Crunchy libertarians?

Via the “Crunchy Con” blog I see that idiosyncratic paleo/libertarian/localist Bill Kauffman has a new book coming out in May: Look Homeward, AmericaIn Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (excerpt here). Here’s the publisher’s description:

In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can’t—or shouldn’t—be filed away in the usual boxes labeled “liberal” and “conservative.” Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.

Here’s an interesting account of Kauffman’s own ideological sojourn from the introduction:

I cannot think of the libertarians without laughing, and yet, on the great issue of the day, they were dead right. They diagnosed the twentieth century’s homicidal malady: the all-powerful state, which in the name of the workers of the world, the master race, and even making the world safe for democracy had slaughtered tens, nay hundreds, of millions of human beings whose misfortune it had been to run afoul of ideologues wielding state power.

I next fell into queer company with the “paleoconservatives,” that intoxicating (and often intoxicated) mishmash of libertarians, traditionalist conservatives, and reactionary hippies whose flagship magazine, Chronicles, became, for perhaps a lustrum, the most galvanizing, infuriating, brilliantly written political journal in America. For a moment, the old boundaries seemed to have fallen away; bizarrely apt alliances formed: Jewish Confederates, Latin Mass Catholics, Ed Abbeyesque tree-hugging beer-can throwers, radical businessmen who admired Jerry Brown, and gay Quakers who campaigned for Pat Buchanan. Mix it all together and you get Ross Perot. To whom—despite . . . you know—I will ever tip my cap.

The paleos excited more lurid portraits and sputtering denunciations than any political movement since the New Left. As a sojourner on their left fringe, I agreed with certain of the criticisms while bemoaning the modern practice of demonizing all dissenters as furtively creepy thought criminals. For what a glorious hodgepodge these people were! The guru of the libertarian paleos, the combative economist and joyful iconoclast Murray Rothbard, was a gnomic 5’3” nonbelieving Jew who adored cathedrals; championed the Black Panthers while also boasting that he had been founder, president, and pretty much the only member of Columbia University Students for Strom Thurmond in the 1948 presidential election; and once woke his wife JoAnn out of a sound sleep to declare, in his gleeful squawk, “That bastard Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin!”

The paleos ranged all over the political lot, from Port Huron New Leftists to John Birchers, and American politics staggered from the shock when a former Nixon polemicist and fierce Cold Warrior, Pat Buchanan, adopted isolationist paleo themes in his presidential campaigns and shocked the GOP in that redoubt of flintiness, New Hampshire. It couldn’t last. The paleos dissolved—or rather, they erupted—in bile and drunken haymakers. Yet the anti-globalist, Little American tendency to which they gave voice and shape is likely to grow (perhaps even burgeon) as the most intellectually rigorous and sentimentally appealing electoral alternative to our two-for-the-price-of-one parties. At its best, it embraces the gentle, amusedly tolerant and neighborly anarchism that makes small-town America so sweet.

My wanderings had taken me from the populist flank of liberalism to the agrarian wing of Don’t Tread on Me libertarianism to the peaceand-love left wing of paleoconservatism, which is to say that I had been always on the outside—an outsider even among outsiders—attracted to the spirit of these movements but never really comfortable within them, never willing even to call myself by their names. When asked, I was simply an Independent. A Jeffersonian. An anarchist. A (cheerful!) enemy of the state, a reactionary Friend of the Library, a peace-loving football fan. And here, as Gerry and the Pacemakers once sang, is where I’ll stay.

Certainly some overlapping themes with the “crunchy con” idea. Whether they’re good ideas is another matter naturally.