SwampFox

I'm politically homeless in a broken society. We need a fresh political wind.

The positive energy from the spontaneous combustion of Google in Greenville is in stark contrast with the dysfunction in Washington and Columbia.

For some time I have felt politically homeless - alienated by GOP excesses, but loath to identify as a Democrat. It turns out I'm not alone. Kathleen Parker captures how I and many other creative people feel about politics right now.

I run into the politically homeless everywhere I go. Meet two South Carolina men named Joe with whom I chatted over the Christmas holiday. Neither plumbers nor six-packs, both are successful businessmen and lifelong Republicans now wandering the political desert. Fiscal conservatives alienated by the GOP excesses, they're equally loath to identify themselves as Democrats.

In issues like health care, there is a consensus that we can't leave anyone behind. We need some form of universal coverage in a modern society. But we are presented with a false choice - an impersonal insurance company bureaucrat or an impersonal government bureaucrat. We can choose one poison or the other. David Brooks wrote an insightful article, The Broken Society.

The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian.

The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.

Economically, [British writer Phillip] Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.

As I read that, I'm not sure I really buy all that. Brooks recognizes this.

Britain is always going to be more hospitable to communitarian politics than the more libertarian U.S.

Then he continues:

But people are social creatures here, too. American society has been atomized by the twin revolutions here, too. This country, too, needs a fresh political wind. America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority. The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.

As I reflect on Google in Greenville, on the energy of a small, passionate group of people to change their world, of the public/private partnership that is the Falls Park canvas on which they painted, I realize that almost no one in the political class is speaking with them. I am certain that we need a fresh political wind.