Retrospective of Front Porch Republic

"No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, [then] each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville, intellectual forbear of Front Porch Republic

Front Porch Republic turns two today.  From Mark T. Mitchell:

On March 2, 2009, FPR was born. We’ve been going for two years now and our mission remains clear: to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. The need is great and there is much work to be done. We are committed to fostering healthy communities and promoting discussions about policy and practices that will further this goal.

I am on board with this kind of conservatism.  I am sympathetic to both Austrian and institutional economics and political decentralism.  I think Big Food represents one of the gravest problems for humanity at several levels, and I hope to take up subsistence farming to some degree after moving to the United States.  I'm anxious to produce my own varieties of decidedly non-rubber tomatoes, red and white miso, and mountains of basil, with long-term aspirations to mushroom husbandry, craft dairy production, and bee-keeping.  I'm proud of and love traditional New England culture more and more everyday, and I hope to be a steward of that culture from this summer, when I will be returning to the United States with my family after almost five years of living in Japan.  

If this kind of conservatism seems like an impossible dream, don't take my word that it's not.  Go check out Front Porch Republic.  Here are some highlights from the first two years.  From the mission statement:

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.

From Patrick Deneen's first post, "A Republic of Front Porches":

The patio, it was believed, was a symbol and practical expression of our independence, our liberation from the niggling demands of neighbor and community. Yet, Thomas insightfully notes that it was just as much a symbol and reality of a new kind of bondage, the bondage especially to the automobile and to the grim necessities of mobility, including long commutes and increasing isolation from a wide variety of bonds. It was too soon, perhaps, to note that this form of living also symbolized our increasing bondage to “foreign oil,” though at the time he wrote it America had just recently passed the apogee of oil production and would forever become dependent on foreign powers for our purported liberation through energy – particularly tyrants – eventually fighting a series of wars in a region far from where we should have any real concerns. The house, he wryly noted, housed fewer people but more cars, and it was our new inanimate occupant that “both freed us and enslaved us.”

From Mark T. Mitchell's "What our Hands Have Wrought":

Here we can see the curious state of affairs in our waning republic: Democrats tend to be suspicious of big business but they trust big government to rein in abuses; Republicans express suspicion of big government but no fear of economic centralization. Both are half right but half blind. Here is a principle that we would do well to grasp: concentrations of power in any form are a threat to liberty. It may be too late for this generation to see this vital truth, or if seeing, to do anything about it. But nothing is inevitable, and there are hopeful signs that people are beginning to think seriously about the importance of localism, human scale, limits, and stewardship, the very things woefully lacking in the current spending orgy. While a return to these ideals is still only in its infancy, change is afoot. This represents a glimmer of sanity in a world succumbing to the apparent security promised by centralization.

From Deneen's "Incoherence", which I've referenced here before:

What’s remarkable about the images of the oil spewing from the severed pipe a mile deep in the Gulf is the widespread belief that this leakage represents an environmental catastrophe in contrast to the norm. Our understanding of the “norm,” of course, is the belief that we control our circumstances and fate. Our true norm, in fact, consists in a more widespread but no less disastrous release of poison into our world. The norm that we fantasize about returning to is when we imagine that we control our circumstances by pumping the substance through pipes to containers to refineries to gas stations to automobiles to exhaust pipes to a warming atmosphere (or, to fertilizer factories to farm machinery to topsoil to erosion to rivers and back to dead zones of the Gulf).  In other words, our experience and belief in “control” is little different in the end than our current felt condition of “helplessness.” The only real difference at the moment is the concentrated visibility of the disaster, one that makes visible what is usually hidden – that our civilization exists by poisoning our world, by a concerted and organized effort to release toxic substances from confines where they are relatively sequestered for life to flourish, to a condition where we must come to mistrust the food that we eat, the air that we breath, the water that we drink. Rather than dispersed throughout the world – including the very molecular composition of our bodies – the spew allows us to see with unusual clarity the nature of our civilization. Yet we treat it as an exception, a momentary and controllable lapse, the fault of nefarious oil profiteers, rather than the rule, our “way of life.”

Finally, from Jeremy Beer's "The Decline of Middle America and the Problem of Meritocracy", a long, thoughtful and controversial article that does not render itself easily to excerpting:

Then there is a vast interconnected network of public and private scholarships, grants, loans, and subsidies, not to mention ranking and testing systems, designed to identify and support the smartest and most able young men and women in reaching the highest positions possible in our meritocracy. Fine and good, except that it is all done without regard for the consequences for the communities and regions from which they spring. Indeed, those who are selected from the ghettos and hinterlands are typically taught only one major in college, says Wendell Berry: the discipline of upward mobility. They are encouraged to question and reject the values and loyalties and histories of their home places for the more enlightened substitutes offered by the global meritocracy.

As should be quite clear from the above, one of the most valuable things about Front Porch Republic's presence in the blogosphere is its commitment to good, thoughtfully-crafted writing in the face of rambling and sloppy, content-oriented sites.  But then that is to be expected from a magazine that values traditional craftsmanship.