Localism in the Mass Age

“Why reorient our lives toward local communities, economies, farmlands and forests? Because that’s where you can be a citizen rather than a consumer, where you can see a need and help to meet it, where kinfolk might gather not just to visit but to live, where flesh-and-blood neighbors can offer one another aid and companionship, where public officials must answer for their actions, where you can grow food when the trucks stop rolling, where sun and wind offer free energy, and where you can protect and restore a piece of Earth. If anything in that list appeals to you, then you’ll be stirred by this book—a bold reimagining of our lives and our places.”


—Scott Russell Sanders, author of Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World and other books





“If each of these essays is a gem—and it is—then coming upon them all in one place is what it must feel like to come upon a streak of emerald in a layer of shale. To find them embedded in one place, in a manifesto that is a paean to place itself, is a sight, and a site, for hope. Singly, they bring us—with equal parts humor, humility, and gravitas—to new vantage points from which to glimpse tantalizing glints of an alternative to today’s creed of greed and gain. Together, they construct a non-military equivalent of a phalanx—with equal parts criticism, common sense, and ideals—against destruction of the particular local places and bonds that give us our lives. Only such patient words and intricately argued bridge-building can help us withstand the ravages of expansion without limits, exploitation without renewal, and social and political polarization without thoughts of perpetuity.”


—Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University, author of Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution 





“Among the few remaining signs of civilization these days is this smallish salon of wonderful writers and thinkers, the Porchers, as they call themselves. In well-tuned prose, they celebrate rootedness and that elusive notion, a sense of place. Not to mention, a sense of the truly human.”


—Elias Crim, editor and founder, Solidarity Hall





“This is a book of serious ideas, well parsed, and rather brave considering the pervasive intellectual perversity elsewhere on the American scene. But mostly it is a lot of really good writing.”


— James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and other books.





“For over 30 years we have heard lamentations from across the political spectrum about the decay of community.  Most sound quaint now, for we have lost so much more than community.  We’ve lost contact with reality as we move through an environment of abstractions and, worse yet, appeals for even more unreal abstractions.  Even our most “real” and tangible institution, family, has come perilously close to being little more than an emotionally charged set of freely chosen and temporary affections bound only by fragile allegiances.  Localism in the Mass Age is not just about local communities, but about the local context in which real things are either made or discovered. Localism isn’t a political creed or a reactionary abstraction: it is an affirmation of the most human of things, in all their messy and colorful expressions.  This collection of essays is about real things, including human needs, and ought to be the starting place for our national conversation of rebuilding a nation of free republics.  Free republics are constructed of gnarled oak, not Formica uniformity and clean simplicity.  Gnarled oaks may be found locally, the individualized products of real life situated in a real place. A better future is found here.”


—Ted V. McAllister, Pepperdine University, author of Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order





“Any seeking a way through the barren strait of Fox News and CNN will find in this volume a seaworthy, storm-tried vessel.  Responding point by point to the easy assumptions and begged questions of our day, these writers engender a rare quality of mind: the diminishing of melancholy and the presence of hope.”


—Eric Miller, Geneva College, author of Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch





“This indispensable collection of essays brings together the most important thinkers advocating the decentralization, diffusion, devolution, and dispersal of government power. Anyone concerned about the size, scale, and scope of the current form of the nation state will find here the maturity, wisdom, and common sense necessary to cultivate virtue, prudence, modesty, and restraint. In a noisy age of ephemeral controversies, the contributors to Front Porch Republic represent plain living and high thinking.” 


—Allen Mendenhall, Associate Dean, Thomas Goode Jones School of Law





“This book is a welcome respite from the vulgar reality show of contemporary American politics and culture, and a wholesome reminder that life according to reality—place, limits and embodiment—is a lot more fun. In insightful and entertaining essays on topics ranging from economics to art, the Front Porch Republicans show why pessimism does not have to be world-weary and why humor is a mark of sanity and hope.” 


—Nathan Schlueter, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Hillsdale College





“Our modern world, the Front Porch Republic essayists in this volume rue, is a world of big government, big corporations, concentrated power, globalizing and scaled-up markets; and these latter-day conditions tend to produce rootless, restless, job-hopping, unhappy individuals. Might there be ways to inspire renewed commitments to localism without lapsing into libertarian recklessness, invidious tribalism, or priggish provincialism? Here is a thoughtful and arresting manifesto about building a new kind of republicanism for the twenty-first century.”


—John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government, Professor of Politics, Pomona College





“American localism is like the little man upon the stair: it seems it isn’t there—but it won’t go away. This important volume bears witness to this long and honorable tradition, points to paths not taken that could have averted many of our present discontents, and suggests some ways to reverse our course toward centralization, standardization, and dreary uniformity. Let us pray that it’s possible.”


—John Shelton Reed, author of The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society