On “Blue Highways Conservatism”

Blue Highways Conservatism embodies the restoration of individual rights, humane national loyalty, and confidence in the American spirit. It looks to the towns without malls, and the in-between places, to speak with an authentic voice in an attempt to foster community and the restoration of public virtue necessary to sustain democracy in America.

The joy of reading William Least Heat-Moon’s book “Blue Highways” comes from sensing something deep about our ethos: That every American should be master of earning wages to put bread on his table and pursue his bliss. But also, we must all be mastered by the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution that proceeds from them. That is the heart of civic virtue from which the red blood of national restoration flows.

An overlooked gem in modern American nonfiction is William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, a travelogue of an eighty-two day drive around the country in a Ford Econoline van. The title is taken from Rand McNally’s coloring system for side roads, which Heat-Moon mostly used.

The journey was conceived when the author found himself both unemployed and separated from his wife. Concluding that a “man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,” he decided to follow, like a migrating goose, the beginning of spring. He made stops in most every region, avoided the major cities, and managed to find a good diner or tavern wherever he went.

The book still has a minor cult following, and it’s not hard to see why. Much like its literary cousins in the open road genre—Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Kerouac’s On The Road—Blue Highways appeals to the latent wanderer in every American. Moreover, Mr. Heat-Moon had a knack for finding out-of-the-way towns like Nameless, Tennessee or Dime Box, Texas with people who liked to talk.

The book offers something different than the spiritual pilgrimage of Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome. Thankfully, it was written well before travel pieces turned into snide exposés. Mr. Heat-Moon’s interest in the people he meets is genuine, and key to the enduring charm of Blue Highways. “Each of the people from anywhere, when you see in them far enough,” his father told him, before he set out, “you find red blood and a red heart. There’s a hope.”

The stories are from men and women in varied walks of life. Many live small-town lives, while some look to the horizon. Others are working to build or renew something, or spending their leisure time trying something new, like hang-gliding. The heart and hope of Blue Highways is a conversation with a man in Kentucky who, with his wife, was building a yacht in which to cruise the inland river system.

“Dreams take up a lot of space?” Mr. Heat-Moon asks.

“All you’ll give them,” the man replied.

We can naturally wonder how different the journey in Blue Highways might look today. Dignity, Chris Arnade’s 2019 book, probably comes closest. A onetime finance industry employee, Mr. Arnade seems to have heeded the warning of Dickens’ second spirit about the perils of shunning Ignorance and Want. Like Mr. Heat-Moon, he hit the road in a van, but his purpose was different in that he sought out people living in poverty and its adjacent regions.

Unsurprisingly, the personal accounts recorded in Dignity have a darker tone. What Mr. Arnade found, usually from his vantage point at the local McDonalds, were “long stories of wrongs, mistakes, and injustices.” The presence of drugs looms large in the background, but the reader will not find the romanticized nihilism of Breaking Bad.

In fact, Dignity is quite effective in showing a number of our fellow Americans coping with the fallout of economic disruption—and the sting of a backhanded slap, as the author explained in a 2016 Guardian essay:

These communities are dealing with lost and changing jobs, which are no longer sources of pride, but simply about getting by. Life for many has become a constant anxiety over upcoming bills. They are also dealing with social problems that always follow economic loss, such as families broken apart, children struggling with little support, eroded institutions, and substance abuse – a quick salve to either forget or numb the pain.

Yet, “despite being stigmatized, ignored, and made fun of,” he observed, “most of the people I met were fighting to maintain dignity.” Insperata accidunt magis saepe quam quae speres. It’s a fight most of us cannot imagine, despite the better angels of our nature.

Forty-one years separate Blue Highways from Dignity, yet to read both books, one comes away with the impression that they’re snapshots from different countries.

The reasons for the changes are numerous, of course, and have been chronicled exhaustively in The Imaginative Conservative and elsewhere. Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ provides some historical context. Rome’s increasing wealth brought about a change among the elites. “Manners became more refined,” he wrote, “as morals were relaxed.” The upper class tolerated plays that lampooned the old gods and influenced religious practices that effectively consented to “turn exploitation into a sacrament.”

Moreover, the aristocracy that had previously

esteemed honor above life adopted the new morality and shared in the new wealth; it thought no longer of the nation, but of class and individual privileges and perquisites; it accepted presents and liberal bribes for bestowing its favor upon men and states.

Meanwhile, the underclass became increasingly coarse in manner and speech, and its amusements more violent. As Orestes Brownson points out in The American Republic, Rome, like Greece, “fell precisely through internal weakness caused by the barbarism within, not through the force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.”

No one who seeks the truth through philosophy can declare our nation’s current state of affairs good. It would be easy to cynically write it all off by singing along with the Texas Playboys: “When you leave Amarillo, turn out the lights.” Easier still to simply borrow the overused Twitter phrase “now do” and add “America.”

On the other hand, the interesting thing about Mr. Arnade’s travels—which took place over the course of 2015 and 2016—is the frequency with which he heard Donald Trump’s name mentioned. What he wrote off as native bigotry among poor whites turned out, in hindsight, to be a political groundswell of people of a variety of colors, accents, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The message they were responding to, best described by Michael Anton, was compelling in its sense of hope: “I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.”

It may just be that people from the hard pages of Dignity—and a broad swath of their countrymen—dream of something that permeates the pages of Blue Highways like the first fragrances of springtime: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All you’ll give them.

Now that Mr. Trump has been replaced by a new president and, significantly, a coterie of progressive appointees, we might ask if the nation is now too far gone for redemption.

The notion of divine punishment is not new. Jefferson contemplated the perpetuation of slavery and trembled at the thought of a just God. Lincoln picked up on this theme in his Second Inaugural Address when he wondered aloud if slavery was

one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

If we take a hard look at our zeitgeist, if we inspect the American sector of Pope Francis’ imagined field hospital, there occurs a dismaying juxtaposition that argues in favor of revising Lincoln’s label of “an almost-chosen people” to something more fitting, like “passed over.”

On one side, there is the newspaper story of a young woman in the opioid belt destitute to the point of having to hitchhike to her mother’s funeral; on the other, the Senate confirmation of Rachel (born Richard) Levine, the man who identifies as a woman nominated by President Biden to be an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. “At its core,” Levine said, with no apparent a sense of irony, “my career has been about helping people live healthy lives.”

Transgenderism, abortion, and eugenics. Levine and his fellow appointees, fiercely committed to “helping people live healthy lives,” pledge their solidarity to all three. But they might be surprised to learn that their pedigree includes slaveholders and abolitionists. Yet, it’s an unbroken line. The error that ties them together, Orestes Brownson recognized, is a political philosophy rooted in the assumption that man is God.

Taking stock shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, Brownson examined how radicals on both sides inflamed the passions that led to the conflict. He offered a warning about political movements claiming to act in the name of humanity, or a “higher law,” over individual rights, which he believed would result in “a complete social despotism, which, proving impracticable from its very generality, would break up in anarchy, in which might makes right, as in the slaveholder’s democracy.”

That should come as no surprise. A politics that denies something could be objectively true is as arbitrary as words written on water. A system of laws which codifies that politics thereupon declares anyone who espouses truth an enemy of the state.

Thus, if the Democrats are successful, by some sleight of hand, in enacting the Equality Act—a kind of distorted bill of rights—we will soon be asking what became of the church basements and other refuges for the poor. Not to mention middle class people fired from their jobs, and rendered unemployable, for refusing to comply with the elite’s antiracist, implicit bias, transgender, and critical race thinking statutes.

Bob Dylan said we have to serve someone. In response, progressives proclaim sinn fein, ourselves alone. It seems that in a country now ruled by those who bear malice towards some, and charity for all who support them, the slogan drummed into us over the past year—“we’re in this together”—has a renewed poignancy in the context of those who still hold to the idea of “We, the People.”

Norman Maclean, the great novelist of Montana, thought that Americans shared a trait with the British: “the freedom, security and predisposition to memorialize defeat.” We can hope this is still the case, though the zealous enforcement of cancel culture makes it less likely. Current education standards also do not offer much hope for the future. Instead of encouraging the development of reasoning skills, students are being taught what to think. Most of them will go into the world as grown children, unable to understand James V. Schall’s formula of ‘what is, and that it is, and what is not, and that it is not.’

Maclean, significantly, was writing in the context of monuments on the battlefield of Little Bighorn. In general, these edifices, usually erected by veterans or their descendants, are there to remind us of things that came before us; to make us, as James Jones put it, “walk into history looking backwards.” Not to live in the past, but to apply it (as best we can) to the present.

The point of all this is to remind conservatives—at least the uncorrupted ones—that they have a natural advantage in political discourse, because their philosophy usually come closest to the truth, particularly that of our nation’s founding. Progressives, of course, have a decided advantage in holding the commanding heights of the media, education, and government institutions. It might seem like the cards are stacked against conservatives, but Dostoyevsky reminds us that even for realists, “it is not faith that is born of miracles, but miracles of faith.”

Reviving the optimistic America of Blue Highways certainly seems like a worthy goal, if only because an attainable middle class is essential to a healthy nation. In fact, the late Leslie Rubin handed conservatives their post-Trump political program when she wrote that

Aristotle and the American founding generation would… exhort the national and state governments to do all in their power to foster an economy in which most can earn a moderate income and to revive an understanding of the American dream as achieving self-reliance and making the most of that moderate income through rational self-control, generosity, moderate ambition, friendliness, and fairness.

We might even call this approach “Blue Highways Conservatism.”

Blue Highways Conservatism has a populist core in that it represents Hilaire Belloc’s “poor men” who get little from their occupations “beyond dreams and death.” It strives for statesmanship from a patriotic demos, rather than faux leadership by an unprincipled ruling class. It does not deny that there is a natural aristocracy in men, but it resists the idea of an artificial hierarchy of self-sufficing winners that exploits government, in part, to punish the losers.

But populist does not mean popular sovereignty. The perilous condition we find ourselves in today justifies Orestes Brownson’s warning about the dangers of “personal freedom and unrestrained action” to the development of a “barbaric” constitution. Suffice it to say that Blue Highways Conservatism opposes the limitless expansion of rights to redress an incalculable litany of grievances. In doing so, it should speak for basketball dads, school bus drivers, county sheriffs, and medical clinic assistants who do not want to be, in the eyes of the law, less equal than other citizens.

Finally, Blue Highways Conservatism embodies the restoration of individual rights, humane national loyalty, and confidence in the American spirit. It is committed to the goal of liberation from Big Tech and the perverted tenets that have sapped America’s vitality and sense of national purpose. It looks to the towns without malls, and the in-between places, to speak with an authentic voice in an attempt to foster community and the restoration of public virtue necessary to sustain democracy in America.

The joy of reading William Least Heat-Moon’s book is partly nostalgic, in that it is a record from our past, but also comes from sensing something deeper about our ethos. Which is: every American is, or at least should be, master of earning wages to put bread on his table and pursue his bliss. But there is more to it than that. We must all be mastered by the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution that proceeds from them. That is the heart of civic virtue from which the red blood of national restoration flows. Especially for a people that places its hope in an America that can survive to its Tricentennial.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.