A friend asked me whether I’d comment on the clash between James Poulos and his “Postmodern Conservatives” and the localists at the Front Porch Republic. I replied that Patrick Deneen had already made the point that I would have made: “PoMoCons are uneasily but pretty firmly aligned with the Republican party as it has been forged in modern times by the likes of Reagan and Bush. FPR’ers are generally pretty discontent with the whole crew, Dem and Rep alike … ”

I’m closer to the Front Porchers, for their decentralism and because they make the more penetrating critique of state and society, though if I had to choose a neoteric faction to align with I’d go with the “left-conservatives,” since I would take Dwight Macdonald or Gore Vidal over Wendell Berry. The greatest doubt I harbor about the Front Porchers is whether local communities (as if they can all be described at once) are as really virtuous as the Front Porch Republicans wish them to be. Most of the evils of the world exist on the local level, too — they’re just proportionally smaller. That’s good, but it’s not a panacea.

Consider economics. Ever wonder why Wal-Mart, the bete noire of agrarian localists, grew out of little old Bentonville, Arkansas? It wasn’t an accident. Up to the early 1980s, when I was a kid, the Midwest had a lot of small and mid-sized towns that were commercially underserved — if you wanted to buy a washing machine in, say, Knob Noster, Missouri, you had to drive to a city or big town to buy one. Opening a specialty store to sell appliances was a risky proposition: you couldn’t sell many appliances because there weren’t many potential customers, so making money on volume was out of the question. But charging a high mark up on goods was out of the question, too, because what customer base did exist was not affluent. Wal-Mart grew to colossal proportions because it solved this problem: as a chain, it could make money on volume even in rather small towns. (Though admittedly, not as small as Knob Noster. What happened was that small-ish towns with Wal-Marts took the place of cities like Kansas City as retail destinations.)

Once Wal-Mart conquered the Midwest, it had the means to outcompete East Coast department stores and chains on their own turf. I suspect that a fair bit of anti-Wal-Mart animus began as outraged snobbery from urban and East Coast retailers who couldn’t stomach being clobbered by hicks from Arkansas. (Notably, the stores that Wal-Mart displaced in my home town in the 1980s were not local mom-and-pops, they were Sears and Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney. Those had long before killed off downtown. Later, as Wal-Mart moved into groceries, it did uproot local and regional-chain supermarkets.)

Bentonville triumphed over Chicago and New York. In the process, of course, Bentonville ceased to be what it was, as did many other Midwestern towns, and later town across America. Some places were destroyed outright, booming so long as they had a Wal-Mart, then collapsing when the old Discount City closed its doors and a Sam’s Club or Super Wal-Mart opened two towns over. There’s a lot not to like about the homogenization the retailer wrought. I’m not a fan.

But Wal-Mart was not created by outside forces, by national politicians or big-city bankers. To be sure, the federal highway system facilitated its emergence. But it took the native genius of a small-town businessman to create the monster. (I should note in passing, by the way, that as much as I dislike the federal highways, my own home town is a product of earlier “internal improvements” — it was the terminus of an interstate railway before the Civil War, and is sustained today in part by two U.S. highways and a nearby military base. Just as the local can beget the national, the national can beget the local.)

Many a Rome, New York dreams of becoming Rome, Italy, which itself began circa 753 B.C. as a backwater. Ironically, some of the policies favored by the Front Porchers make imperial outcomes all the more likely — I had a discussion with a Front Porch Republican once about the idea that small towns should pay talented college graduates to return home, on the theory that this would prevent a brain drain from towns in need of intellectual capital. Consider again Sam Walton — the best thing, from an anti-growth perspective, that might have happened after Walton graduated from the University of Missouri would have been for him to leave the Midwest altogether and seek his fortune on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. Instead, the Oklahoma boy stuck to Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and made a revolution.

This flags up one other difference I have with the Front Porch: I have much less faith in what for lack of a better word can only be called social engineering. My faith is in the (mostly) unguided social order. I’m aghast at the ease with which some Front Porch Republicans have embraced Ross Douthat, a self-described Sam’s Club Republican (what could be less localist?) who harbors ambitions of building an information superhighway on the scale of “Lincoln’s transcontinental railroad or FDR’s rural electrification program.” But, hey, he wants to subsidize teenagers who work at Blockbuster video — a putatively pro-family measure.

I don’t buy it. To the extent that I believe any improvements in our world are possible, I think they will almost always be incremental and non-systemic, precisely because the fund of human virtue, even in the smallest, purest places, runs nearly dry.

(All of this is meant in a spirit of friendly criticism. I consider myself about 70 percent Front Porch-y — perhaps 90 percent if Bill Kauffman is the archetype.)