Ideological Similarities and Differences Between Liberal Homesteaders and Conservative Homesteaders

The term “homestead” conveys a sense of self-sufficiency that draws many conservative (and particularly conservative libertarian) people into the fold. However, there are quite a few people on the left who share similar ideals and goals, though the methods to achieve those goals, and the reasons why are significantly different. I’m going to outline what I believe are the similarities and differences between liberal homesteading and conservative homesteading in a number of areas within the realm of homesteading like: climate change (the BIG one), guns (the BIG 2A), organic vs. non-organic foods, farm animals as pets vs. a product, self-sufficiency vs. community-sufficiency, individual vs. communal living. The similarities and differences between liberal homesteaders and conservative homesteaders can be fascinating. But don’t get me started on healthcare…

Climate Change a.k.a. Global Warming a.k.a Big Oil’s Big Lie

One of the simplest ways to determine if someone is on the political left or right is whether or not they acknowledge (I will not use the term BELIEVE, because science is our best guess based on data, and the collection of data necessary to rule out alternative hypotheses – there’s no room for BELIEFS) climate change, and that humans are the cause of the disruption.

A lot of the following paragraphs that describe the difference between homesteader on the left and right stem from this difference. If you acknowledge climate change, chances are you’ll want to do SOMETHING that is within your power – whether that is to eschew chemical (and nitrogen heavy if you live near a body of water) fertilizers, leave your leaves for the bugs and soil health, plant native plants for pollinizers, forgo herbicides and pesticides, ride an e-cargo bike, thrift shop, embrace degrowth, or a number of many other sustainable practices.

And if you don’t acknowledge climate changes, chances are you will be caught in the hedonistic cycles of more, more, more, without giving a second thought to change how you live for the better of yourself, and all of humanity.

GUNS

Obviously, gun control is super controversial, and republicans tend to want open access to guns of all types, while Democrats tend to want to get rid of all guns, or at least make it more difficult to buy a gun. As much as this is a divide between republicans and democrats, it seems to be more of a divide between urban/suburban and exurban/rural voters. Anecdotally, I know some republicans living in suburbs who think gun control is necessary especially with regard to guns that are used to conduct school shooting and other mass murder, and I certainly know some democrats living in exurban parts of southern states that are very. very pro-gun.

To make it even murkier, the US seems to be barreling more toward government overreach, which the prevention of was the intent of the Second Amendment in the first place.

Second Amendment

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

That’s it. That one sentence has caused so much strife in our society. However, as it relates to homesteaders, I think liberal homesteaders tend to lean more toward gun-ownership than the rest of the liberal population – unless mobsters, gang members, and the mafia vote liberal, but I doubt they vote at all – and again with overreach on the doorstep, I’d suspect gun ownership among liberals is increasing. Hunting deer is an important food source for many homesteaders, and protection from predators is vital to raising animals – so guns certainly have their uses. Do homesteaders need machine guns? No.

Organic vs. Non-organic Food

To me it seems that Liberals and especially Progressives on the left seem to care more about the quality of their food (organic, dye-free, natural ingredients) and how the food was made/raised, while Conservatives tend to care more about quantity (e.g. the rise of The Cheesecake Factory) and lowering their food costs.

Why might this be? For myself, as a Progressive Liberal, I can say that I’ve seen what chemical exposure can do to people since I’ve worked in rubber product manufacturing plants. A lot of people who worked there for a long time had cancer of some form, and it seemed to be more prevalent among the factory workers (who were exposed to all kinds of chemicals through their careers) than the office workers. Now, are the concentrations of unnatural chemicals as high in our foods as they would be in a rubber manufacturing plant? No, but there’s a lot of misinformation about what chemicals are used in food production, including the reasoning behind the rise of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in crops (most GMO crops are designed to be resistant to herbicides, so crop fields can be doused with herbicides to kill weeds, but not affect the crop).

Farm Animals As Pets Vs. A Product

It seems that liberals tend to have farm animals as pets as opposed to raising them for slaughter. The big divide seems to be most clear with chickens, as they are probably the most popular farm animal that homesteaders keep. Anyone who keeps chickens tends to want the eggs (I don’t think a vegan chicken farmer exists, and most vegetarians will eat eggs), but liberals generally don’t raise broilers (male chickens that have been bred to grow quickly and killed after about 32 days) for meat, but more often conservatives will have both hens for eggs and broilers for meat.

I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with raising your own chickens to eat. I still eat chicken meat from the grocery store, but I don’t think I could bring myself to eat chicken I raised, even if I only raised it for a month. But don’t get me wrong, if there was a cataclysmic event and I felt the need to raise broilers, I’d do it. But for now, it’s messy (both emotionally, and bloodily) work that I’d rather not do, and I think this is a prevailing sentiment among non-vegan/vegetarian liberals. Maybe one day I’ll fully commit to veganism, but for now I certainly eat less meat than the average man. The similarities and differences between liberal homesteaders and conservative homesteaders are very visible.

Maybe some of the “farm animals as a product” sentiment from conservatives is driven by the amount of meat they eat? I found this article very intriguing: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8794126/

“In the food domain, it has been shown that people endorsing conservative values and beliefs consume more meat, identify themselves as meat eaters, are less likely to be vegetarian [19–23], and hold more negative attitudes toward vegetarians [24,25] compared with people holding liberal views.”

Self-sufficiency vs. Community-sufficiency

Homesteading is all about self-sufficiency, right? Well, for some people it is, but it’s much easier to have a small community that is community-sufficient (I don’t really know what to call a self-sufficient community). But that’s not to say that by being self-sufficient you won’t have a community.

So the way I see it, communities for conservative homesteader tend to be formed around their families and religions, while communities of liberal homesteaders tend to be formed around their families and neighbors. This is a pretty murky distinction though. The similarities and differences between liberal homesteaders and conservative homesteaders extend to community relationships.

A clearer distinction is the specialization of individuals that are a part of a sufficient community. If one person in the community is raising pigs, then you can get bacon from them and you don’t need to raise your own pigs. You can grow fruit trees instead, and share the fruits of your labor with you neighbor with the bacon. This type of organization naturally forms in a town, or county, or state, depending on the needs of the people. But a small suburban neighborhood can be their own sufficient community by specializing, though still keeping their specializations small in scale – hobby farm size.

If there is not any specialization within the community and everyone does every type of homesteading activity, then the community won’t be efficient compared to a specialized community, but it will be more robust due to its distributed nature. This is the balance that is generally lacking unless the community is well organized, since efficiency and robustness of resources are generally at odds with each other.

As applied to liberal and conservative ideologies on the homestead, it seems to me that conservatives tend to want to do everything themselves and be fully self-sufficient (and therefore robust to catastrophe) while liberals tend to want to specialize and therefore become more efficient, though less robust against catastrophe.

Individual Vs. Communal Living

It’s pretty clear to me that conservatives tend to want big houses away from the rest of the populace, while liberals tend to live in cities for the community and vibrancy of other people. And of course, then there are communes, which are typically rural garden and natural living communities where people share resources and have some type of hyper-local governance. The hippy dream, right?

To me, a commune with friends that have a shared vision of sustenance farming seems idyllic, but of course, there’s always issues when living with other people (duh, even families don’t all get along). There seems to be more modern commune-like living situations with the advent of remote work, where digital nomad groups can form to live and work in rented homes, or the home of a friend. It’s kind of like a digital commune, where instead of doing farm work to provide food, the people are performing remote work (typically coding or IT…hmmm I wonder how AI is affecting the digital nomad lifestyle?) to bring in money to buy food.

I guess the whole point of this post is that I’ve been dreaming about castles in the south of France, so hit me up if you want to buy a castle in France to start an orchard/food forest and digital commune.