Perhaps Mr. Gordon was a bit hasty in his reading of my complaint about his article.  I may not have been sufficiently clear in my post, in which case I would like to explain what I meant.  I did express my frustration with labeling “crunchy” and agrarian arguments as socialist, as I have seen done countless times before, which at the very least the article’s title (which Mr. Gordon may not have selected) suggested that he was doing.  If he merely wants to call them statist, I will restate my objection more precisely–I am weary of the tendency to label as statism whatever does not suit libertarians.  This framing of all political questions as scarcely anything more than a struggle of the state against the individual does not take account of other institutions and more local forms of public authority, and it wrongly identifies conservatives and communitarians of various kinds as part of the statist camp. 

The heart of the indictment against the two men rests on evidence that Berry opposes trusts and Rod thinks that zoning regulations should “protect old buildings of historical value.”  These are grave and terrible things indeed!  This assumes that any public authority, no matter how local and no matter its interest in preserving community standards, that infringes on aimless development is practicing “statism.”  I would suggest that it takes an extremely expansive definition of statism to make this charge stick, and it seems clear to me that you could find no better example of enemies of statism in its original form of etatisme than “crunchy” cons and agrarians who are hostile to the alliance of corporations and government.  Moreover, if it is statist to believe that the market should be subject to regulation and that there is something fundamentally misguided about untrammeled commercial development, you will not find many people who are not statists, least of all among conservatives who think that there is an obligation to protect the commons and pursue the common good.   

P.S.  This would not be the first time that Mr. Gordon has belittled someone with less than charitable arguments, since he also quite unfairly derided John Lukacs for his “characteristic ineptness in logic.”  More analysis and fewer dismissive pronouncements would be desirable.