I knew exactly who Dreher was talking about. When we lived in rural Tennessee, a number of people in my church described themselves as “homesteaders.” They raised their own livestock and they tried to live as self-sufficiently as possible. Some built their own houses.
As a cultural phenomenon, it’s fascinating. My homesteading friends even inspired us to try a bit of light self-sufficiency. We raised chickens, briefly churned our own butter (not as fun as it sounds) and even considered dipping our toes into the joys of goat ownership. But we moved to the suburbs, and my goat dream died.
Now homesteading has morphed into something a little different, the tradlife and its most indispensable character, the tradwife. Immensely popular social media celebrities now preach the gospel of their simple, traditional lives, but there’s a catch: The most popular influencers are often quite wealthy. Their money enables a “simple” lifestyle on large farms that are out of reach for a vast majority of Americans.
At the same time, populist and nationalist economists were deriding the Republican Party’s “G.D.P. fetish.” In a 2020 Times guest essay, Oren Cass, a Times Opinion contributing writer and perhaps the leading economist of the new right, made his case against growth:
But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency or life satisfaction.
Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness and strain of unpredictability.
The final piece of the puzzle comes from the so-called postliberals, the right-wing critics of liberal democracy and free markets, most notably Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at Notre Dame and the author of one of the most influential books in the modern right, “Why Liberalism Failed.”
In it, Deneen argues that liberalism itself, which conceives of “humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life,” has failed at a profound level. Liberalism, he says, “generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.”
#Opinion #Free #Trade #Raise #Chickens
