From a few years back, but a required read as we/you prepare to vote. Please read!

http://www.calebstegall.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=61


here is an annotated snippet

There's something profoundly unnatural, indeed fundamentally wrong with a consumer-driven system that alienates people from their land, their neighbors and their traditions for the sake of satisfying consumer desire. We've got to break the cycle that turns self-sufficient yeomen into docile consumers who, in the immortal words of Samuel Adams, "crouch down and lick the hands which feed them." This is the only way we will realize Bryan's dream of defending our homes, our families and our posterity. (Yet I own a lot of stock that profits from this... no purity here I am afraid)

What would this kind of regional populism look like in an actual political platform? Broadly speaking, it would seek at every turn to end the dependence of its constituents on elites. It would oppose, for example, the nationalization of any sector of our economy, from health care to agriculture. Instead, it would seek creative ways to open regional markets for regional goods. (Am I l33t?)

It would seek to permit regional cultural and religious particularities to emerge from the fog of federalized regulation and be made manifest in our schools, courthouses, businesses and civic organizations. And it would provide incentives to keep cultural capital local. It would encourage people to work, study and raise families close to where they grew up. It would seek ways to promote local culture and would cultivate loyalty to our neighbors and a fierce love for our own places. (See Walton Rural Life Center where my children went, my grandchildren go and then ask why they are 6 generations here. There are 15 of us in Highland township and Pleasant)

But in the end, what this kind of vibrant regionalism requires is something much more difficult to obtain than a slogan. It is a renewed appreciation for society over and against both the individual and the state. Society defined by what the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry calls "membership" – a network of social interconnectedness and shared obligation. To be a member of this kind of social order is the best hedge against manipulation by the central planning committee for "growth" and "prosperity." It is, to put it plainly, to be free. (individualist nilhism is the only sustained critique of christianity that will be or is successful and our culture of death and Philip Reiff "My Life in the Deathworks" reveal (HA!) some facets of this. Read Sowell.)

It may be too late, things too far gone, for the kind of Anti-Federalist regional populism I am describing to become politically viable in our day. If so, we will likely be tossed between the tyranny of a militantly nationalist populism and the stifling bureaucratic rule of a progressively universalizing liberalism. Neither is a welcome alternative. (As a Calvinist I think that it is always too late for humans, See Charles Bowden "Blood Orchid" but then the end of History happened at the Resurrection.)