the happy conservative

I recently occasioned on another three day stint with my Tory pals, and I have to say that it will likely be my last. I had a nice run, I suppose. They’re not fond of disagreement, and I’m not fond of watching two people out of twenty debate minutiae while the rest of the group masks their embarrassed ignorance with a pose of educated dispassion. Out. Standing.

Today I take issue with one of their favorite complaints - that of the Interstate Highway System. In Toryland, things were better before the mobile society, Wal-Mart, globalization, airplanes, telephones, and electricity. While they do love to beat on Wal-Mart (and who doesn’t), they seem to hold the Interstate Highway System in a special and almost rabid sort of contempt. How dare we make it easier for people to travel from place to place? Worse yet, “haven’t we lost something?”

“Haven’t we lost something?” This from a Georgetown U. professor of political theory. He advocates a return to the agrarian lifestyle, where we lived in small towns in New England, surrounded by nice large trees to keep the world away, and thought about how great it was to live in small towns in New England, where the trees kept everything away.

But have we really lost anything? America, unlike Continental countries, has always been characterized by a nearly inexhaustible supply of land and a shortage of people to use it. Our Fathers had lots of children, and when the land around the Fathers filled with other Fathers, the children pitched their homesteads on the frontier. We are a nation of eternal frontiers - any given piece of land in America was once the frontier. We never stayed indolent and ignorant in our New England villages. That simply isn’t what Americans do. We’re the most mobile society in the world, and have been since Jamestown.

I believe that place is special. I hold a spot in my heart for my hometown that I could never feel for another place. But the suggestion that we lost something by building the Interstate Highway System, that it has altered our culture for the worse, is nothing more than fallacious fuedalist revision.