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.
If it's morally wrong and you think that as a result the law should stop it, society changes, and eventually, the people who are morally wrong will eventually turn that abuse of power back on you or your children after they gain power. SEE segregation/affirmative action, sodomy/gay "tolerance" regs, tariff barriers/"free trade." SEE ALSO affirmative action/racism, gay "tolerance" regs/gay bashing, "free trade"/xenonausea.
The best way to stop moral perversity is to shun it or protest it freely. Banning it both makes the banned act "subversive" and thus attractive to rebellious youth, and perverts the law to use for ends not suited to one who prefers a limited government.
ping
Well, I may have a largely vegetarian diet, and I do like to go hiking, but I remain a greedy capitalist pig. Therefore, this description does not suit me.
I wasn't planning on buying that book-even though Kate O'Beirne is one of my favorite contributors/editors at National Review-until the left wing slime machine decided to wage a concerted jihad against her, which turned out to be yet another tactical mistake of the type we've come to expect from the geniuses that think Howard Dean is a political visionary.
The "crunchy conservatives" would have a far greater chance of success had they moved north to Canada. That country's political heritage would have allowed a more authority-based conservatism to prosper (Toryism). They did have Red Toryism in their history, mind you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Tory
"Yep and the crunchy stuff all goes back to church teachings on subsidiarity and how it relates to family and community."
Exactly. And no free crunch :^)
Other than that potential problem, Dreher was a terrific writer for the New York Post and the rest of what is expressed in the article makes it likely that the book should be read by textured conservatives determined to preserve and expand Western Civilization. Getting one's kids out of the maw of the gummint skewels to be homeschooled by parents who love them and will impart wisdom, substantial knowledge unavailable at gummint skewels, and a fighting spirit is a BIG strategy which will guarantee future leadership to family, Church, nation and civilization. Let's help Dreher make it reality.
If it were not for baseball, football, C-SPAN (to keep an eye on the enemy) and Fox News, the television could evaporate too!
I don't know if you saw this. I just read it and I like it. I loathe Berkenstocks though.
Yeah, I noticed that too.
It's funny, because on another forum someone invoked the Taliban to denounce another user who was not in favor of mandatory condom distribution in public schools.
The problem with your viewpoint is that currently, in many respects, gov't (both state and fedgov) are merely servants of large corporate interests and laws and passed merely to please their masters. So economic concerns cannot be addressed merely at the cultural level.
Separation of Corporation and State!
Here's a thought: On many threads about raunch - whether porn, seriously nasty computer games, and the like - people will say things like "let the market decide", if people don't like it they won't buy it, it's legal, and so on.
This proves that letting the market decide in all matters is to slide off into the abyss. I've said more than once that capitalism without being informed by morality winds up little better than communism. DIfferent, but little better. Inevitably conflict arises between the rights of corporations to make money how they choose, and the rights of people to not have to live in a sewer.
PREACH IT BRO!
FAR, FAR, FAR TOO TRUE.
Not sure how far it will get before the various end times conflagrations but great to see the rise of such perceptiveness.
Have long wondered what The Millenium culture, life would look like . . . and speculated that it would be a lot more in line with this sort of focus than anything else I've read.
Have even wondered if God was going to reduce technology back to a very aggrarian sort of life . . . if not hunter/gatherer . . . in part, forcing a more relational based culture.
If we'd followed The Manual, we could have had the best of all worlds . . . but no, man knew better than even God . . . or thought he did.
So, the GREAT OBJECT LESSON for all creation looms ahead.
Say it now and say it loud.
I'm a Crunchy Con and I'm proud.
(Call me anything except late for dinner.)
Very good. But how exactly are we "crunchy?" Sounds too close to "brittle" for me.
IOW, as in the actual Constitution.
Exactly.
You should run for office. I'll vote for you!
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