Saturday Night in Steubenville, 1950s
Downtown Steubenville, Ohio, not unlike the fictitious town in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), possessed all the admired attributes of American life in the first half of the twentieth century – public spirit, locally-owned shops, full employment, a rising middle-class, thriving local cultural scene and so on. Somewhere along the line, however, the American dream turned into a nightmare. Fourth Street precinct, the main thoroughfare in Old Steubenville, became a run-down, burnt-out parody of its previous self – the place you went to buy drugs or sex or get yourself killed when you were tired of life. There is, nevertheless, a revival going on in Fourth Street, a renewal that tells us a lot about a different kind of conservatism.
Marc Barnes, editor of New Polity magazine and one of the founders of the College of St Joseph the Worker on Third Street, Steubenville, is a self-ascribed ‘postliberal’ conservative. His Catholic-informed political philosophy has its roots in G.K. Chesterton’s Distributism. In short, Barnes advocates for dispersing ownership of property and commerce to as many as possible, a ‘third way’ between socialism and business-as-usual capitalism. After all, profit-driven American entrepreneurship brought steel mills and other manufacturing centres to Steubenville, only to take them away with the advent of NAFTA and China’s membership of the WTO.
Downtown Steubenville, childhood home of Dean Martin, has a post-apocalyptic feel about it – disused commercial buildings, broken windows, an inoperative bridge to West Virginia, boarded-up houses, empty lots, plenty of empty lots. Two pre-First World War ‘skyscrapers’, each thirteen storeys high, are almost entirely unoccupied. The phantoms of the past are everywhere, if you know where to look – including, yea, an opera house. A mostly empty open-air carpark is the site of The Hub (1940-80), a multi-storey department store on Market Street (adjacent to Fourth Street). The Hub once enjoyed a reputation for unparallel service throughout the Ohio Valley. It meant Steubenville was connected by rail to the rest of America; today there is no passenger service, only freight trains that rumble through the town in the middle of the night without stopping. In 1950, Dean Martin and then-sidekick Jerry Lewis, the two most famous entertainers in the world at the time, enjoyed a ticker-tape parade celebrated by thousands of proud locals. Their route, which probably took them along Fourth Street before turning right onto Market Street, is like a bombsite today. It’s as if America won the Second World War only to lose the subsequent peace.
And so here is a further way in which Barnes’s political philosophy is postliberal. A well-rounded and genuine form of human identity emerges from dignified work that serves the community and a social existence that at its core is based on the family. In short, we find identity through our humanity and not the other way around. Liberal constructs such as identity politics or, at the other extreme, alt-right conspiracism do not align with our best selves, our moral selves. Our full humanity arises when our higher or spiritual dimension is not compartmentalised as “religion” – that is, something that’s only activated on Sunday or in the private domain – but accompanies us through the day, all day, every day. That’s only possible if there is dignity in labour, physical or otherwise, a principle which runs counter to the imperatives driving modern-day corporations. For example, proud, family-owned Fourth Street businesses – from the butcher shop, the haberdashery, florist, newsagency, bookstore, tobacconist and toyshop to the greengrocer and pharmacy – were subsumed by the oversized Walmart in Steubenville’s sterile suburb. And the checkout operators at Walmart are the glummest folk I have encountered in America, so poorly paid they resort to food stamps to make ends meet.
Nevertheless, back in Fourth Street there is something of a minor commercial regeneration happening, partly because Catholics and Evangelicals from as far away as Alaska have decided to build a new polity among the wreckage of the post-war era. Dotted among the ruins, you can find the wonderful BookMarx Bookstore, Leonardo’s Coffeehouse, Chesterton and Co. cigar shop, and the mouth-watering Downtown Bakery. Marc Barnes himself co-owns a grocery store in Fourth Street, the Grocery Box, which has a policy of sourcing it produce – fruit and vegetables, cheese, yoghurt, eggs, honey, milk et al – from local family-owned farms in Ohio, smallholdings just across the border in West Virginia or even Amish businesses in Pennsylvania. The Amish have long been scorned by mainstream America as an unfashionable cult and yet the refusal to be slaves to technology and their prioritising of family and community sounds leading-edge postliberal.
Meanwhile, agribusinesses, increasingly foreign owned, are supplanting the family farm in the same way the likes of Walmart destroyed family-owned stores in Mainstreet USA and, in this case, Fourth Street, Steubenville. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America (1977) warned about the social implications of the demise of the family farm from what was considered a left-wing perspective at the time. Since then, unfortunately, progressivism in America has mutated into urban identity politics while advancing the socialist maxim that the state is the answer to the problems caused by profit-maximisation and global economics. Consequently, the works of Wendell Berry, all about tradition, the interconnectivity of life and the value of community, are less likely appreciated by the Democrats of New York than the (newly converted) Republicans of Steubenville. Pointedly, a flyer in BookMarx Bookstore advertised a seminar to discuss Wendell Berry’s books. At the same time – this is back in March 2024 – a workshop was announced in which not only local ranchers but ones from further afield were invited to learn the skill of butchery. The idea behind this, seemingly, is to empower families on the land to feed themselves and become something more than cogs in the brave new world of food production.
The right-wing admirers of the left-wing Berry, now 91, appear to share his view not only about the importance of localism but also that the unlikelihood of the state to remedy social dislocation and inequity generated by the profit-obsessed machinations of the corporate world. Barnes has publicly admitted he voted for Donald Trump, but he senses that Trumpism, while reversing DEI, securing the border, cracking down on drug cartels, challenging radical Islam, ensuring energy independence and returning some manufacturing to the homeland, will not solve the nihilism of Late Capitalism. It is a civilisational problem requiring the revival of religious faith and community rather than endless billions spent by the state to fix – top-down – a broken world. A case in point: the Trump administration might impede the flow of illegal opioids into the USA, but a spiritual renewal of sorts is required to diminish the demand for them.
Marc Barnes’ postliberalism starts with the acknowledgement that what’s good for corporate America is not necessarily good for America, as evidenced by the demise of steel mills and associated manufacturing along the entire Ohio Valley. What is good for Walmart, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Media is often not good for regular Americans. The same might be said about Ivy League schools and all the other elite institutions that indoctrinate the young with anti-American narratives and encourage the widely held prejudice against physical labour. The College of St Joseph the Worker, another brainchild of Marc Barnes, is intended as an antidote to much of the above. Attendees at the college earn a bachelor’s degree in religious studies while becoming carpenters, electricians, masons or heating, ventilating and air-conditioning servicers. And they are not burdened with a college debt after six years because St Joseph provides them with subsidised accommodation and a salary while they train. Graduates, then, are in a spiritual/psychological and financial position, along with possessing a marketable skillset, to begin raising a family and perform valuable work when they return to their hometowns.
The opportunistic, profit-driven corporate world was not kind to America’s rustbelt, not least the Ohio Valley. Time, perhaps, to try a different way, of putting community before self and choosing love over gold. As Barnes has written: ‘If businesses are only ever begun for the sake of self-interest, which only subsequently serves the common good, downtown Steubenville would not have a grocery store any more than it would have a monthly street festival or a trades college – the math wouldn’t work out. But, within Christianity, a man is supposed to act for the common good first, and to receive what benefits he receives as a member of that common.’ That might be the ultimate angle on postliberalism.
