Only BACKYARD NATIONALISM Can Save America (and the World?)

An Introduction to Backyard Nationalism (J.D. VANCE READ THIS)

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Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Perhaps you’ve read the poem Mending Wall by Robert Frost.¹ It’s a splendid little poem in the way that we humans can be splendid little beings—a lovely picture of tongue in cheek existential reflection. Take a moment and read it for yourself—think about all the walls in your life that have ever been, both physical and otherwise.

Think about the purpose they served, or failed to serve if they were broken or simply not high or sturdy enough to begin with. I’m sure the walls in each of our lives run the gamut in their purposes. Many we may detest and justifiably so, but just as many more secure our very existence down to the meagre membrane of skin entombing our flesh and bones.

Some read the Mending Wall’s narrator as a standard bearer for the principle that walls are unnatural at best, wrongheaded and ill spirited, even evil, at worst. To these people, the narrator’s bemusement at the tradition of mending the wall with his neighbor is taken at face value for the proposition that the neighbor is clinging blindly to tradition, and the narrator, though humoring him, is enlightened concerning the wall’s true nature.

But Frost, though a man of simple language, was not a man of simple thought. The above reading of the piece misses the mark. There are two truths to Mending Wall. Yes, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” but nevertheless, “good fences make good neighbors.” Within this great American poem by a great American artist, we catch a glimpse of the core foundation of the American experiment—of life, liberty, and property—of Anglo-American common law, itself reduced to to rubble all around us more and more with each passing fancy of judges, both elected and unelected, competent and incompetent.

On November 5, 2024, America will vote on whether “good fences make good neighbors,” perhaps for the last time. The sides are clearer and the stakes are higher than they have ever been in recent history. After all, there’s only one candidate in this election that doesn’t think walls are racist.

But this piece is not about the 2024 election.

Rather, I present to you a praxis that can reanimate the Founding spirit of America regardless of political outcomes on the national scale—a political ethos that transcends mere ideology and petty political squabbling for the crumbs of compromise and spoils amongst parties and interest groups begging at the table of the establishment—a modest yet evocative rearticulation of the American experiment for the 21st century and beyond:

BACKYARD NATIONALISM.

What is Backyard Nationalism?

I’m glad you asked. At its core, Backyard Nationalism is a recognition of the fact that “good fences make good neighbors.”

But to go deeper, we must review just how fundamental this maxim is to the human experience. Bear with me (we’re tight, you don’t have to worry about him), while I dig into some political philosophy as we analyze Mending Wall further.

The tension between the two readings of Mending Wall is parallel to the supposed tension between Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as found in the Declaration of Independence² and his potential sources, all of which included some variation of “property” as the third inalienable right rather than “the pursuit of happiness.”

There are differing views on exactly where Jefferson drew the larger portion of his inspiration. However, John Locke (1632-1704) certainly bore a significant impression on the entire Founding generation and was perhaps the first to use phrasing most similar to Jefferson’s in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), where he declared the protection of property as the sole positive end of government, defining property as a man’s “life, liberty, and estate.”³ Locke also wrote of the pursuit of happiness, declaring in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.”⁴

Ah, so you’re telling me that the pursuit of happiness isn’t just whatever I happen to think in a given moment feels good? But I thought a super mega triple soyslop burger with my Xtra-BIGBOY glugglug caramel colored corn soda was my inheritance as an American, damnit!!!

Yes, in fact, that is correct. Words have meaning beyond the bare surface of their expression. When we forget this, we allow those who seek to control us to mutate language into whatever serves them.

So, really, the intentional pursuit of genuine happiness—which is the constant care for and development of the self—is the foundation of liberty. Sounds good to me, even if arduous. But why did Jefferson opt for this rather than “property?” A distant relative of none other than Alexander Hamilton, Carol V. Hamilton, wrote an essay in 2008 discussing this exact question.⁵ Hamilton links the switch to Jefferson’s belief in the philosophy of Epicurus which Jefferson framed as moral happiness being the aim of life, with virtue as its foundation, and utility as the measure of virtue.

In simplest terms, then, Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” referred to self-improvement which leads to overall societal flourishing. To engage in rank speculation, I think Jefferson used this verbiage at least in part to emphasize a certain moral character that he believed Americans ought to exhibit—that of a civic virtue energized by eudaimonia (the Greek word for happiness linked to a life of virtue). This evokes perhaps a higher and more selfless purpose than mere protection of property.

How does all this fit into Mending Wall though?

The Pursuit of Happiness in Mending Wall and Our Own Backyards

Though we have established that the pursuit of happiness is a term of art with a much more nuanced meaning than we typically think at first thought, nevertheless, in Mending Wall, the narrator sounds like so many bleeding heart, smarter than thou liberals crying that “um actually walls make people sad, and that is bad because people deserve to be happy.”

Our narrator wonders at the fact that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Every season, almost inexplicably, there are large openings that two people hand in hand could pass through. Is it man in the form of hunters? Or is it the natural freezing and melting of the earth over the course of the year? Either way, both man and nature are likewise wont to thwart and stymy our own pursuit of happiness just as they do to the wall. The narrator’s response to this is the thought that perhaps the wall shouldn’t be there.

Whereas we see the neighbor exhibiting a joy to play the game of mending wall with the narrator as he sings the refrain of his fathers, “good fences make good neighbors,” the narrator’s only joy appears to be the smug thought that he is better than his neighbor. Note, however, that the narrator is the one who calls his neighbor to set a time for mending wall. It reminds me of so many liberals who are solid, productive members of society and their communities—think about Vermont for example—and yet for some reason they have an instinct, an irresistible urge to think—just because they can leave their doors unlocked at night—that any laws or social ordering that would account for other circumstances can only be ignorant and paranoid at best, malicious and evil at worst.

For both characters, the wall provides a source of eudaimonia in their particular ways, albeit the ways are not equal in any stretch. The narrator believes he is appealing to some greater social good by questioning the wall. Both nature and man himself are wont to tear it down, so why keep rebuilding it? What good is tradition for tradition’s sake if that’s all it’s good for? After all, he thinks, walls are for “walling in or walling out,” so he would like to know “to whom I was like to give offense.”

And yet, he knows the answer to this question. The wall is between himself and his own neighbor. His rhetorical exercise is purely masturbatory in the way that he assails the act of mending wall to be. Except it is not the same way, because at least mending wall is productive, even if the utility of it is not readily apparent.

The cinch, though, is that the utility of mending wall is readily apparent if you are willing to acknowledge it: “good fences make good neighbors.” For the neighbor, his eudaimonia is coming together with the narrator to mend the wall, to keep a clear boundary and expectation of social duty and obligation—of maintaining a practice of civil etiquette that is what enables civil society to ever begin, much less flourish.

The narrator reaps the benefits of this, even as he smugly questions the act itself in his mind. As mentioned, the narrator is the one who initiates the meeting, and he even enjoys the act of mending wall as a game, even if in a ironic, detached kind of way. “Um actually, we don’t even have cows. And there is no wall where our orchards meet, how silly!”

Our own backyards (and for those who do not physically have a “backyard,” think metaphorically) are just like the backyard in Mending Wall. We have boundaries and expectations, rights, duties, and obligations. All of these are susceptible to being torn and broken down with the passage of time, and we must actively pursue their upkeep if we are to live a life that is virtuous, for virtue is the cultivation of something rather than the destruction and degeneration of something.

Our backyard is where we seek out eudaimonia, our own pursuit of fulfilled, genuine happiness. The old commercialized image of the white picket fence in the suburbs as the “American Dream” was a con to conflate material consumerism with actual, real pursuit of happiness. You can trace the reality of 20+ million illegal aliens in this country to this exact little piece of cutesy propaganda. “Everybody deserves a shot at the American Dream.” For decades the messaging of both Democrats and Republicans was virtually the same on this—they merely had branching ideas on the implementation.

The Establishment Left sold the idea of giving the “American Dream” away, while the Establishment Right sold the idea of allowing them to come and bootstrap themselves into the “American Dream.” But both ultimately just sold the American people down the river for a dependable welfare slave class.

“Good fences make good neighbors” because they set the expectation up front that one person’s (and class of people’s) “pursuit of happiness” cannot infringe on another’s.

The Property Rights Implicated in Mending Wall and Our Own Backyards

Of course, the act of mending wall⁶ is much more directly a matter of property rights, but everything regarding the pursuit of happiness discussed above is almost inextricable from property.

Americans can easily get turned around when thinking about property because the two views in Mending Wall are actually reflections of deep rooted American instincts. Think about Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and its original lyrics⁷ which feature the line:

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.”

Now, although, ol’ Woody had plenty of commie tendencies, it is important to acknowledge that this is still a genuine American impulse. We did after all literally conquer this country from the savagery of both man and nature, and the whole history of the West has been a story of conquering lands and peoples. That said, however, the whole history of the West has also been the nuanced story of how that conquering developed into a nuanced system of social mores and legal rights and duties.

We developed rules to the game. Even war was “civilized.” Specifically in the Anglosphere, a “common law” organically developed which was an understanding of rights and duties in the context of precedent from time immemorial, e.g. since before anyone could remember. “He will not go behind his father’s saying.”

Ultimately, the confusion around property stems from a lack of understanding rights and duties as they relate to it—in truth, the root is probably a lack of understanding concerning rights and duties writ large. For much of the American public, there is a fundamental disconnect between the two. They do not acknowledge or even comprehend that there must be correlative duties to rights. (Otherwise, it is simply a privilege to be exercised freely).

We see this most blatantly in the “rights” that the Left has been championing as of late. Take the right to kill an unborn child for example (or the “right to choose” to kill an unborn child if you so prefer). There is no correlative duty to this supposed right whatsoever. I even ran a little ChatGPT experiment to see what the AI daemons think.

Its initial response was to provide a list of duties that all had to do with society’s obligations to the one exercising their bodily autonomy:

I quickly course corrected the bot and asked for an answer on what duties the person exercising the right to choose has:

As you can see from its answer to the real question, each of these supposed duties point directly against the right to choose to kill one own unborn baby. #1 in particular is unfortunately all too ironic.

Whatever your opinion on this particular “right,” it would behoove us all to actually refer to and discuss it using the appropriate term for what it actually is: a privilege. If you think about it, there’s another “privilege” that really ought to be considered a “right” if anything, considering the burdensome duties required of it, but I will get into that at some point later.

Contrast this with an actual right, the fundamental right of parentage, e.g. the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. The correlative duty to this right is obvious. Parents have the duty to provide for, tend to, nurture, and raise their children to be functioning adults—to keep them from harm and from harming themselves.

A tougher and more controversial right would be the right to bear arms as enshrined in the Second Amendment. But the duty there is no less obvious for those who are willing to acknowledge it. The right to self defense has the correlative duty of defending oneself and the lives of third parties where it may be so appropriate. The Founders knew with dreadful intimacy that this also meant a duty to defend one’s people and community from tyranny when so foisted upon.

In Mending Wall we read about a literal property line—that physical point whereby two parties (all all within their same legal system) know with certainty where rights and duties shift. As we’ve already discussed, the narrator scoffs at the notion. When they come upon the point where there is an intentional gap in the wall—“He is all pine, and I am apple orchard”—he blithely states that “My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines.”

But the narrator is again missing the finer point of the wall’s purpose. While he is caught up in the query of “What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense,” he fails to comprehend that the wall is not walling anything in or out in and of itself. As he has already contemplated, both man and nature are wont to tear the wall asunder.

Instead, the wall is a message.

That message is (and I do like having thought of it so well) “Good fences make good neighbors.”

This message is to say, “the recognition of rights and duties is the first step to honoring them.”

Bringing It Home

So how does any of this relate to everyday life? What can Backyard Nationalism do for me?

First of all—and this is very important—the real question is what can BYN help you do for yourself? Those with low agency and a go along to get along spirit need not apply. BYN is what Daniel Boone was exercising as he crossed the Cumberland Gap. BYN is what the pioneers were exercising when they were risking being scalped, raped, and killed by Indians. BYN is what the Founders were exercising when they sent the Declaration of Independence to King George III.

Take a moment and envision what your ideal community looks like. I will venture a guess and say that pretty much anyone reading this would like to live in a community where there is real civil society again, whatever that may look like to any individual one of you. You want a community that you can pour into and that will pour into you in return. You want high social trust—leave your doors unlocked at night, let your kids run wild during the day levels of social trust.

But while you may understand what “bowling alone” means, most of your everyday Americans simply do not. Even if you explain it to them, it’s in one ear and out the other to make space for more TV or Tiktok. But everyone does still understand what a backyard is.

And while there has been a recent development of opposing NIMBY and YIMBY tribes “‘Not in’ and ‘Yes in’ my backyard, respectively,” BYN fully reconciles theses warring factions. The answer, as simple as it may be, is to live with people that think like you do and want to live like you do.

We fret and we moan about the practicalities, but if we really want to live how we want to live, then that requires us to take action to do so. As atomized as we are, this is not an easy thing, but the beauty of Backyard Nationalism is that it provides a common discourse for peoples to engage in the conversations necessary for tribes to naturally appear and take substantive action in real life.

I have much more to share about Backyard Nationalism with you, but I think this suffices for an introduction for now. I will write another piece with more substantive thoughts on how BYN can be implemented in everyday life after the election. While the election results themselves will not change the core practical considerations, they will certainly affect the overall climate in which we’re operating in.

Whatever the outcome on Nov. 5, rest assured that good fences make good neighbors.

1

Robert Frost—Mending Wall (1914)
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

2. The Declaration’s full preamble:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

3. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, full .pdf: https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf

87. Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property— that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. But because no political society can be, nor subsist, without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and in order thereunto punish the offences of all those of that society, there, and there only, is political society where every one of the members hath quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it. And thus all private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire, and by understanding indifferent rules and men authorised by the community for their execution, decides all the differences that may happen between any members of that society concerning any matter of right, and punishes those offences which any member hath committed against the society with such penalties as the law has established; whereby it is easy to discern who are, and are not, in political society together. Those who are united into one body, and have a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them and punish offenders, are in civil society one with another; but those who have no such common appeal, I mean on earth, are still in the state of Nature, each being where there is no other, judge for himself and executioner; which is, as I have before showed it, the perfect state of Nature. (emphasis added).

4. John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, full .pdf of Books I & II: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm#chap1.02

52. The Necessity of pursuing true Happiness the Foundation of Liberty.

As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire, so upon any particular, and then appearing preferable good, till we have duly examined whether it has a tendency to, or be inconsistent with, our real happiness: and therefore, till we are as much informed upon this inquiry as the weight of the matter, and the nature of the case demands, we are, by the necessity of preferring and pursuing true happiness as our greatest good, obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desires in particular cases.

5. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/why-did-jefferson-change-property-to-the-pursuit-o

6. And yes, I have been phrasing “mending wall” like “playing ball” intentionally. I do think that the narrator was onto something by thinking of it like a game. “I’m going to go mend wall now.”

7. Woody Guthrie—This Land Is Your Land (1944)

As I went walking that ribbon of highway 
And I saw above me that endless skyway, 
I saw below me that golden valley: 
This land was made for you and me. 

I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps 
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts, 
All around me a voice was sounding: 
This land was made for you and me. 

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me 
A sign was painted, said: Private Property, 
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing: 
This land was made for you and me. 

When the sun come shining then I was strolling 
In the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling; 
A voice was chanting and the fog was lifting: 
This land was made for you and me. 

This land is your land ’n this land is my land, 
From California to the New York island, 
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters: 
This land was made for you and me.