TAC: Jeremy Beer

From Jeremy Beer's TAC essay, in which he praises the work of the Brandywine Conservancy, which buys up and protects land in his Pennsylvania region -- and happens to be run by liberals who happen to love the land and heritage of that part of the world:

Here is where Russell Kirk was truly exemplary. He ought to be remembered not as "the principal architect of the postwar conservative movement," as the quasi-official adulation has it, but because he went home. There he restored an old hous, planted trees, and became a justice of the peace; took a wife (and kept her) and had four children; wrote ghost stories about census-takers and other bureaucrats getting it in the neck; took in boatpeople and bums; and denounced every war in which the US became involved -- especially the first Gulf War, which he detested. And he also denoucned abstractions because he knew they were drugs deployed to distract us from the infinitely more important work of the Brandywine Conservancies of the world.

If there is ever to be truth in our political labeling, we need conservatives who will go home, or at least make homes somewhere, conservatives who will abjure Washington and New York and pick up the struggle in their own burgs to help (re-)build real communties, work to conserve the land and its resources, and ally with ther naturally like-minded brethren in order to revive -- locally -- the religious and historic traditions that might sustain us. In face, those are the only conservatives we need.