There is a kind of conservatism that is against big business, as well as big government. It looks for decentralization of power across the board, favoring local communities and families. It prefers small businesses to big corporations. It opposes what modernity, post-modernity, untrammeled technology, and laissez faire capitalism can do to destroy traditional values and institutions. It is the conservatism of Edmund Burke and Wendell Berry, rather than that of today’s Republican party. A brand new website is devoted to this political and economic philosophy: Front Porch Republic.
My colleague Mark Mitchell contributes, as does “crunchy-con” Rod Dreher, and other thoughtful folks. (And our Stewart designed the site!) This is from the “about” section:
The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.
Does this sound promising?
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