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The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve academics centered at Vanderbilt University in the early 20th century. Their manifesto, I'll Take My Stand (1930), was a collection of essays on the southern way of life published in response to what they saw as the negative effects of northern industrialization.
There were three common themes which appeared in these essays and I believe they could provide us some guidance as the rising generation seeks to put America back on track. These themes are what I would refer to as "practice, place, and community."
The Southern Agrarians, like our own founding generation placed a great deal of importance on what a citizen does rather than what he or she says, or the abstract ideas they might entertain. In other words, Americans have traditionally valued "practice" over "theory." As we look to right the ship of state today, I think we should be much more concerned with what people do (how they live their lives) rather than what they claim to believe or whether they espouse the Republican or Democrat party line.
Second, the Southern Agrarians believed that "place," (where one was raised or chose to live) has a major impact on character. Because they were southerners at heart, they favored a rural over an urban setting, seeing the latter as disordered and chaotic. I likewise believe that if we are going to move our country in the right direction, it will come as the result of an embrace of rural rather than urban values.
Finally, this group of thinkers stressed the importance of community, the idea that healthy citizens do not live in isolation from their counterparts. They believed that a web of intentional, interconnected relationships gives depth and meaning to life in a way that an atomized, individualist, social-media type existence cannot. Like Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, they valued the "interposing institutions" that organically grew up when people formed real communities. They recognized the benefit of these now quickly-disappearing organizations is that they stood as a buffer between the individual citizen and the harsh power of the state.
There is a great deal we can learn from the study of our own history and there are valuable lessons, important to us today, to be learned from a group of southern academics who lived and wrote nearly a century ago.