The folks at 2Blowhards spent last week interviewing Bill Kauffman. The series finished up last Friday, and Kauffman offers up the perfect outline for a localist, reactionary radical perspective:

Anarchy is the absence of government coercion. It implies nothing about one’s religious or social views; indeed, the most convincing anarchists have been Christians: Dorothy Day, Tolstoy. I prefer to let people, working voluntarily and in small groups with their neighbors, tend to their own affairs, without the state and its credentialed experts bossing ’em around.

Bring all our troops home from everywhere. Reunite them with their families. Devolve political power to the most local level possible: the town, the neighborhood, the family, the individual. Slash the defense budget, repeal all corporate subsidies, abolish the many direct and indirect subsidies (interstate highways, federal aid to colleges, a standing army) of rootlessness. Eliminate the national government’s role in education; break up soulless consolidated superschools; restore local districts and small, human-scale schools. Revoke TV and radio licenses from absentee owners.

Well, it’s a source of great hope. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) provides a local source of fresh food, a way to support farm families and agrarian communities.

We have it in our power to restore parts of the good America. We vote not only in booths every November but every day in so many ways: with our time, our money, our hearts, our love. What kind of an America do we want? A Wal-Martized land at perpetual war with the world, a nation of TV watchers mesmerized by CNN and MTV, or a place with vibrant local cultures, flavorful regions, variety and life? I want the latter. So buy local. Live local. Local food. Local music. Local baseball.

The entire series is worth reading.

Posted on 24 October 2006