards localism and the argument from efficiency, Latimer probably makes his strongest points against much localist rhetoric; too often localists assume administrative centralization (which would be the aforementioned processes of handling local knowledge) and governmental centralization (which would be the scaling up of fundamental political decision-making) are identical, but they are not. To use examples particular to the United States, the power to administratively experiment, which has historically been embraced by those who celebrate the power of states (such as under some readings of the 10^th Amendment), could be extended further to local counties and cities (such as under the principle of Home Rule and the Cooley Doctrine), without compromising the federal settlement under the Supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. He notes that “policy experimentation requires [administrative] initiative but not [governmental] immunity” (p. 191), and he’s not wrong.   

That leaves Latimer’s chapter on localism and the argument for “democracy,” which I think is the densest and most frustrating of all of his engagements with his topic, and also the one which brings me back around to Smith’s perceptive comments on what Latimer’s attacks on localism reveal about the thinking of many localists themselves. The density and frustration comes from the way Latimer conflates a large variety of admittedly difficult arguments that have been made over the millennia about democratic rule, lining them up against localist conceptions of democracy in a somewhat arbitrary manner. The connection to Smith’s comments come from the way Latimer’s anti-localism—unavoidably, I think—makes use of common anti-democratic tropes about the presumed divisiveness and injustice of democratic participation. As Smith admirably confesses, perhaps certain localists are wrong in assuming that democratically empowering people within their spatial divisions will lead to preferred outcomes; as he put it,  perhaps some localists “smuggle our opinions about what should be decided into our statements about who should decide.”

To select a few of Latimer’s multiple overlapping arguments, he claims that, assuming one accepts the democratic legitimacy of electoral representation, questions of spatial proximity and size ignore “system effectiveness”—after all, while citizens “in large communities are less likely to influence decisions…those decisions are more consequential and more likely to be translated into outcomes” (p. 124). Hopefully, even those resistant to communitarian or republican ideas will recognize that making “consequentialness” solely a function of how many individuals are effected by a decision in total, ignoring entirely the affective dimension of that democratic empowerment which emerges when citizens are able to make decisions within their own communities, however humble or limited, is contestable at the very least.

Similarly contestable—and, in fairness, Latimer allows that his arguments regarding democratic participation are “less sure-footed” that his others (p. 127)—is the data he employs on the rates of local incumbent re-election, or on local media consumption, or on the social position of local activists, or on the convolutedness of local decision-making boards, all to suggest that arguments which tie localism and democracy together merely assume what they claim to support: the existence of a democratic local political culture. And it is exactly that kind of localist culture of politics—a culture which demands, in Latimer’s words, that governments be “more accountable to their [meaning, that localities’] citizens” (p. 147)—that Smith admits that, just maybe, many who call themselves localists don’t actually want. Why? I suspect primarily because prioritizing civic and democratic formation cannot be predictably tied to any particular policy outcome--especially not, as the localities in question often reflect progressive ideas characteristic of urban communities, illiberal ones.

People are urbanizing across the globe; changing technologies of commerce, information, finance, and communication have been making that inevitable for many decades. There are many reasons to think critically about the cultural and economic consequences of this characteristic of late modernity; as FPR readers in particular ought to be quick acknowledge, the agrarian critique should be made part of any localist (and therefore republican or communitarian—and I would say also socialist) one as well. But as Smith observes, for some localists the frustration is that local democracy in urban settings often contravenes the preferred outcomes of many of those who had embraced jurisdictional arguments for localism primarily because they'd assumed that their preferences would find greater support “in the country and the small towns” stereotypically association with localist politics. He thus asks: “to what extent are we localists, and to what extent are we postliberals, and to what extent are these positions compatible?” It’s a good question and---for left-leaning localist writers like myself, who have occasionally wondered why some longstanding advocates of localism seem uninterested in the classical republican literature when it comes to working out the implications of local democratic empowerment in our increasingly urbanized world---a revealing one.

Latimer has his vision: it is the maximization of measurable individual welfare. Localism is, for him, usually a false path towards achieving that. I think the case he makes has many flaws. But to the extent that his book helps some localist thinkers recognize that a defense of localism should rest not upon aggregate material results but rather upon a recognition of the moral and anthropological value of certain forms of civic engagement and democratic empowerment—and therefore not upon securing anti-urban political victories in various culture war issues—then it deserves praise. Latimer does end his book on a more positive note, hoping to provide “some lessons for localism from a skeptic” (p. 225). Maybe he actually succeeded at this: just in a far more conceptual way than he—or I, upon my first reading—thought.