Mondragon in Spain is based on a Distributist model, but it not typical of the Spanish economy or any national economy of which I’m aware.

Anyway, I’m not talking about short-term measures like per capita income. I’m thinking of things that make for a good quality of life, not a high (and ephemeral) lifestyle.

I suffer a curse of the autodidact: I can become pretty smitten with newly-encountered old ideas – especially when I realize that a hero like Chesterton (and Belloc) held them. Perhaps my fascination with Distributism will wane with familiarity. I’ve already started getting suspicious that Mondragon Corp. in Spain seems to be the only healthy specimen.

There seems to be a congruence between localism and subsidiarity – and Distributism for that matter. I don’t know the full history, but I know (from the narrative commonly told) that Mondragon was the result of attempts to apply Catholic social teaching to the workplace. So if it has problems in practice, our appreciation of Catholic social thought needs to be critical – not surprising since the social encyclicals come long after the Great Schism and centuries of Catholic drift.

Were subsidiarity and Distributism, in effect, efforts to Christianize an Industrial world that was supplanting the agrarian world of earlier centuries? What level of government is the appropriate one, in subidiarist thought, to keep the corporate powers manageably small? Do we need a trust-busting power at the national level? Huge corporate powers in a world of widely-diffused political power seems a mismatch.

What could have prevented the growth of the federal gov’t (as opposed to the supremacy of the many states?): subsidiarity. This is where I wish we Orthodox had more consciousness of Catholic social teaching.

On the politics of social conservatism, I pretty much agree with George. But I’m inclined toward localism and Distributism, not libertarianism, for reasons that would be way off track to go into here — except to say:

(1) that leviathan government and too-big-to-fail corporations live in symbiosis with each other while being parasitical of human-scaled institutions; and
(2) our economy, which probably is past the point of no return, was wrecked by bipartisan consensus, largely since 1972 when the Democrats sold out “the working man” for 60s radicals and intellectualoids.

I resist my 60s-bred impulse to bomb-throwing mostly because I know that unintended consequences would follow the sudden imposition of my sort of localist vision. So we’ll get economic collapse instead and then see what happens.

It is a sad commentary on our society that the Republican Parry has become the default totem around which traditionalists congregate. But so it is and political conservatives the world over do not have to apologize for it. The work of traditionalists cannot be thrown away because only one party is hospitable to it or because both parties are not of one mind on this most basic aspect of human existence.

As a conservative/traditionalist of libertarian impulses, I would welcome the Democratic Party taking up the banner of traditionalism again but unfortunately I do not hold my breath. Until then, I will pitch my tent in lands where I am welcomed or at least not disdained.