I recently left for a week in the Rocky Mountains to get away from the Washington, D.C. swamp. There’s only so long one can pretend to idolize Robert Mueller, or to listen as a co-worker gushes about some new Ted Talk about women’s health in Africa.
And yet, when I got to my destination and sat down in a bar most known for its country music, I found this message on my menu:
We are committed to a diverse, inclusive, and truly great America. That’s why, every time you order our new “Pa’s Special” Hard Iced Tea, we will donate $2 to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I had been to this same town and same bar before, as recently as 2015. It was then and remains now a pleasant town, full of bright little stores selling western landscape watercolors, artisanal olive oils, and quirky clothes for dogs.
But in the mere two and a half years since then, the cultural ground has shifted. Now, the coffee shop plasters its walls with smiling pictures of Bernie Sanders and Nelson Mandela. “Fuck Trump” and “No Place for Hate” signs hang outside otherwise welcoming businesses staffed by Boomer ladies with close-cropped hair and costume jewelry. A singer in a bar ends his song to shout out praise for illegal immigrants. And so on.
A few years ago, what political friction did exist was barely noticeable, and could be pushed away in favor of other, more naturally relevant interests, like a shared love of the outdoors. Not once in my 2015 visit did politics ever arise; in 2018, the struggle is to avoid it.
Around the same time I returned from this most recent trip, Social Matter reposted an old article, reminding me that the blog The Front Porch Republic still exists. I used to read that site, too, a few years ago. But now, in the age of Trump, the Outer Right, antifa, and democratic socialism, I would have trouble conjuring up a more pointless ideology than one which finds the solution to modern problems in leaving the cities and raising your own pigs. Here I was visiting a largely homogeneous state, where small-town businessmen ostentatiously send a piece of their moderate profits to the Southern Poverty Law Center. You can travel to the heart of America, but you can still find the same types as fill the sociology department at Barnard.
In such a world, what differentiates the small towns from the imperial capital?
Of course, it’s commonplace to note that local culture has been erased. The Internet and social media give people in flyover country access to the same opinions and propaganda as us on the coasts. But even more to the point, these media amplify the establishment’s propaganda to enforce homogeneity well beyond what would otherwise be possible. They are not just propaganda tools; they have become weapons for social control.
Witness the social media hate campaign against Memories Pizza, whose owner opined that she would not cater a gay wedding, if, hypothetically, anyone ever asked her to do so. Most of the people harassing this Walkerton, Indiana-based pizzeria had likely never set foot in Indiana, let alone Memories Pizza itself, located outside the Great Lakes’ region halfway between Chicago and Fort Wayne. But that is meaningless. Our friends on social media can generate likes on their Facebook pages by attacking Christian pizza makers, signaling to their friends and co-workers how closely they adhere to fashionable ideology. They have every social incentive to join the mob, and even to whip up its passions further; doing so will only show how virtuous and right-thinking they are, elevating their status in a culture which has come to value social standing far above the increasingly unreachable economic status signifiers—big houses, jet skis, fancy cars—that tempted our parents.
Bill Kauffman, the godfather of the Front Porch types, will rhapsodize about his hometown baseball team, the Batavia Muckdogs, and its volunteer fire department. To take one of many examples, he wrote:
There are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the world, and the rest of us. The former is a factitious creation whose strange gods include “Sex and the City,” accentless TV anchorpeople, Dick Cheney, Rosie O’Donnell, “Friends,” and the Department of Homeland Security. It is real enough–cross it and you’ll learn more than you want to know about weapons of mass destruction–but it has no heart, no soul, no connection to the thousand and one real Americas that produced Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint Dorothy Day and the Mighty Casey who has struck out.
I am of the other America, the unseen America, the America undreamt of by the foreigners who hate my country without knowing a single thing about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards who made their places live.
That’s laudable, but how long would the Muckdogs last if the national media learned that they banned transgenders from trying out for their team? My guess: about twelve hours of the media spotlight before they back down and conform. And, contra Kauffman, the pressure would not only come from the “televised America” of distant CNN anchors; it would likely come from his own neighbors in Genesee County, who consume the same media, as people in Boise, Idaho, do not want to be seen on the “wrong side of history.” They voted nearly 50-50 to reelect Chuck Schumer to the Senate.
But that is still the comparatively good side of the coin: the natural recalcitrants who are pressured into conformity by the ruling class and its minions. On the other side, there are those places that do not need to be pressured because they already conform—and often in a much more outlandish manner than even the elites themselves.
This phenomenon was on full display last summer when the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, cracked down on the disastrous, misguided Unite the Right rally, though its disastrous nature is beside the analytic point here. The night before the rally, Charlottesville had revoked the organizers’ permit for the event, and was only forced to allow it to proceed after a federal court ordered the city to comply with the First Amendment. It was only after the federal judiciary had boxed Charlottesville into a corner, requiring it to host speeches its anarchist-bookstore-tier residents deplored, that it sought other pretexts to shut the rally down—ultimately by working with the commonwealth to declare a spurious “state of emergency.”
Even worse, after the local police created a state of chaos where real people died, the city began a targeted campaign of retribution against the Right. At the same time, the black “counter-protester” Deandre Harris was just found not guilty by a state judge, bypassing the need for a jury trial, even though video shows Harris committing the exact assault he was accused of. (Also confirmed in a report that the city itself commissioned (at page 137)).
All of which is to say: imagine what Charlottesville would do with real power to regular conservatives whose beliefs are noxious to the Left.
These double standards only exist because the city is forced to follow the U.S. Constitution. They want to make “racism” illegal, but the First Amendment prevents them. So, the next best option is to somehow wrangle whatever a “racist” did to fit under the existing criminal law, while ignoring the real crimes of anti-racists.
This is certainly hypocritical. But it is only a hypocrisy forced on the town by a federal Constitution that does not allow the city council to jail its political enemies.
In this way, the leftists who run similar towns across the country are just regressing to their historic ideological mean. The American Right has benefited by operating in a country where bourgeois conservatives historically held power and shaped culture in ways that benefit us, even if their country fell short of our ideal. Part of the benefit came from the bourgeois ideals of fairness and tolerance, that everyone is entitled to his own opinion and cannot be persecuted for his beliefs.
But as the country moves further away from its historical roots, these benefits become attenuated. Why, after all, would leftists who openly admire Trotsky and Mao act differently from their own heroes once they attain power? Why would they treat dissent with a tolerance that none of their forebears showed?
Thus, it is naïve to believe that the rural can be a check on the urban, or to believe that devolving power from Washington to the states will have any effect at all. In our day and age, it does not matter where power is located; all that matters is who exercises it, and for what ends. Better to live under a centrally-managed empire ruled by the Right than some Jeffersonian patchwork of a thousand progressive small towns. And even if a localist conservative order somehow existed in that patchwork, Front Porch Republic types don’t really think about power, how to obtain it, and how to keep it.
Of course, putting faith in the existing central government would be foolish, too. The present ruling elite is just as opposed to the true interests of civilization as some progressive city council. They are just more professional and intelligent about it, less likely to lash out in hysterical ways or to openly flout their own rules and procedures.
Indeed, the progressive small towns of the world seem to have some kind of “little brother” psychology in regard to New York and D.C. Overshadowed by the big shots, they seek recognition by amplifying the same message a thousand times louder.
It was once possible for Americans to form organic bonds with their neighbors, and even to use these as a basis for political organization. But that unity is lost to us. As Julius Evola wrote in a similar context, “[i]n a regime of dissolution, in a world where neither castes, traditions, nor races exist in the proper sense, the [physical generation and the spiritual generation] have ceased to be parallel, and the hereditary continuity of blood no longer represents a favorable condition for a spiritual continuity.” Thus, modern men “rarely find themselves sharing their inner form and orientation on account of sharing the same blood or stock, through heredity” with their communities. (Ride the Tiger, page 194–5.)
As a result, we must find people who are spiritually like us, not just physically close to us. One such bond for Evola was the “relationship between teacher and student, initiator and initiate.” We could update this to include ideological comrades, or people who actively seek out like-minded friends. These people are forced into what for our ancestors would be a highly unnatural form of camaraderie.
But it is likely to be much more rewarding than talking to the guy next door about Game of Thrones.
Ultimately, place is much less of a relevant factor in the present. No one on the Outer Right can count on their neighbors to stand with them against the tides of modernity. Even if your neighbors are not actively on the side of the enemy, they have no incentive to defy the system, which could cause them huge losses, making the fact that you both happen to live in Omaha unimportant.
In a sense, this is a loss. It is much more natural to form bonds based on shared community and physical connection than finding ideologically similar Internet friends.
But it is only a loss in the sense that I lose if I buy a Toyota instead of a Lamborghini, since the Lamborghini is the “better” car. The relevant criterion is not some abstract notion of what would be best in a perfect world, but rather what good we can make of the world we have. Restoration will only come, not from groping to restore an unattainable past, but from understanding the present, and striving to overcome it.
