For example, one professor (they were almost all professors) presented his localist bona fides by explaining how he bought his vegetables from a local food co-op. He was very proud of the fact that he paid a higher price to support a local farmer—despite the fact that the same vegetables from the same local farmer could be bought at Whole Foods. For most agrarians throughout history, food was considered fuel for survival and cheap food has made it possible for populations to grow and thrive. For the tenured agrarians, though, food is a totem, a symbol of how they are not only making the “right” consumption choices but how they are supporting the environment and the community in the process (a debatable assumption). The professor’s underlying message—though admittedly presented rather winsomely—was that if you bought bananas at Wegmans rather than whatever was in season from your local farmer, you were part of the problem.
During the question and answer session that followed, an earnest student stood up and asked how people like him—poor kids on the college’s meal plan—were expected to partake in the “luxury of buying local.” The professor’s rather dismissive and surprisingly smug answer was that the student should buy what he could afford and make his meals in his dorm room. And if the student couldn’t afford the higher prices charged by local farmers, then the right thing to do, said the professor, was to eat less food. Hunger was the price one pays for philosophic consistency. Can’t afford organic arugula? Let them eat leeks.
Here's where I disagree: "They respect freedom—they just want you to use it to make the right choices." If this were the case, I'd have no real problem with the FPR argument. I think the actual argument is different--something like "freedom only obtains when the right choices are made." The person who buys their bananas at Wegmans is not free, or is laboring under a delusion about their freedom, or (most confusing of all) somehow wasting their freedom by making the wrong choice. If freedom is only making the right choices about how to live, and the program of how to live is intricate (to put it nicely), freedom begins to look like its opposite.
This is where the libertarians have a serious advantage--the willingness to admit plural conceptions of the good. Modern city life and "authentic" rural life are neither better nor worse than each other, they're just different. One can live with integrity in either environment; one can live without in both. The behaviors, beliefs, and dispositions that actually matter can be fostered or prevented in either: country folk turned bad are no more incredible a possibility than good city folk. Making the worth of one's moral character hang on where one's food is bought, or where one lives, is just madness.*
Also, unrelatedly, except it's in the post: monarchism is to real conservatism what defenses of the antebellum south are to libertarianism: immature, politically and historically naive, and the sort of thing that (rightly) keeps each to the margins of American political life.
* Not least because it automatically disqualifies some from virtue because they were born in the wrong place. Rod Dreher will always have the proper bona fides no matter how much of his adult life he lived in major U.S. cities; someone born in Manhattan can stay there, and be authentic but contrary to the full spirit of liberty, or can move out to someplace rural, and be an interloper who has forsaken their roots.
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