Posted on 03/31/2006 7:39:09 AM PST by NYer
Over this past weekend, I had the opportunity to read Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. This is a book that has been stirring up conservative circles since its release this past winter. Dreher is a popular Generation-X conservative writer and a convert to Eastern Catholicism. He has worked for a number of publications, including the National Review, the New York Post, and the Washington Times. He is now a full-time writer and editor with the Dallas Morning News.
A Manifesto for the Family Putting Families Back Together The Little Things Count
In Crunchy Cons, Dreher sets out to chronicle how “Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party).” What Dreher has tapped is a lively coalition of conservatives who believe that family and community ought to come before unrestrained free-market capitalism.
In fact, Dreher’s nine-point “Crunchy Con Manifesto” includes the following long recognized by social and paleo-conservatives: “3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government”; “4. Culture is more important than politics and economics”; and “9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that ‘the institution most essential to conserve is the family.’” In defending these points, Dreher takes aim at the culture of lust and greed undermining American society in our day.
“Sex and commerce are fine things, but man cannot live by Viagra and the Dow Jones alone,” Dreher writes. “A life led collecting things and experiences in pursuit of happiness is not necessarily a bad life, but it’s not necessarily a good life either. Too often, the Democrats act like the Party of Lust, and the Republicans the Party of Greed. Both are deadly sins that eat at the soul, and crunchy cons believe that both must be resisted in our personal and communal lives.”
Throughout the book, Dreher provides several examples of how lust and greed undermine American society and what crunchy conservative families are doing to counter this perverse influence. “Strong, healthy individuals and strong, healthy societies cannot be made without strong, health families,” Dreher states in defense of homeschooling families. “Kids today marinate in a sexually aggressive popular culture that teaches them that life is supposed to be an erotic free-for-all.”
In a chapter explaining how modern architecture dehumanizes its occupants, Dreher notes the reason why children are often left to marinate in public schools, daycare facilities, and the popular sewage that passes for culture. The answer, to the shame of conservatives and progressives alike, is greed. Parents confuse their wants with their needs. The pursuit of the McMansion, the annual family cruise and a third luxury vehicle means more time at the office for each parent, more time in a daycare facility for the child, and less actual family interaction.
Even home time is not necessarily family time in modern North America. “Each kid has a television and a computer in [his] room,” observes David Holme, one of Dreher’s crunchy correspondents. “There’s a six-foot TV in the living room. People just tend to sit in front of them and go to mush. The houses are so large that people go off in their own little area, and they don’t interact. You never run into anybody, so you never have to play a game with anybody. People get to be like strangers living at the same address.”
Thus Dreher draws a conclusion that many other conservatives find uncomfortable: “The undeniable fact is that free-market, technology-driven capitalism, for all its benefits, tends to pull families and communities apart by empowering individuals and encouraging — even mandating — individualism.... Civil society has been routed over the past thirty years.”
Dreher’s solution to this problem is simple: we must return our focus to family, our community and church. We must renounce the selfishness of lust, avarice and covetousness, and we must one again seek to be good stewards of creation over which God has given us dominion. Finally, we must pay attention to the needs of the soul and not just those of the flesh. “Politics and economics will not save us,” Dreher concludes. “If we are to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving these ancient truths in the choices we make in everyday life.”
Dreher chronicles how many families are living out their crunchy con convictions. From homeschooling to organic and family farming, from turning off the television to turning on the oven and enjoying a good home-cooked meal, crunchy cons are doing little things to restore a more natural pace within the family. For at its essence the crunchy con philosophy is about living in harmony with the natural world as wise stewards entrusted by God with the care of His creation.
This last point has escaped Dreher’s critics in my opinion. Their most common complaint is that Dreher never gets around to presenting a plan for moving the crunchy con ideology forward. He does not have to present some grand plan; rather it is the little things that move crunchy conservatism forward. As Dreher repeatedly points out in his book, big things happen when enough people look after the little things.
“Maybe I’m too optimistic,” Dreher writes, “but I think there’s a growing army of crunchy-con homeschooled kids, not only learning academics at a higher level than most of their conventionally schooled generational peers, but also learning how to think — and, moreover, learning how to think independently and counter-culturally. This is especially true if their primary teachers — their mothers and fathers — make certain that the core convictions of their faith are the sun around which all the academic learning orbits. When these kids enter mainstream society in large numbers, we could see the beginning of a quiet cultural revolution.” And since many of these children come from Republican families, as Dreher painstakingly chronicles throughout his book, the GOP is more likely to be the political vehicle used by these young crunchy cons to bring about this quiet counter-cultural revolution. But if so, it won’t be the Republican party of today, it will be the one they rebuild.
Life in suburbia was too noisy in so many ways. The traffic, the bigger and better jobs, the materialism, the pressure on our kids, etc. Enough was enough!
I still prefer being a South Park Republican
I guess I'm a counter cultural crunchy con.
I've actually read excerpts from this book published on the Web-and passages from the book itself-recently, and agree with most of the sentiments Dreher expresses.
I can't say I fully share his mystical relationship with food-I suppose because it involves an ancestral European relationship with the earth that my family has gradually discarded as they've embraced America over the centuries, although my last name, believe it or not, means "pear tree" loosely translated-but I do appreciate the value of his words in this respect, especially the part of this book where he explains the benefits of being able to go to the farmer's markets that take place in this city every week.
When I have some more surplus cash to splurge on some of my favorite books I'll probably pick up a copy of Crunchy Cons.
For myself I can only say that, as a conservative, I've never thought of the market as a god, never worshipped capitalism, and always understood the trade-offs any economic system presents to those who participate in it. The market is simply a tool, the best tool ever devised for creating wealth. It's not the 'be and end all' of life, and if Dreher maintains that principled conservatives, with the exception of certain Randian types, have said otherwise in the modern era, he's simply mistaken.
Thanks for the ping...
read later!!
Statistics don't back your observation. It's the Hummer-driving, 12-room house exurbs that are the Republican strongholds in this country.
I have always been there, as has my family. I'll just keep doing what I have been doing. I'm not especially thrilled with being labelled, though--just another socio-demographic pigeonhole.
In that case, what are the smug levels among the Crunchy Cons? Not to Clooney levels, to be sure, but still...
Crunchy on the outside? Soft and loving on the inside? I must put the Eucharist at the center of my heart and my life or I won't have any motivation for anything or anyone.
This is not on my reading list. The political debate, and the resulting society, have been shaped into a Marxist dialectic. Greed is not good, and the definition of Capitalism (Labor, Capital, and Capital Owners) is a straw man cast system intended to make communism look good.
I think we might be crunchy.
seems the MSM is trying to push this as "catholic liberal democrats".
This has all the stink of a media effort to produce "me too" democrats for religion.
I'm closer to this than any other conservative viewpoint I've seen expressed.
I take the train to work, have tried doing some container gardening, live below my means, etc.
Generally I'm not one for such labels, but I guess this sorta fits. Kinda.
You're quite right: this is an "older" conservatism, sometimes called "virtue" conservatism (as contrasted to "liberty" conservatism), with roots in Russeell Kirk and G.K. Chesterton and --- probably Louis IX, hey? I think Dreher invented the "crunchy" tag just as an entree or a teaser for people who might not already be familiar with the tradition.
I've got to thank Peter Vere for his good review of Dreher's book. Some critics have missed the point entirely, imagining that Dreher just wants
people to define their identity via a more refined consumerism, for instance expensive free-range chicken rather than cheap poultry-factory Tyson wingettes.
Vere (and you, B-Chan) correctly noted that Dreher is making much bigger points (like recovering a human scale for farming and a family centered way of living and a humane attitude toward other living beings) -- all
of which is consonant with a Catholic personalist philosophy.
Thanks for getting it...
And once you've hung around at Free Republic long enough, you'll see lots of soi-disant "conservatives" who are contemptuously down on marriage and family, whose response to porn is "where can I get me some 'a that?" and who think the most important Trinity is Me, Myself, and I.
If you haven't run into that yet, bless you, you are fortunate indeed.
"One television, if any, in the living room, home schooling, and modest behavior and consumption." Way to go. I'm with you, redhead.
"I've never thought of the market as a god, never worshipped capitalism, and always understood the trade-offs any economic system presents to those who participate in it."
You are absolutely correct; too many in our movement have a Walter Williams-like reglious belief in unrestrained capitalism, that the market is ALWAYS right, and that the "law" of supply and demand was handed down along with the 10 Commandments!
I do appreciate the ping.
Capitalism is a fine thing. I believe it is an important component of a free and prosperous society. Just another tyranny however when all else is sacrificed upon its' altar. Enterprise (ambition based) capitalism is a positive force. When unprincipled greed is elevated to the status of religion, bad things happen.
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