THE DEATH OF JEFFERSONIAN AMERICA?

...Such barbs assuredly promise better results, by and large, than the banging of a judge’s gavel in a large, impersonal city...

...Every economic age requires a philosophy to justify it, if only so that its participants can find some civic meaning in earning their daily bread...

...A mass return to small towns, then, can only be cause for cheer among those concerned about America’s current social breakup...

...The potential for a mass surrender to a narcissistic fantasy world at the expense of family and civic ties is real and obvious...

...City folk—particularly the college-educated professionals inventing and manning the cutting edge technology of our day—espouse the philosophy that justifies and sustains both these new technological changes and their live-and-let-live urban lifestyle...

...But these would-be urban nomads should be informed before they pull up stakes that Jeffersonian America, in its fullest sense, long ago vanished and probably for good...

...This judgment of posterity might well make a smile curl up from the stone-carved lips of Jefferson’s statue by the Potomac...

...Alan Ehrenhalt of Governing magazine recently conducted a survey of small towns in Oklahoma in response to these statistical trends and confirmed that there is indeed a “smalltown comeback” taking place...

...This was 1,500 years before Rousseau would so chide Westerners, and thereby earn Voltaire’s stinging retort in defense of city life and civil society: “On reading your book one feels tempted to go on all fours...

...First, do small towns, as Jefferson believed, produce better citizens than cities do...

...Peer pressure can effectively be brought to bear against unruly neighbors in small towns, because the people there feel the sting of being singled out and held up for public censure...

...Yet it remains to be seen whether Information Age technology will complement or hinder the social benefits of a rural renaissance...

...In contrast, during the 1980s, 55 percent of rural areas lost population...

...Parents were no longer able to teach their children simultaneously an honorable profession and solid social values...

...The most amiable example of this small-town advantage is to be seen in the way country folk wave at each other as they pass in automobiles—even from behind the steel-and-glass armor of a motor vehicle, even to complete strangers...

...But before we despair that science has become an agent of national suicide, we can find plenty of reason to hope that these new-fangled modes of communication will mean more than simply exporting urban decadence to small towns...

...Things become somewhat dicey, however, because libertarianism offers a set of ideas that has proved unstable in practice...

...We are compelled to ask, finally, if these trends will mean the reemergence of something like Jeffersonian America on a broad scale, or merely the corruption of small towns by urban expatriates...

...For just as it is fitting that “Jeffersonian” is used to describe the ideas of this philosopher-president and not his deeds—who would call the Louisiana Purchase “Jeffersonian”?— it would undoubtedly please him that his name has become securely fastened to the view that a society is asking for trouble unless it is anchored to an economy of gentleman farmers...

...Ehrenhalt found companies in Oklahoma’s small towns dealing in commodities as varied as computer software and racing silks for horse jockeys, companies that were able to set up shop there precisely because of this very recent technological freedom...

...It remains to be seen, then, whether small towns will absorb these newcomers and change them for the better, or whether it will be the towns themselves that change...

...George, Utah, and other small towns in the area...

...In the fourth century B.C., as Athens and its surrounding city-states were sliding into fratricidal chaos, the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tze was admonishing his countrymen to flee government and society and seek the serenity and spiritual enrichment of life in the woods...

...Jeffersonian America is making a comeback...

...The lack of anonymity in a small town offers an even more fundamental benefit for the individual and society...

...These values conflict with the moral laissez-faire disorder of libertarianism, the value system that guides most of the young couples escaping the libertarian-created problems of southern California and elsewhere...

...It is a telling sign of how much these apprehensions have remained with us that, when Jefferson’s name is used as an adjective today, it is generally in connection with his love of rural folk and their institutions and not with democracy, liberty, and his other, less earthy preoccupations...

...George and share their somber fears that such places will become smaller versions of our violent urban cores...

...Worse yet, the same technology that is enabling this rural comeback promises an intrusion of information and images that, unrestrained by law or community oversight, will inject a veritable kaleidoscope of vices into small towns...

...Small towns offer certain unassailable social advantages over cities...

...This growing divide runs roughly between those who follow the philosophy of the computer and those who remain the loyal disciples of Jefferson...

...To find out if there are solid grounds for this optimism, three questions must be answered...

...It embraces the new technological changes because they permit greater personal autonomy and freedom of choice...

...Now, technology is restoring our ability to live outside large cities while receiving roughly the same pay...

...Let us join this perennial city-vs.-country argument to add a few lessons learned the hard way from our high-crime age...

...Fed up with big-city living and economically free to return to smaller towns, Americans seem to be voting with their feet in favor of the rural republic lionized by our third president...

...For those people who would move from our dysfunctional big cities to small towns, thinking they can thereby escape all their problems without taking a hard look at their own lives and thoughts, make a fundamental miscalculation that will forever frustrate their efforts...

...The return of small-town living will earn the name “Jeffersonian” only when both newcomers and natives follow more carefully the values that distinguished the simple rural folk idealized by the master of Monticello: industry, integrity, civic-mindedness, self-denial...

...The chasm is evident in everything from voting patterns (city-dwellers are more liberal, townspeople more conservative) to the social clashes that are flaring up in the small towns where city folk are making their new abodes...

...One need not agree with his conviction that his rural neighbors plowing the Virginia soil were the “chosen people of God” to be wistful for the country-fried images of local democracy and peaceful communities his writings evoke...

...Those of us who prefer quiet neighborhoods to anything-goes urban thrills may instinctively side with the residents of St...

...In political circles, libertarianism can be recognized as the yuppie philosophy of “fiscally conservative and socially liberal...

...The community cannot rightfully exercise authority over sexuality and family life, free expression, even drug use, because decisions in those areas must be made by the individual, no matter how irresponsible and in need of social guidance he may be...

...The increased exposure to home and hearth would seem to promise better child-rearing and less criminal mischief by those children once grown...

...Second, regardless of where we live, will the new technology of the Information Age improve or corrupt us...

...The resulting conflict between libertarian refugees from cities and the small-town defenders of Jeffersonian America was well documented in an April 1994 article in the Wall Street Journal...

...With computers, fax machines, and other equipment installed in residences, people could forgo commuting to central work sites, performing their quota of work from their homes...

...But it would also enable parents once again to spend large amounts of time with their children...

...He noted that the influx of new residents is spurring an “investment boomlet” in previously moribund downtowns, turning nearghost towns into thriving dots on the state’s map...

...This writer, who grew up in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, can attest to the strength of such sanctions, having been the well-justified target of harsh gossip at the town donut shop for being at once the high school’s student-body president and a habitual truant and drunkard...

...Yet for all the complaints we are used to hearing from city-dwellers about the crime, pollution, traffic, and general pandemonium raging around them, such grievances always have been just talk...

...Recent data from the U.S...

...The Californians complain about a lack of urban entertainment, the strict liquor laws, and grating, goody-goody morals...

...Census Bureau show that between 1990 and 1994, 74 percent of America’s rural areas grew in population...

...Libertarianism, which traces back to the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the philosophy of the Information Age...

...This decentralization of work might isolate us more than ever, especially those of us without family...

...The issue of whether rural life is more wholesome than city-dwelling has hounded philosophers from the beginning of their trade...

...Libertarianism teaches that government and the community it represents should be highly limited in size and function, so that they do not infringe upon individual liberty and economic decision-making...

...The more extreme, and increasingly popular, versions of libertarianism preach that moral relativism should be written into law...

...On one hand, new telecommunications will inevitably further fragment society...

...Jefferson was saddened by the very phenomenon that may restore his vision: the fact that commerce is the sultan of demographics, and that people generally move where the money is...

...The huge cities of our time sprang up as a response to the Industrial Revolution, which dangled the lure of higher wages before the farmers and sharecroppers who had the courage and drive to abandon their fields for urban factories and offices...

...George natives, predominantly Mormons, lament steep rises in the town’s crime and illegitimacy rates (crime rates doubled in only four years), the Californians’ love of the lawsuit, and a general rudeness in the newcomers...

...It requires people to acknowledge their neighbors as individuals, not as merely indistinguishable faces in a crowd...

...His fears that industrialism would mark the demise of the agrarian age and usher in a wave of ominous social disruptions seem to have been borne out in spectacular fashion, especially in the criminal violence loosed in America’s largest cities...

...The individual in a small town, first of all, is not able to hide his transgressions amidst the urban multitudes...

...The only way to replicate the string of small, self-contained towns that characterized America then is for everyone to head to Alaska and Wyoming—which, so far at least, we have been unwilling to do...

...Industrialization changed the family farm from the centerpiece of our economy to a quaint and vanishing oddity, and swept away with it parents’ ability to work alongside their children on their own land...

...Until now...

...They bring themselves with them...

...Today, unemployment rates are falling, and employment is growing, faster in rural areas...

...Of course, these statistics suggest the beginning of a gradual change in population patterns rather than widespread urban flight...

...It observed the “cultural mismatch” that has taken place as Californians have moved into St...

...And in answering this question, we must look first to the ideological chasm that has opened between city-dwellers and country folk...

...And yet we find in these trends abundant reasons to hope that the coming dispersion of America’s population to smaller towns will make us a safer and better society...

...Adam Smith came to the service of those who wished to accumulate wealth without fear of government meddling and confiscation...

...It is considered impolite not to recognize the individual humanity of a person you have encountered along the way to your destination...

...So said Thomas Jefferson—with fitting pugnacity—and who would take issue with him these days, given the horrendous troubles afflicting American cities...

...Liberated from the financial enticements of the big cities, city-dwellers on America’s coasts are looking with new interest to the scantily inhabited towns of the nation’s interior...

...the Internet, virtual reality, and other devices vitiate the need for direct human contact...

...Observed a wise local rancher: “People don’t like it where they are, so they come here and try to make it just like the place they left...

...As the transmission of information has become more important to the economy than the manufacture of goods and appliances, it is increasingly true that all one needs to conduct business is a phone line...

...Andrew Peyton Thomas, a Bradley Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is general counsel for the Arizona Department of Agriculture and the author of Crime and the Sacking of America: The Roots of Chaos...

...His loss of anonymity allows for two important social controls lacking in the metropolis...

...Third, will the former city-dwellers moving to small towns become better citizens because of their move, or will they simply transform small towns until they resemble the crimeplagued places they thought they had left behind...

...And while it seeks to conscript Jefferson for its cause, libertarianism harbors certain ideas that would unsettle even the iconoclastic Virginian...

...Nonetheless, we may well be experiencing the first stage of a momentous transformation of American life...

...This theory is libertarianism...

...Buffeted and harassed by the worsening conditions of city life, Americans may finally be heeding Jefferson’s warnings...

...After over two centuries of industrialization and accompanying shifts in population from rural to urban areas, there is now hard evidence that these trends are being reversed...

...The lonely but titillated individual at the center of the new libertarianism finds his closest ally in the technology that permits people to move away from cities and their problems—and, more fundamentally, from other people in general...

...The wide-scale introduction of such values to our small towns would mean, at last, the death of Jeffersonian America, rather than its rebirth...

...After all, he is most likely one of your neighbors...

...Marx supplied a respectable theory for revolutionaries wishing to steal the property of the masses...

...Fifty-six percent of the new growth in the rural population is the result of new arrivals moving in...

...The Industrial Revolution produced two main philosophies, which squared off through proxies until the end of the Cold War—Marxism and capitalism...

...The same technology holds the prospect of strengthening the family by permitting large numbers of us to work at home for the first time since the Industrial Revolution...

...Ironically, then, libertarianism encourages a flight to rural life—if not necessarily to small towns—while also emphasizing a system of values that would change these towns so that Jefferson, and the rest of us, would not recognize them...

...Such informal community punishment is far cheaper than cops and jails, and far more efficacious...

...Jefferson’s declarations on behalf of the yeoman farmers around him were a defense of a way of life he knew was gravely threatened by technological progress...

...For one thing, there are too many of us now: 220 million more of us than in Jefferson’s time...