Look Homeward, America: Reactionary Radicals and Traditionalist Rebels

Look Homeward, America: Reactionary Radicals and Traditionalist Rebels by Bill Kauffman. (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006.) Amazon Price: $16.50

Review by Ryan Setliff

An Outsider’s Look at Bill Kauffman’s Bombastic New Book

Novelist and writer Bill Kauffman is starting to stir a fuss with his powerful little tome, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. Herein, Kauffman introduces us to “the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life.”

I write this review as a southern conservative — one that reveres Edmund Burke, John Taylor of Caroline and Russell Kirk as my political sages. I prefer reading The American Conservative and Chronicles to the Beltway Right establishment magazines of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. I stake my flagpole squarely in the camp of the Old Right — and hoist the flag of my native commonwealth up on high as I whistle Dixie. I love the provincial countryside, not the blighted urban sprawl. I love the Shenandoah Valley of my native commonwealth. I share Kauffman's parochialism! To be sure, I wouldn’t dare prefix my political philosophy with the appellation anarcho-. I find anarchy distasteful. I consider government requisite for the reason of flawed human nature and likewise strict limits upon that government is necessary for the exact same reason. Abusus non tollit usum (Wrong use does not preclude proper use.) Still, the author of this book tries to salvage anarchy on behalf of his cadre of traditionalist “front-porch anarchists.” With all this in mind, one may wonder, why did I bother reading, much less positively critiquing Kauffman’s book?

Who is Bill Kauffman?

For starters, Kauffman identifies with figures of the political Left, but hardly fits the mold of the Old Left, the New Left, or the Leftover Left of New Dealers, Red Brigades, Trotskyites and Yippies. In many ways he defies categorization. While Bill can speak affectionately of independent Catholic Liberals, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy – he would probably distinguish himself from the three all the same. Anyhow, with a closing chapter entitled, “Why I Am Not Ashamed to Be an American,” it should be readily apparent that Kauffman is certainly not in the Hate America, First crowd. He is certainly not your cosmopolitan, middle-of-the-road Clinton New Democrat by any means nor is he your statist Big Government New Deal Liberal. In fact, Kauffman rather detests Comrade FDR and his New Deal. He wouldn’t fit in with your limousine liberals and Hollywood courtesans either. So, where is this guy on the political spectrum?

From the onset of his book, Kauffman makes no bones about his eccentric political moorings and his topsy-turvy political journey:

My wanderings had taken me from the populist flank of liberalism to the agrarian wing of Don’t Treat on Me libertarianism to the peace-and-love left-wing of paleoconservatism, which is to say that I had always been 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.

That paleoconservatives even has a left-wing fringe was news to me when I first read it. From my vantage point, The American Conservative editor Scott McConnell and Bill Kauffman are the only two members of this “peace-and-love left-wing of paleoconservatism.”

Look Homeward, America

Look Homeward, America keeps the reader curious to see exactly what Kauffman will say next. Kauffman is possessed of a trenchant pen, an alluring eccentricism and a flare for bombast — coupled with his celebration of community as opposed to the state. This all acts to give his cultural and political criticism an added punch of pith, vim and life.

Amusingly, Allan Carlson, author of The American Way, speaks affectionately of the Bill Kauffman and Reactionary Radicals:

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.

Yes, Kauffman is a native New Yorker, but no Gotham-dweller. As a Jeffersonian, he no doubt acquiesces with that adage that, “The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.” Critic and playwright Gore Vidal proclaims Kauffman to be “the Sage of Batavia.” Bill’s hometown Batavia is situated in rural Western New York, which in Bill’s words is “a land of dairy farms and finger lakes, of proud lady ghosts and the desolate beauty of winter.” It is from this rural provincial enclave that Kauffman wrote this cultural and political anthem. At the onset of his book, Kauffman writes, “I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist.” Echoing George McGovern’s critiques of American Empire, Bill is by no means a Cold Warrior nor is he a crypto-Marxist loon who privately roots for the underdog Evil Empire either. He is not part of Tom Brokaw’s much revered Greatest Generation who fought the holy war against fascism only to come home an embrace Americanized version of fascism at the behest of FDR. Instead, Kauffman reveres and celebrates another America — not an America whose epicenter is in Washington, D.C. — but an America that even an Old Right paleoconservative like myself could be at home in. Completely aloof from the blighted, monotonous urban landscapes, Kauffman speaks of his America with much flare and bombast. “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” (p. xii). Kauffman’s America is one animated by a sense of community, neighborliness, local culture, small-scale institutions and traditional liberties. It is an America that is there and always has been there – but is not quite here yet, as it awaits renewal and restoration. It’s an America in the Platonic realm of forms – which bubbles beneath the surface and makes its faint echoes from time to time, and it’s the only true America worth celebrating.

In praise of the Reactionary Radicals

Behind this reverence for this other America — as opposed to the American empire — Kauffman celebrates what he calls the “reactionary radicals” in America’s backyard. As agrarian writer Allen Tate surmised, “Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots.” Bill says of these radicals:

“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” (p. 1).

These traditionalist rebels that Kauffman celebrates are a disparate group to be sure, and include distributivist Dorothy Day, artist Grant Wood, Catholic Liberals Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as well as poet Robert Frost, along with a barrage of other characters. Incidentally, he even finds an unlikely hero in conservative publishing mogul Henry Regnery. These figures have stood aghast at “what is artificial, factitious, imposed by remote and often coercive forces and instead cultivate what is local, organic, natural, and family-centered” (p. xii). With his tongue planted in his cheek, Kauffman admonishes the reader, “You can believe in the American Empire, with its smart bombs and dumb presidents, or you can believe in the American Main Street, where Sinclair Lewis and Grant Wood lived” (p. 87).

Moynihan, Bill’s Admired Mentor?

Interestingly, Kauffman got his start in the employ of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan –who is himself a man of contradictions and difficult to pin down. In Bill’s summation, Moynihan “was a Tertium Quid in the New York politics of the 1950s and early ‘60s: his head agreed with the reformers, but his heart belonged to Tammany, to the ass-kicked and ass-kicking Catholics who had not gone to college, who had never read Sartre, and whom the ‘the liberals, almost exclusively a middle- and upper- class group,’ held in contempt” (p. 20). He initially was a fan of the New Deal. But with maturation, Moynihan came to question the incessant ritualism of the federal government plundering the people blind. As Congress engaged in a myopic trough-feeding whereby legislators scrambled to bring their share of the bacon home, Moynihan “toyed with a radical decentralism, wondering aloud (though no one listened) whether or not most of the functions of the federal government ought to be turned back to the states and cities.” Being no fan of imperial empire, “He called for abolition of the CIA, the return of American troops from Europe, and a foreign policy redolent of Oklahoma rather than Manhatten” (p. 23). Moynihan made flirtations with the neoconservatives briefly. “By his last decade, not only had he gone anti-imperialist, he had also lost his New Deal faith in centralization, consolidation, and bigness” (p. 25). In his last decade, Moynihan came to consider more local and state control a moral and political imperative. I myself have read the Moynihan of later-day, and he invokes Calhoun’s political philosophy and speaks affectionately of the principle of concurrent majority. This certainly does show intellect, prudence, principle and maturation for a veteran New York Democrat and man of the political Left. Bill surmises of his mentor, “The great tragedy of [his] life was that his toper dad dragged the family out of Oklahoma…” and that maximum effervescence would never be achieved by someone raised in Gotham. Bill even speculates, “Had he been raised in Oklahoma, Pat Moynihan might have become a towering populist leader, a William Jennings Bryan of our very own” (p. 21).

Grant Wood and the Promise of a Vibrant Regionalism

Kauffman finds a hero in Grant Wood — the famous American painter — who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris. As Bill surmises, Grant Wood was, “a New Deal employee, albeit in attenuated form. As director of the Public Works Art Project in Iowa, he oversaw the painting of federally-subsidized murals in the Hawkeye State.” During that time he proposed regional arts centers.” Strangely enough for a New Dealer, Wood recognized, “America… was the sum of its regions. Homogenization, globalization, the concentration of power: these are the enemies of American art” (pp. 56-57). For his faults of selling out to the New Deal state, Wood was not rejoicing in its bureaucracy and statism by any means. In fact, he was quite aloof from it, and he certainly resisted its centripetal tendencies toward cultural homogenization and statist collectivism. He saw art and creativity most effectively nurtured in the beau ideal of the American heartland, and celebrated a vibrant American regionalism. He recognized that one must surely be an Ohioan, a Virginian, or a Texan as they are an American, and he thus esteemed the “smaller patriotisms” which Edmund Burke spoke affectionately of. Wood characterized his regionalism as “a revolt against cultural nationalism — that is, the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America.”

Standing Aghast at the Cult of the Colossal with Wendell Berry

Therein his book, Kauffman also celebrates culture critic Wendell Berry — the poet, the agrarian, and the Kentuckian. Berry’s love for the soil and localism — manifests real home-spun patriotism — which has earned him acclaim from the Right and the Left. In his time, Wendell Berry was quick to recognize the interconnectedness between faith, family, the small community, and the land. He had a fanatical devotion to the soil and was a staunch critic of both empire and nationalism. Wendell Berry spoke out against the consequences of a national war culture, and lamented of war and its perilous consequences. Berry lamented of the social discord that war wrought, the strain on families, and likewise he detested the drain on the countryside populace that it sowed as well. In the spirit of Berry, Kauffman judiciously surmises:

War devastates the homefront as surely as it does the killing fields. Soldiers are conscripted, sent hither and yon to kill and maim or to be killed or maimed; their families relocate, following the jobs created by the artificial wartime booms. War is the great scatterer, the merciless disperser. How you gonna keep ‘em down the farm when Mom and Pop and Sis have found Elysium in Detroit? (p. 89)

Kauffman observes: “War nationalizes culture; it exerts a centripetal force that shreds what it does not suck in” (p. 95). There are no winners in war to be sure – as even the victor loses. In his article, ‘Thinking Locally, Live Locally, And Act Locally, Kauffman declares, “The subordination of American life to the demands of military empire sapped the vital link between families and their neighborhood schools. Consolidation — the merging of small district academies into large schools to which rural children must travel by bus — was one of the biggest saps.” In this environment, “the child is a cog, a drone, a spoke — all in all, he’s just another brick in the wall.” The augmentation of educrats and the centripetal tendency heading towards a national curriculum has meant the demise of small schools and parochial education. This regrettable phenomenon is decried by Kauffman, precisely because it “eliminated local idiosyncrasy, local accents, removed parents from the daily life of the schools…” (p. 95).

Those Civil War Artifacts!

For a New Yorker, Kauffman writes a quite fiendish dissident chapter entitled “What I Found While Hunting Civil War Artifacts” full of random musings of historical and political curiosities. It is sure to ruffle the feathers of a few of his northern compatriots. Therein, Kauffman reveres anti-war Ohio Peace Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham, the lawyerly son of a Presbyterian minister, who ran his gubernatorial campaign from Canada after being exiled by Dictator Abraham, for opposition to the Republican’s War. This was a man who prior to the war had come up with a prudent solution: a constitutional amendment to divide the country into four sections, whereby controversial legislation required the assent of a majority within all four sections, thus stifling majoritarian tyranny and sectional friction and effectuating the safeguard of concurrent majorities. Kauffman also fondly reminiscences about Ron Maxwell’s Gods and Generals, which only got derision from Manhatten’s limousine liberal critics.

Now we’re Looking Homeward!

I have a grudging admiration for Bill Kauffman just in spite of our differences. I don’t necessarily like all of his eccentricism, idiosyncrasies, nor would I readily embrace his politics. Yet I am fascinated by his cunning prose and principled political philosophy all the same — and particularly his fanatical embrace of localism and do-it-yourself Americanism. The core themes of families, neighborhoods, communities, decentralization and grassroots decision-making are worth celebrating.

In my estimation, a genuine renaissance of federalism — would be a blessing for liberty and prosperity in America. Just imagine no longer taking our marching orders from legions of politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. The death knell of Big Government imperial nationalism accompanied with a concurrent revival of federalism would be a great day for America. In fact, I would be thrilled if more individuals from the American Left embraced localism, and contented themselves confining their socialist experiments to the state and local level in their narrow enclaves. Left to govern themselves, the progressive New Englanders might successfully press for socialized medicine, an $11 hour minimum wage and a Scandinavian-model welfare state in their little regional bloc. Well, I say let them have socialism good and hard — but keep it confined to New England! The virtue of a federal polycentric political order would allow quicker recovery against imprudent public policy. And the people could more easily vote with their feet, and move to a freer neighboring state. At the local and state level, people would be likely to discover the failings of policy much more quickly, and could much more effectively remedy those failures by undoing it. So, let it be! The promise of American federalism and the return of states’ rights is worthwhile and preferable to the status quo of national gridlock in every possible way.

Even in New England, outside the bustle of Boston’s billion-dollar boondoggle ‘Big Dig’ freeway, there are redeeming places and people worth celebrating. These are part of that other America of whose virtues Kauffman extols. Nestled in the valleys and crannies stretching from the Green Mountains to Waldon Pond, there are a motley crew of “reactionary radicals:” the ‘Live Free, or Die’ New Hampshire crowd; the Maine country-store owners; the orchard and dairy farmers with their community cooperatives; and even the secession-minded Green Mountain agrarians with the Vermont Commons.

Closing Salvos

Like one of his heroes, poet Robert Frost, Kauffman puts his hope for America’s renewal in the hands of “insubordinate Americans.” By insubordinate, he means that vanguard of traditionalist dissenters who loathe the telos of ‘empire’ and the ‘cult of the colossal.’ He means those who are possessed of acridity in their thoughts of a future National ID and the barb-wiretapped Patriot Act police-state of the present-day. Instead, these traditionalist rebels believe in permanent truths, reject war, love liberty and they cherish the amber waves of grain, the streams, the lakes, the forests, the rolling hills, the steeple-capped churches, the Town Hall meeting, and all things parochial. These “insubordinate Americans” celebrate an America in its rich tapestry of regional diversities and its myriad of cultural distinctives—from the “pacifist homesteaders” to the “Neo-Confederate painters.” These Americans look not to Wall Street or the District of Corruption for answers to life’s problems or marching orders. Instead these Americans look homeward. Kauffman reminds us, “The cornfields are still there — no immutable law of state or economy says that they can’t be tilled and harvested by families. There is no reason why Iowa, or why inner America, why even my Main street can’t once more strike up the band” (p. 87). I doubt the costly and bloated American Empire — its managerial state, its welfare-warfare policies — will last into the mid-twenty-first century. In the wake of its atrophy, there is genuine prospect for renewal and recovery of the other America.

In closing, I am apt to acquiesce with another critic Tom Bissell, who said, “Look Homeward, America is a book whose thesis I completely disagree with—and I loved every page of it.” In précis, this is an enjoyable, thought-provoking and readable tome from a decentralist of the American Left.