The older communities we conservatives defend had a great deal of enforced uniformity. You couldn’t be an open homosexual for example, nor could you run around naked. If you spouted heresies you stood a good chance of getting punished in more severe ways than an HOA fine, at least until the 18th Century or so. In the United States, blacks were kept out of many subdivisions until the 1940s through restrictive racial covenants. So too were gambling, drinking, and other behaviors restricted under the rubric of “public and private nuisance.” The core American tradition hardly requires us to tolerate Camaros on blocks in people’s front yards.

The old America was one of a great deal of forced conformism. And it even extended to matters of politics and war and peace. Consider the Palmer Raids or the oppressions meted out to Unionist Southerners from your favorite folks. My God, consider the Bleeding Kansas episode.

Anyway, forced conformism is the price of civilization. And, frankly, I wouldn’t want to live near hippies and neither should any other sane and civilized American conservative. They can have their peace symbols and peace pipes in their squalid communes, thank you very much. They should be messed with simply because so many of them are disloyal and otherwise disagreeable. Tolerance is overrated, particularly of treachery, and doubly so of people that show so little tolerance for our intolerance of various things–homosexuals, communists, subversives, criminals, undesirables of various stripes.

Moreover, the homeowner associations don’t just pick on peaceniks. If your American flag is too big, or you wash your car in the driveway, you can be in big trouble. These outfits are often harmless or even useful, but when they get out of control, they can be the bourgeois analogue to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

Small cities like Laguna Beach also try to micromanage people’s lives, with local boards exercising unfettered discretion over all kinds of things. Although without castor oil and rubber hoses, it may be hyperbolically styled “environmental fascism.”

This stuff is far from trivial. If we can’t have a bit of breathing room in our own condo or neighborhood, why even bother with things like the incarceration of Judith Miller or the peccadilloes of John Kerry and Trent Lott?

I despise the Nanny State whether it’s next door or in Washington DC.