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Eighteen months of severe recession have
brought to the surface old truths that many chose to forget when times seemed to
be good: 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
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” Newt Gingrich, for example, is a great admirer of Mr.
Hanna.
I will focus this evening on a different gallery of 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 turned his nation into a model agrarian republic and 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”; and 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 current 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.”
I. Decentralist Economics of Ralph Borsodi
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”:
[Its 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, tariffs, special 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” 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.
II. The Second Character in this tale: Herbert Agar.
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 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. Its
proponents 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 derived 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 “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 “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.” Morover, 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 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: “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 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. 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.”
III. Third figure: 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, “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 cites 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. He sees them
as wars of empire, paid for (disproportionately) with the blood, treasure, and
integrity of America’s remaining small places.
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 time. 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 eighteen months.
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. This same
Business Government might be perceived in the skillful way in which former
Goldman Sachs executives have alternated between “creating” and “solving” the
financial crisis. For example, it was then Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson who
successfully lobbied six years ago to weaken the reserve obligations of private
U.S. investment banks; later, as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, he wound up in
charge of the 2008 bank bailout, which saved the great banks from their follies.
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 18 months, the American
government’s remarkable takeovers of the insurance giant A.I.G. and auto legend
General Motors appear to be 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 keeps the wage-earning Russian masses alive… and mostly
propertyless.
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 incorrect. From Belloc and
Chesterton to Agar and 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.
How might this policy orientation be applied to our current economic and
political situation? Good Distributists in America would take the opportunity,
I think:
• To break up, prudently, the great, politically-favored banks;
• To restrict much more sharply the revolving door between regulated
banks and corporations and
their regulatory agencies;
• To focus mortgage lending again on small, locally controlled savings
banks (such as the pre-1981 American “Savings and Loans”) and on Credit Unions;
• To end state “incentive packages” everywhere for migrating
corporations;
• To replace welfare benefits with opportunities for family 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 homes and investment properties);
• To reduce property-taxes on homesteads of 3 to 20 acres.
• To let real bankruptcy courts divvy up failed, albeit politically
favored dinosaurs like General Motors;
• To prosecute aggressively white-collar criminals who have violated the
public trust through recklessness and fraud;
• To redirect farm subsidies ($20 Billion annually in the USA) away from
vast 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 others).
• 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, professional offices, and so on) and multi-generational
residence.
• To mobilize credit, at favored rates, for new family businesses and
other micro-enterprises.
• To protect and encourage home education.
• To impose a progressive corporate income tax on retail giants;
• To improve greatly highway systems, both the asphalt and digital
kinds;
• To focus tax relief on families with dependent children; and
• To end neo-imperialist adventures and “nation building” abroad, in
order to restore the republic at home.
This policy platform rests on four pillars:
trust in widely distributed
private property as the safeguard of liberty and democracy;
restoration and protection of a
truly competitive market; faith
in the natural family economy as humane and just; and suspicion of the national
security state. Could this be the next Conservatism?
At first look, probably not, at least not on Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean
Hannity’s watch. And yet, within the populist anger now stirring across
America, there may be a substantial number of persons who would respond with
enthusiasm to the program just outlined: one that sees beyond capitalism,
socialism, and empire; and one that reconnects with the best traditions of the
American Founding. Perhaps it can be seen as a protean, promising movement,
simply awaiting its leaders. |
