It is truly strange when people like Wendell Berry — and others, consider the case of Dorothy Day described by Lukacs below — are ascribed to the left by our schizophrenic political taxonomers. People who are rooted by a love of the permanent things; who are loyal above all to the tradition and membership of their “little platoons;” people who are willing to defend what they love from encroaching destruction via spaghetti-interchanges, foreign entanglements, mega-corporations, technological developments, mass media, etc., all of which are designed to take their local capital — intellectual capital, social capital, fiscal capital, cultural and agricultural capital, and most especially, generational capital in the form of their children — as far away from home as fast as possible.

The gulf between Berry and Day as rooted conservatives and the progressive-liberal architects of rootless movement and centralization is as wide, one might say, as is the gulf separating the conservative Buckley and his clarion call to “Stop!” from the progressive dreamers on the right who today take up the fevered mantra of “Faster Please!”