Where are they? Lord, Jonah, come to Dallas. In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. Whenever the people who actually live there object to what this practice, at least in the way developers are currently doing it, is doing to the aesthetic

character of the neighborhood, the developers invoke the Free Market,

as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the

late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if

people didn’t want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn’t be

building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification.

James Howard Kunstler was here a few months ago, and he said that

there’s nothing wrong in principle with big houses on small lots. Some

of the most beautiful neighborhoods in America are composed of these

kinds of houses. What rankles people, he pointed out, is that lots of

these new houses are ugly, and put up with no consideration for the

aesthetic character of the neighborhood. I would add that they’re put

up with no thought toward what consideration the individual homeowner

owes to his neighbors and community. I don’t see what’s so conservative

about that. Libertarian, yes, but as you know, that’s not the same

thing as conservative.

At worst Jeff is engaging in imprecise writing by deploying the word

“utopian” — though to be fair, he actually wrote “a kind of

utopianism,” and it seems to me clear from Jeff’s piece that what he

means by this is a state of affairs in which the only thing that really

matters is what the free market wants. (That’s one reason why we’ll

never get real immigration reform in this country; a lot of

conservatives who don’t like what’s happening with out-of-control

Mexican immigration will not, at the end of the day, give up cheap

consumer goods and services for the sake of other conservative values

that would be served by stanching the outlaw migrant flow). I think you

are reading Jeff too literally here. What he decries is the economic

version of the sexual libertinism that many liberals exalt. You might

not see this kind of thing advocated on web sites, in think tanks or in

gatherings of the intellectual right, but a crude version of it

animates a lot of what calls itself conservatism today out here far

from the NY-DC corridor.