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The last three months have been a remarkable time of
political theater in the United States. The attempts by new Republican governors
to cut the pay and benefits of public sector employees and break their unions
were met by mass demonstrations, with over 100,000 angry marchers up in Madison,
Wisconsin, alone. Meanwhile, our politicians in Washington, D.C. have been
unable to craft a budget for the current fiscal year, while the costs of now
three wars in the Middle East, an untouchable and bloated Defense establishment,
massive interest payments on debt, and an unsustainable health care system all
point toward some form of governmental bankruptcy, probably effected through
inflation.
And although the Great Recession of 2008 now appears
to be waning, it did bring to the surface old truths that many had chosen to
forget: the business cycle has not been eliminated; finance capitalism
is by its nature unstable; politically-connected corporations commonly
escape market discipline; and there is nothing conservative about the
“creative destruction” of a capitalist economy.
Indeed, a curious aspect of political labeling in
America has been the conflation of the word “conservative” with the interests of
the great banks and corporations. The problem is an old one. As one
commentator noted in the mid 1930’s, the label “conservative” had then been
thoroughly “discredited,” twisted by the “apostles of plutocracy” into a defense
of “gamblers and promoters.” He continued: “According to this view, [the old
Republican political boss] Mark Hanna was a conservative.” This diagnosis
remains fairly accurate: the “conservative commentator” and rumored
Presidential-candidate Newt Gingrich, for example, is a great admirer of Mr.
Hanna.
I will focus this evening on a different gallery of
American political thinkers and activists. In their deep respect for the
integrity of the human person, in their allegiance to the natural communities of
family and village, in their celebration of the family farm and the independent
shop, in their devotion to private property, and in their reverence for
traditional ways, these figures could be labeled conservative. At the same
time, their commitment to the ideal of economic democracy, their refusal to
treat human labor and relationships as commodities like any other, their
sympathy for the pluralism and peculiarities of small human communities, and
their rejection of imperialism and military adventurism seem more atuned to the
modern progressive label. They have been seekers after a
“Third Way,” a social and economic system that in important respects would be
neither capitalist nor socialist.
In Europe, these seekers included: Great Britain’s
Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, architects of the Distributist program [to
which I will return]; the Russian agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov, who
crafted a remarkable theory of “the Natural Family Economy”; the Bulgarian
peasant leader Alexander Stamboliski, who began to turn his nation into a model
agrarian republic and who co-founded the “Green International” in 1923; Nancy
Eriksson, a Member of Sweden’s Parliament who defended a curious political
movement that might be accurately labeled, “The Desperate Swedish Socialist
Housewives” [I am working on the pilot for TV]; and figures such as Gilbert Dru,
Etienne Gilson, and Wilhelm Roepke, architects of a vibrant mid-20th
Century Christian Democracy that aimed to build a Humane Economy. These
episodes effervesced in events of brilliance and excitement, sometimes reaching
fruition, only to fade in the face of the two main 20th Century
ideological contestants: capitalism and communism.
Tonight, I want to tell you about three American
writers and activists who also have been part of this quest for a Third Way:
Ralph Borsodi; Herbert Agar; and Wendell Berry. I will also suggest ways in
which their examples and ideas may help us understand the recent economic crisis
and point toward an alternate Conservatism for the decades ahead, one combining
a preferential option for the natural family with a more decentralized, human
scale economy and a curtailing of the “national security state.”
First, I turn to the Decentralist Economics of Ralph Borsodi <B-O-R-S-O-D-I>
For 25 years, from 1920 to about 1945, Ralph Borsodi
was one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He had begun his career in
New York City as a consulting economist and advertising expert for several of
America’s leading corporations and trade associations. Borsodi grew
increasingly troubled, though, by what he saw on Madison Avenue. In a series of
books, he traced a change among American companies from a focus on making
products that met consumer needs toward an economy resting on high-pressure
marketing, the manipulation of emotion, and heavy consumer debt. He denounced
especially the new technique of “national advertising”:
[It’s object] is to create
desire. It ignores the question of the necessity for the goods and tries only
to succeed in persuading the public to buy what the advertiser offers.... [The
advertiser] creates...a necessity in the lives of the people that has no
economic or moral basis in fact.
More broadly, he saw modern finance capitalism working
mightily to eliminate the free market. The real “competition” among
corporations, Borsodi said, was a quest “to secure [political] privileges
which enable their possessors to operate outside of the competitive
market.” He indicted not only state-granted franchises and subsidies, but also
licenses, special tariffs, corporate tax breaks, and nationally advertised
trade-marks, all of which – he said – conspired to raise prices, crush
diversity, handicap the small producer, and favor extreme
centralization.
In his best-selling 1928 book This Ugly
Civilization, Borsodi more directly attacked the status of joint-stock
corporations. He emphasized that they were neither a natural nor an inevitable
development. They rested instead on a grant by governments of legal privileges,
ones denied to families and individuals. These privileges included limited
liability; perpetual life; and the ability to issue stock, bonds, and other debt
instruments, which gave corporations huge advantages in raising capital. He
labeled corporate charters “veritable letters of marque,” that is, licenses to
commit economic piracy, commissions “to embark upon the adventure of doing
the investing public with impunity.”
While praising the modern “machine” tool, Borsodi
condemned the “huge” factory as “a steam-age relic rendered obsolete by the
electrical age,” yet sustained in the twentieth century by the regulatory powers
of government. As he wrote, “It is the factory, not the machine, which destroys
both the natural beauty and the natural wealth of man’s environment; which fills
country and city with hideous factories and squalid slums,” and which robs “men,
women, and children of their contact with the soil” and “familiarity with the
actual making of things.” He added: “Against the family...the factory wages a
ruthless war of extermination.... Industrialism seeks to root out individual
devotion to the family and the homestead and to replace it with loyalty to the
factory.”
So, what was Borsodi’s alternative? The
working home, the economically functional home, he said, had
to be restored; and this needed to be done in a revived countryside. As he
argued, “Man, no matter how often he has tried to urbanize himself, can only
live like a normal human being in an essentially rural place of residence.”
Setting an example, Borsodi and his family resettled on an abandoned seven-acre
homestead near the Ramapo Mountains, north of New York City. Each family,
Borsodi insisted, must also begin “an adventure in home production,” rooted in
“true organic homesteads.” Gardens, chicken coops, a few cows and pigs,
carpentry workshops, small machine shops, loom rooms: all were necessary in
real family homes, he said. Careful experiments showed that a homestead
equipped with appropriate tools and small-scale machines was more efficient in
producing three-quarters of the products that a family home would need.
In a way, Borsodi and his wife also invented modern
home-schooling. “When I compared Mrs. Borsodi to the average school-teacher in
the public schools,” he wrote, “I saw no reason why she could not teach the
children just as well, if not better.” They brought their children home, and
found that this “experiment in domestic production”—as he put it—also
proved superior to schooling organized on a factory model. Two hours a day of
course work, it turned out, was all it took for the Borsodi boys to keep pace
with their public school counterparts.
In 1933, Borsodi launched his School of Living to
teach others how to build their own home, make furniture, tend a garden, care
for poultry and dairy animals, operate a loom, and conduct a small family
business. Thousands attended and Borsodi Homesteads mushroomed across the
American countryside.
My Second Character in this tale
is Herbert Agar.
<A-G-A-R>
The son of a prominent corporate attorney in New
York City, Agar had an Ivy League education, including a Ph.D. in History from
Princeton University. In 1928, circumstances led him to England where he joined
the editorial staff of G.K.’s Weekly, the journal owned and edited
by the prominent English writer G.K. Chesterton. Here, Agar drank deeply from
the well of Distributist ideas. Briefly, this idea-system was rooted in a
rejection of socialism as immoral and unjust. It rejected as well modern
capitalism, which – the Distributists said – tended toward monopoly and toward a
peculiar alliance of the great corporations with government: what Chesterton
called “The Business Government”; or what his collaborator Hilaire Belloc called
“The Servile State.” According to Belloc, The Servile State existed when
productive property was concentrated in a few hands and when most adults gained
their livelihood strictly from a wage, tied in turn to government benefits, or
the welfare state.
As Chesterton framed the matter, the Distributist
alternative rested on the premises that public life exists to defend private
life, that property secures liberty, and that [quote] “all political and social
efforts must be devoted to securing the good of the family.” Put another way,
the Distributists held that private property in a home, some acres of land, and
basic tools were so important that every responsible family should have
them. Again, this broad distribution of property was the Distributists’ answer
to both the so-called “wage slavery” of monopoly capitalism and its close
partner, the welfare state. Chesterton was also a fierce foe of British
imperialism. Adventures abroad, he believed, always came at the expense of the
common people at home; local communities would be sacrificed to globalist
dreams.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his first
book, The People’s Choice, Agar returned to America. He wrote a
long article in 1934 entitled “The Task for Conservatism.” Applying
Distributist analysis to the American setting, Agar – the historian – sought to
renew the “Conservative” label by appealing to “an older America,” a time when
there was “virtue in and a moral plan for the nation.”
Central to this plan, Agar insisted, was “[t]he
widest possible distribution of property.” To some of the nation’s Founders,
notably Thomas Jefferson, “this meant agrarianism,” or self-sufficient farming.
To others, such as John Adams, “this meant an interdependent community” of
farmers and modest merchants, with government maintaining the balance. All the
American founders, Agar argued, held that “a wide diffusion of property...made
for enterprise, for family responsibility, and in general for institutions that
fit man’s nature and that give a chance for a desirable life.”
But America had lost its way, Agar said, becoming
“the victim of economic determinism.” The natural wealth of the nation in
conjunction with the industrial revolution had intensified “the normal human
temptation to sacrifice ideals for money,” lifting “the rewards for a successful
raid on society to dangerous heights.” Finally, the political franchise had
been expanded at the very moment when “the temptation to plunder was growing
irresistible,” opening up the system to a form of mob rule, guided by the
plutocrats. By 1914, Agar argued, the American finance capitalists no longer
needed an agricultural surplus for export, and they planned the coup de grace
for the independent farmer. Indeed, Agar said, the “Coolidge prosperity” of the
1920s masked the devastation of private property in rural areas, as small farms
failed by the tens of thousands.
Could the situation be reversed? Agar thought it
possible that trends had gone too far in the wrong direction: [quote] “If
Americans have come to believe that a wage is the same thing as freedom; if they
prefer such a wage, with its appearance of security, to the
obvious danger and responsibilities of ownership, then they cannot be saved from
the servitude which awaits them.” Yet he concluded that a “redistribution of
property” could still be accomplished; this was “the root of a real conservative
policy for the United States.” The ownership of land, a home, machine-shop,
small store, and/or a share of “some necessarily huge machine” needed to become
the normal thing, to set the moral tone for society. This would make “for
stability in family and community life, for responsibility, for enterprise” and
for all the other virtues which had been sacrificed to “an unclean monopoly.”
Along with Belloc, Agar agreed that this goal was not in line with existing
economic trends: “It must be produced artificially and then guarded by
favorable legislation.” But there was little choice: “Either we restore
property, or we restore slavery,” through the servile state which waited at the
end of monopoly capitalism’s work.
In 1937, Agar, Borsodi, and others of a similar
frame of mind launched the remarkable monthly journal, Free America.
The lead editorial in the first issue defined the journal as “the meeting ground
for those who are equally opposed to finance – capitalism, communism and
fascism.” The editors recognized “a fundamental community of aim in the Borsodi
Homestead Movement, the Southern Agrarians [at Vanderbilt University] and their
allied Distributist Groups throughout the country, the consumer Cooperative
Movement, the Catholic Rural Life Conference, [and] certain of the Protestant
rural life organizations.” In housing, the goal was to build “the
owner-occupied home of the free man,” where “living and producing a livelihood
are welded into an harmonious whole.” Among its projects, the journal ran an
architectural contest for new designs of a “productive home”; it received over
500 entries. Contributor Louis Bromfield, himself a Pulitzer Prize winning
novelist, set the broader tone for Free America. He called
industrialism the source of “a vicious and Hellish puzzle,” with agrarianism as
the cure: “A piece of land for every family is the soundest of all bulwarks [of
liberty]; indeed it is the ultimate one.”
My third figure—the one you may
know—is Wendell Berry.
Like Chesterton, a poet, novelist, and
essayist, Wendell Berry is the most important American writing today in the
agrarian tradition. Born in Kentucky, he still resides there with his wife
Tanya on a small farm overlooking the Ohio River.
The word most commonly associated with Wendell Berry
is “community”; and he does give this often mangled term a fresh and vigorous
meaning. In one exemplary essay entitled, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and
Community,” Berry provides a formal definition of “community” as “the
commonwealth and common interests, commonly understood, of people living
together in a place and wishing to continue to do so”; and also as “a
locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local
economy, and local nature.”
According to Berry, the “beloved community” makes
claims that commonly trump the freedom of the individual. Individual rights and
the satisfaction of individual desires “are limited by human nature, by human
community and by the nature of the places in which we live.” This membership is
“that company of friends” that gives pleasure and meaning to individual lives.
Even the landscape becomes marked by paths connecting households, a commerce of
shared affection, trust, bounty, and work. Indeed, the true community becomes
an almost living thing, a network for communicating news and gossip, part of a
village’s “ever-continuing conversation about itself.”
Most good communities have shared characteristics,
Berry maintains. They live by a “precarious interplay of effort and grace.”
They can “enforce decency without litigation,” using techniques such as shunning
and emotions such as shame to influence individual behavior. The vital
community also rests on the natural economy of altruism, solving its challenges
“by non-monetary exchanges of help,” not by buying things. Such living
communities create people of superior moral worth: “Persons of character are
not [governmental] products. They are made by local cultures, local
responsibilities.”
Berry summons up the powerful metaphor of the Dance
to describe the good community, where the members would gather “in the immortal
ring, the many-in-one.” As the fictional Andy Catlett explains: “He has heard
the tread of his own people dancing in the ring, the fiddle measuring time to
them, a voice calling them, through the steps of change and absence, home
again.”
Yet, in Berry’s mind, the modern world threatens and
corrupts such true community. Berry points to the current commercial order as a
sinister force. He writes: “As the salesmen, saleswomen, advertisers, and
propagandists of the industrial economy have become more ubiquitous and more
adept at seduction, communities have lost the loyalty and affection of their
members.” Neither conservative nor liberal defends any longer “the economic
integrity of the household or the community,” which are the mainstays of family
life. He notes that under a “conservative” President, Ronald Reagan, the
American economy, “which once required the father to work away from home – a
development that was bad enough – now requires the mother to work away from
home, as well.”
Modern war also erodes true community. As one of
Berry’s fictional characters, Jayber Crow, describes Word War II: “This new
war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against
people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it will make the
world worse.... The dark inhuman monstrous thing comes and tramples the little
towns and never even knows their names.” The true world of vital communities is
“a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be.” And, indeed,
Wendell Berry has been a leading critic of America’s wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan… and I suspect he is none too happy about Lybia, as well. He sees
them as wars of empire, paid for (disproportionately) with the blood, treasure,
and integrity of America’s remaining small places.
[pause]
Some would dismiss Borsodi, Agar, and Berry,
together with Europeans such as Chesterton and Chayanov, as hopeless romantics,
with their ideas and arguments irrelevant to modern times. I would reply that
agrarian and distributist analysis had in the 20th Century important
policy consequences and that it may also offer insight into the events of the
last two and a half years.
Relative to past influence, several projects
launched by the American New Dealers during the 1930’s had Distributist roots,
ranging from the Subsistence Homestead Program to the Housing Act of 1934.
After World War II, the British Conservative Party adapted large portions of the
Distributist platform, pledging to create a nation of property owners – as an
alternative to the Labour Party’s welfare state. Down in Australia, the
Democratic Labor Party, which featured a “model Distributist program,” held the
balance of political power for 20 critical years, starting in the 1950’s.
How might agrarians and distributists view our
current situation? Let’s start with Fanny Mae and its cousin Freddie Mac –
mortgage companies that privatized executive pay and profit while socializing
risk and loss. These could be seen as splendid examples of a Business
Government at Work.
The concept of Business Government may also explain
the preference shown these days by both American and European governments for
so-called “public-private partnerships,” cozy arrangements for the relatively
few “owners” and “leaders” who effortlessly move between both sides of the
partnership, reaping rewards either way, while the majority of people struggles
along.
Back in the 1920’s, Distributists noted how owners
of the great corporations had themselves abandoned free-market economics.
Instead of believing that if men were left to bargain individually the public
would automatically benefit, the corporate leaders now pleaded with workers not
to strike “in the interests of the public.” Chesterton commented: “The only
original case for capitalism collapses entirely, if we have to ask either party
to go on for the good of the public.” Instead, he said that “ordinary
conservatives are falling back” on Communist arguments “without knowing it.”
Over the last 30 months, the American government’s remarkable takeovers of the
insurance giant A.I.G. and auto legend General Motors appear to have been a
similar repudiation of free market capitalism, in favor of an arrangement not
quite socialism either: but a form of Business Government that serves primarily
the well-off and the well-connected.
Indeed, this model of Business Government could
explain other global developments. For instance, we might see this victorious
system in contemporary Russia, where “Mafia capitalism” and state-favored oil
and gas companies have grown among former KGB agents and their ilk, to create a
class proudly self-labelled “the oligarchs.” Meanwhile, a crude welfare state
inherited from the Communist time sustains the wage-earning Russian.
Journey to China, and there you may find still
another iteration of the Business Government at work. Western corporations have
moved their production lines to the Peoples’ Republic, where an authoritarian
regime – a reliable Business Government – keeps the laborers cheap, docile, and
strike free. Indeed, in 2002, the Communist Party of China actually invited
capitalists to join its ranks, cementing another kind of partnership.
Distributists and agrarians actually predicted long ago this merger of
Capitalism and Communism, finding it to be the logical consequence of a shared
materialistic world-view.
Critics of
Agrarianism and Distributism have argued that this social-economic scheme lacks
specific policy ideas. The charge is unfair. From Belloc and Chesterton to
Wendell Berry, they have advanced clear ideas for building a property state,
where giant economic institutions would be cut down to a human scale and where
all responsible families would own a home, productive land or small shop,
and garden. Specifics have included:
• To greatly expand
home ownership by families, mobilize “the credit of the community”
through locally-controlled, cooperative credit unions to
enable “private ownership of houses and small plots just outside our great urban
centers.”
• To break up
monopoly corporations, legally support the extension of profit sharing and
ownership to workers’ associations.
• To break up the
financial trusts, mobilize prosecutors to enforce laws banning loan-sharking and
fraud. In addition, put would-be monopolists violating anti-trust laws in
prison, because “private property ought to be protected against public crime.”
• To restore the
small shop, use differential taxation against chain or “big box” stores
(aiming at no more than a dozen shops per corporation).
• To redistribute
land and other properties, tax real estate contracts “so as to discourage
the sale of small property to big proprietors and encourage the breakup of big
property among small proprietors.”
• To decentralize
industry, cheapen electricity through expanded access grids “which might
lead to many little workshops.”
• To encourage
agrarian resettlement, the small family farm “must be privileged as against the
diseased society around it.”
• To restore
craftsmen, subsidize “the small artisan at the expense of Big Business.”
• To defend the poor
against the great, provide the former free legal services.
• To decentralize
transportation, end government monopolies of public transportation, discourage
the railroads, and favor the automobile.
• To encourage
families, provide generous tax relief to parents according to number of
children.
• And to encourage
urban home ownership, “there ought to be a simple rule: every [rental] lease
should automatically contain the power of purchase by installment.”
One may find these ideas
misguided or wrong; yet they do offer specifics and point to a society neither
Capitalist nor Socialist.
How might this policy
orientation be applied to our current financial and political situation? Good
Distributists would take the opportunity, I think:
• To break up, prudently, the great, politically-favored banks;
• To sharply restrict the revolving door between regulated banks and
corporations and the regulatory agencies;
• To focus mortgage lending on small, locally controlled Credit Unions and
savings banks (such as the pre-1981 American “Savings and Loans”);
• To replace welfare benefits with opportunities for property ownership and
the creation of “children’s trusts.”
• To limit direct and indirect mortgage subsidies – including tax benefits
– to only one residence per family (disallowing them on “second” or vacation);
• To let bankruptcy courts divvy up failed, albeit politically favored
corporations;
• To move toward a modest, uniform protective tariff;
• To send to prison those white-collar criminals who have violated the
public trust through fraud;
• To redirect farm subsidies ($20 Billion annually in the USA) away from
large agri-businesses toward the encouragement of small, general purpose farms
(with the quid pro quo that families receiving assistance would open their
properties to visiting school children, and so on);
• To loosen zoning laws and other restrictive covenants so as to allow
greater use of family homes as places of work and production for market (e.g.,
telecommuting and professional offices);
• To make credit available, at favored rates, to new family businesses and
other micro-enterprises;
• To impose a progressive corporate income tax on retail giants;
• To improve both the highway and internet systems; and
• To focus tax relief on families with dependent children.
This policy platform
rests on two pillars: trust in widely distributed private property as
the safeguard of liberty and democracy; and faith in the natural family
economy as humane and just. Could this be the next Conservatism?
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