[Announce] Radicals and anarchists

[Robert Waldrop]

http://www.reactionaryradicals.com/?page_id=3

ABOUT THE BOOK
In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman 
introduces us to the reactionary radicals, 
front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels 
who give American culture and politics its pith, 
vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, 
digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman 
provides fresh portaiture of such American 
originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, 
regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer 
Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick 
U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick 
Moynihan, and other Americans who can't-or shouldn't-be 
filed away in the usual boxes labeled "liberal" 
and "conservative." Ranging from Millard Fillmore 
to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, 
Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws 
its breath from local cultures, traditional 
liberties, small-scale institutions, and 
neighborliness. There is an America left that is 
worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, 
its pantheon.
INTRODUCTION, by Bill Kauffman
I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian 
decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an 
anarchist. Not a sallow garret-rat translating 
Proudhon by pirated kilowatt, nor a militiaman 
catechized by the Classic Comics version of The 
Turner Diaries; rather, I am the love child of 
Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst 
the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York 
autumn. Like so many of the subjects of this book, 
I am also a reactionary radical, which is to say I 
believe in peace and justice but I do not believe 
in smart bombs, daycare centers, Wal-Mart, 
television, or Melissa Etheridge's test-tube baby.

Reactionary radicals" are those Americans whose 
political radicalism (often inspired by the 
principles of 1776 and the culture of the early 
America) is combined with-in fact, flows from-a 
deep-set social "conservatism." These are not 
radicals who wish to raze venerable institutions 
and make them anew: they are, in fact, at 
antipodes from the warhead-clutching egghead 
described by (the reactionary radical) Robert Lee 
Frost:

With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new
Look Homeward, America

These reactionary radicals-a capacious category in 
which I include Dorothy Day, Carolyn Chute, Grant 
Wood, Eugene McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and a host 
of other cultural and political figures-have 
sought to tear down what is artificial, 
factitious, imposed by remote and often coercive 
forces and instead cultivate what is local, 
organic, natural, and family-centered. In our 
almost useless political taxonomy, some are 
labeled "right wing" and others are tucked away on 
the left, but in fact they are kin: embodiments of 
an American cultural-political tendency that is 
wholesome, rooted, and based in love of family, 
community, local self-rule, and a respect for 
permanent truths. We find them not at the clichéd 
"bloody crossroads" but at thrillingly fruitful 
conjunctions: think Robert Nisbet by way of 
Christopher Lasch, or Russell Kirk by way of Paul 
Goodman. Think, always, of things tending 
homeward.

Not that I have never strayed from home. From 
Alaska to North Dakota, from visits with pacifist 
homesteaders to neo-Confederate painters, I have 
sought what is vital, alive, flavorful, and 
seditious in American political life. I started in 
the employ of Pat Moynihan, the most 
intellectually impressive liberal Democrat of 
postwar America, and have ended at a homespun 
anarchism deep-dyed in the native grain, as the 
sort of typewriter agrarian who, quite 
unsuspectingly, bakes zucchini bread with 
cucumbers, somewhat in the manner of blessed old 
Henry Thoreau taking his wash in from Walden Pond 
for mom to do on weekends.

My favorite America is the America of holy fools 
and backyard radicals, the America whose eccentric 
voice is seldom heard anymore in the land of Clear 
Channel, Disney, and Gannett. It is the America of 
third parties, of Greenbackers and Libertarians 
and village atheists and the "conservative 
Christian anarchist" party whose founder and only 
member was Henry Adams. It is the America that is 
always disappearing but whose rebirth is written 
in the face of every homeschooled girl, every poet 
of the wheat fields, every boy who chooses 
baseball over Microsoft, birdhouse building over 
the U.S. Army. It is the America of those who 
harbor the crazy belief that Middle American 
culture might add up to something more than the 
oeuvre of Dean Jones.

Yet while I like a tidy Manichean division as much 
as the next zealot, I readily if glumly concede 
that as Middle Americans the fault lies in 
ourselves, as I learned on a sojourn in Columbus, 
Mississippi, a few years back.  We drove into this 
lovely town of antebellum mansions and 
magnoliafragrant avenues, stopping at a local 
eatery. I am a hopeful romantic and expected to 
find vatic old black men whittling on benches, 
laconic loafers drawling wittily on courthouse 
steps, and tomboyish Nelle Harper Lee hiding in 
the bushes, taking it all down. Eh, not quite, 
Bill. The first Columbian we encountered was a 
sullen youth from Teenage Central Casting, playing 
the usual corporate schlock on his boombox. We 
entered the diner and were seated behind four 
ladies with mellifluous Mississippi accents. They 
spent the next half-hour recounting the plot of 
the previous night's episode of Friends, that 
vulgar and witless NBC sitcom by which 
archeologists will someday condemn our 
civilization.  I wanted to confront them, plead 
with them: Look. Here you are, citizens of the 
economically poorest yet culturally richest state 
in the union, the state that gave us Eudora Welty, 
the Delta Blues, William Faulkner, Muddy Waters, 
Shelby Foote, and yet you not only consume but 
crave the packaged products of cocaine-addled 
East/West Coast greedheads who despise you as 
ignorant rednecks and stupid crackers. Get off 
your knees, Mississippi!

Well, I didn't say that, checked as I am by that 
Upstate New York reserve. But I meant every word I 
didn't say. Until Americans take the Chute route 
of rejecting the remote and pestilential 
institutions that mean us harm, and of choosing 
the free, the local, the life-givingly anarchic, 
the Columbuses will rot into Columbines.

I interlard my work with memoir and personal 
asides the way my wife adds garlic to her cooking: 
liberally, unabashedly, with the conviction that 
flavor and spice make savor and nice. But a little 
extra garlic never hurt anyone. Except the undead.

I begin Look Homeward, America with two Catholic 
Democrats, Senator Eugene McCarthy and my old 
boss, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  McCarthy, 
whom I interviewed several times, was a 
constitutionalist liberal in an age of 
extraconstitutional liberalism. He was the link 
between the Old Progressives of the Upper 
Midwest-boreal Jeffersonians-and the ADA liberals; 
as time went by and his profile sharpened, 
McCarthy proved to be much closer to Bob 
LaFollette than to Adlai Stevenson.  Pat Moynihan's 
extraordinary career informed-gave shape to-many 
of the currents that have twisted and twined the 
Democratic Party and that, withal, drove me away 
from liberalism. He was both Cassandra and coward, 
tower and trimmer. At his best, Moynihan was a 
blend of radical and reactionary, in the manner of 
the great postwar literary American patriots: 
Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Dwight 
Macdonald, Paul Goodman. Like Eugene McCarthy, he 
was precocious in his critique of the devastating 
effect the Interstate Highway System would have on 
American life. He descried (and decried), with 
considerable foresight, the virtual expulsion of 
devout Catholic Democrats from the party, and the 
ways that this purge would deprive the Democrats 
of their anchorage in the neighborhood. He was 
also a late-blooming skeptic of American Empire, 
as his fulsome eulogists conveniently ignored.

In between . . . well, he sure got good press. But 
more on that later. Oh, Pat, I hardly knew ye, yet 
I sure as hell knew I didn't want to be like ye. 
Disgusted by the timidity and lack of imagination 
of liberal Democrats, afire with belief in 
absolute liberty, I crossed the grand ballroom of 
American politics. . . . No, that's not right. 
Better to say that I left the palace and followed 
the din to the tarpaper shack way down by the 
laissez river. I jumped into libertarianism as an 
editor of Reason, the oldest and largest of 
libertarian magazines and a harbinger of the 
market-worship that would overtake-that would 
briefly invigorate, but then 
deaden-latetwentieth-century America.

If only the libertarians simply sought maximum 
personal freedom: legalized dope and criminalized 
taxation. Neat inversions, those. And clearly part 
of the zeitgeist, to swipe a favorite term of the 
movement. Alas, the movement, and Reason in 
particular, had been infected at birth by the 
misanthropic pulp-novelist Ayn Rand, who hissed at 
William F. Buckley Jr., "Mr. Buckley, you are too 
intelligent to be-leef in gott." The priestess 
Rand's only god was selfishness, which she deemed 
a "virtue" in the title of one of her unreadable 
nonfiction word-clots.

My casual confession-exaggeration, really-that I 
was "a good Catholic boy" earned me the enmity of 
a Randian founder of the magazine, one of those 
English-as-a-fourth-language Eastern European 
immigrants who had forsaken his homeland only to 
seek to bring the spirit of Soviet bloc 
regimentation to our country, à la Dr. 
Strangelove, Edward Teller, who was always 
pestering idiosyncratic Americans to take up the 
grey, dreary, antihuman metric system. Anyway, our 
libertarian immigrant asked with (Joe, not Gene) 
McCarthyite urgency in one confidential missive, 
"Do you notice whether Kauffman interjects his 
theistic, altruistic ethical and political views 
into his editorial decisions and opinions?" Well, 
uh, yes, I suppose I did, but I would also, by the 
grace of that Gott who conjoins congenial 
subeditors, meet a dazzling array of kooks and 
patriots, of Mormon polygamists and bellicose 
economists and wouldbe Pizarros who plotted to 
colonize Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, as an 
outpost of extraterrestrial libertarianism. I 
cannot think of the libertarians without laughing, 
and yet, on the great issue of the day, they were 
dead right. They diagnosed the twentieth century's 
homicidal malady: the all-powerful state, which in 
the name of the workers of the world, the master 
race, and even making the world safe for democracy 
had slaughtered tens, nay hundreds, of millions of 
human beings whose misfortune it had been to run 
afoul of ideologues wielding state power.

I next fell into queer company with the 
"paleoconservatives," that intoxicating (and often 
intoxicated) mishmash of libertarians, 
traditionalist conservatives, and reactionary 
hippies whose flagship magazine, Chronicles, 
became, for perhaps a lustrum, the most 
galvanizing, infuriating, brilliantly written 
political journal in America. For a moment, the 
old boundaries seemed to have fallen away; 
bizarrely apt alliances formed: Jewish 
Confederates, Latin Mass Catholics, Ed Abbeyesque 
tree-hugging beer-can throwers, radical 
businessmen who admired Jerry Brown, and gay 
Quakers who campaigned for Pat Buchanan. Mix it 
all together and you get Ross Perot. To 
whom-despite . . . you know-I will ever tip my 
cap.  The paleos excited more lurid portraits and 
sputtering denunciations than any political 
movement since the New Left. As a sojourner on 
their left fringe, I agreed with certain of the 
criticisms while bemoaning the modern practice of 
demonizing all dissenters as furtively creepy 
thought criminals. For what a glorious hodgepodge 
these people were! The guru of the libertarian 
paleos, the combative economist and joyful 
iconoclast Murray Rothbard, was a gnomic 5'3" 
nonbelieving Jew who adored cathedrals; championed 
the Black Panthers while also boasting that he had 
been founder, president, and pretty much the only 
member of Columbia University Students for Strom 
Thurmond in the 1948 presidential election; and 
once woke his wife JoAnn out of a sound sleep to 
declare, in his gleeful squawk, "That bastard Eli 
Whitney didn't invent the cotton gin!"

The paleos ranged all over the political lot, from 
Port Huron New Leftists to John Birchers, and 
American politics staggered from the shock when a 
former Nixon polemicist and fierce Cold Warrior, 
Pat Buchanan, adopted isolationist paleo themes in 
his presidential campaigns and shocked the GOP in 
that redoubt of flintiness, New Hampshire.  It 
couldn't last. The paleos dissolved-or rather, 
they erupted-in bile and drunken haymakers. Yet 
the anti-globalist, Little American tendency to 
which they gave voice and shape is likely to grow 
(perhaps even burgeon) as the most intellectually 
rigorous and sentimentally appealing electoral 
alternative to our two-for-the-price-of-one 
parties. At its best, it embraces the gentle, 
amusedly tolerant and neighborly anarchism that 
makes small-town America so sweet.

My wanderings had taken me from the populist flank 
of liberalism to the agrarian wing of Don't Tread 
on Me libertarianism to the peaceand-love left 
wing of paleoconservatism, which is to say that I 
had been always on the outside-an outsider even 
among outsiders-attracted to the spirit of these 
movements but never really comfortable within 
them, never willing even to call myself by their 
names. When asked, I was simply an Independent. A 
Jeffersonian. An anarchist. A (cheerful!) enemy of 
the state, a reactionary Friend of the Library, a 
peace-loving football fan.  And here, as Gerry and 
the Pacemakers once sang, is where I'll stay. 
Look Homeward, America-and yes, the echoes of 
Thomas Wolfe and George McGovern are 
intentional-offers an alternative to the American 
Empire whose subject no true-hearted American 
would wish to be. Mine is a Middle American, 
profoundly un-imperial patriotism based in love of 
American music, poetry, places, quirks and 
commonalities, historical crotchets, holy fools 
and eminent Kansans. It is not the sham patriotism 
of the couch-sitter who sings "God Bless America" 
as the bombs light up his television, or the 
chickenhawk who loves little of his country beyond 
its military might.

I celebrate, I affirm old-fashioned refractory 
Americanism, the homeloving rebel spirit that 
inspires anarchists and reactionaries to save 
chestnut trees from the highway-wideners and rural 
schools from the monstrous maw of the 
consolidators, and leads along the irenic path of 
a fresh-air patriotism whose opposition to war and 
empire is based in simple love of country.

Yes, I know, "we can't turn back the clock." (But 
did you ever wonder if perhaps your watch tells 
the wrong time?) This is America, land of 
progress: we can't go backward! God how I know it. 
For I have sat in darkening mizzly forenight 
sipping pale ale in Springfield, Illinois's 
hipster-Mexican restaurant reading Vachel Lindsay 
poetize "the City of my Discontent" as the jukebox 
plays "Don't You Want Me, Baby?" and gazed out the 
window at the mottled concrete moonscape of the 
land where Lincoln walked at midnight.

Springfield was urban-renewed into Gehenna. 
Sherman's bummers couldn't have done it any 
better. But the faith demonstrated by poor mad 
Vachel endures. Hell, it animates me.

Now, I do not claim to be the archetypal American. 
If my ethnic mix is typically mongrel, stretching 
from Italy to Ireland, so are my politics a blend 
of Catholic Worker, Old Right libertarian, Yorker 
transcendentalist, and delirious localist. So my 
story is singular but also strangely 
representative.  We live in an age in which 
Americans by the millions have lost faith in a 
system that seems, at best, alien, and at worst, 
repressive. I, too, started in the mainstream, but 
I found it placidly sinister, so I took a trip 
down the tributaries, left and right and great 
plunging cataracts, till I found that my faith in 
the oldest, simplest, most radical America had 
been renewed.  Robert Frost put his faith in the 
"insubordinate Americans," throaty dissenters and 
ornery traditionalists, and this book is for and 
about them-those Americans who reject Empire; who 
cherish the better America, the real America; who 
cannot be broken by the Department of Homeland 
Security, who will not submit to the PATRIOT Act, 
and who will make the land acrid and bright with 
the stench and flame of burnt national ID cards 
when we-should we-cross that Orwellian pass. This 
is still our country, you know. Don't let Big 
Brother and the imperialists take it from us.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING ABOUT LOOK HOMEWARD AMERICA
"Bill Kauffman is the finest literary stylist 
writing within the broad twenty-first-century 
conservative dispensation and among the keenest 
minds in contemporary American letters. Sometimes 
an agrarian libertarian, on other occasions a 
populist or a 'peace and love' paleoconservative, 
Kauffman defies the standard categories. Above 
all, he is-like Russell Kirk-a localist, rooted in 
his beloved (if not always lovely) Batavia, New 
York, region. Look Homeward, America celebrates 
the 'insubordinate Americans' who cherish their 
families, their neighborhoods, and their liberties 
and who distrust the cant pouring out of 
Washington, DC. With felicitous ease, the volume 
moves from side-splitting humor to profound 
insight to wise prescription. In its grand 
affirmation of the true American spirit, Look 
Homeward, America will challenge, dazzle, and 
delight the reader."
- Allan Carlson, author of The "American Way": 
Family and Community in the Shaping of the 
American Identity

"Bill Kauffman is the Sage of Batavia."
- Gore Vidal, author of Inventing a Nation: 
Washington, Adams, Jefferson

"If you are the kind of conservative who despairs 
over the chain-store, geography-of-nowhere, 
slob-in-the-grey-velour-sweatsuit consumerist 
crapulence that is devouring the American cultural 
landscape like kudzu-well, Bill Kauffman is your 
man."
- Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy-Cons

"Bill Kauffman is an impeccably honest, witty, 
insightful observer of American politics and 
culture who is committed to that which is small, 
local, and nonviolent. Although he has been 
characterized as a populist, an agrarian 
libertarian, and a paleo conservative, Kauffman is 
above all his own man. With many political writers 
you can figure out who the good guys are and who 
the bad guys are just by looking at the title of 
the piece. Not so with Kauffman. You've got to 
read the entire piece."
- Thomas Naylor, Vermont Commons

"Bill Kauffman is one of America's funniest and 
wisest writers. Not only can he make anarchism 
seem lovable, he forces one to reassess everything 
one believes about American politics and culture. 
He might even make you change your life. Look 
Homeward, America is a book whose thesis I 
completely disagree with-and I loved every page of 
it. To read Bill Kauffman is like arguing with 
your best and smartest friend."-Tom Bissell, 
author of Chasing the Sea and God Lives in St. 
Petersburg

"Kauffman's marvelous trick of praising to the 
skies and then noting shortcomings and even vices 
increases the fascination of his remarks on such 
defenders of 'family, community, [and] local 
self-rule' as Wendell Berry, Grant Wood, Carolyn 
Chute, Millard Fillmore.More marvelous is that 
Kauffman, who freely injects himself into his 
prose, treats himself the same way; he vaunts his 
stance on something and then acknowledges his 
contradictions on the same matter. If figures he 
considers overrated don't get the same treatment, 
well, that helps keep things snappy. His writing 
persona couldn't be more appealing."
- Ray Olson, Booklist

Scott DeSmitt, Batavia Daily News, May 6, 2006 
Column and Interview