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The misfits: a voice for crunchy conservatives.
Christian Century, June 13, 2006 by David Dark
Crunchy Cons: 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).
By Rod Dreher. Crown, 272 pp., $24.00.
I THINK I MIGHT qualify as a Crunchy Conservative. wear Birkenstocks whenever weather permits. My wife and I worry about our children becoming too much the target market. We buy organic an awful lot. When my friends and I grapple with issues, we ask the age-old question: What would Wendell Berry do? I've voted, at various times, for Democrats, Republicans and Ralph Nader. I want to affirm the sacramental integrity of creation without fitting into any facet of Karl Rove's high-tech totem pole. I want to be a student of wisdom, ever ancient, ever new and ever cosmic.
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To my mind, there's an encouraging sensibility on offer in Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons. The subtitle is a bit misleading. Dreher, a writer and editor at the Dallas Morning News, doesn't appear to put much stock in the right-wing brand or much hope in the Republican Party. He can't name a career politician (Democrat or Republican) whom he finds encouraging.
He notes throughout the book that it's generally the so-called liberals who are "'the most conservation-minded" as homeowners and stewards of local economies. "I fail to see just what American conservatism has conserved." And he repeatedly calls into question the "family values" hype that seems to sustain the GOP: "Conservatives are divorcing at the same rate as liberals."
Amid the static and the noise, Dreher seeks to discern and describe the Crunchy Con character as it emerges beneath the radar of the news networks and the pollsters. The Crunchy Con has begun to suspect that there's something essential in William Blake's vision of "dark Satanic mills," that Jimmy Carter was largely right in his talk of "moral malaise," and that we often commit murder in our attempts at profitably dissecting whatever corner of hallowed creation we refer to as a resource.
Neotraditionalism is an umbrella term that Dreher employs to cover this ecologically minded, self-consciously community-oriented demographic whose ties to religious tradition bear countercultural fruit.
Dreher persists in using the liberal-conservative jargon even as his findings belie the usefulness of the labels. I wonder if this has more to do with his publisher (who also gives us Ann Coulter) than his own inclination. The inexactness of the Us vs. Them paradigm of popular conservative talk is apparent in Dreher's "Crunchy Con Manifesto," which doesn't appear to resonate with either major political party. Among the tenets: "The economy must be made to serve humanity's best interests, not the other way around. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government." And: "A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship--especially of the natural world--is not fundamentally conservative."
With statements like these, it often appears that Dreher wants to recover the stolen conservative brand. He thinks the fact that asthma and respiratory diseases are caused by industrial pollutants is a family-values issue. He believes that the popularly "conservative" refusal to relate global warming to human activity is like tobacco company executives' denial of a link between smoking and lung cancer. And he deeply resents the suggestion that Americans might best respond to the attacks of September 11 by spending more money: "The American way of life is now synonymous with the idea of endless material abundance, at low cost. It is an intoxicating vision, but that's not how the world works."
In regard to the million-dollar industry of "conservative" talk, Dreher wants to edge out the predominance of "market-mad consumers who vote Republican ... whose commitment to conservative ideals ends the moment it costs us something." He proposes a sacramental vision, something akin to Vaclav Havel's antipolitical politics, whereby individual ethical choices, discerned and hashed out within communities (families, neighborhoods and churches), might somehow serve to transform the collective.
The revolution might be nothing more than a determined witness in which people choose lifestyles of mindfulness and communal consideration, an art of being in the world. Dreher notes that joining the volunteer fire department or a local farmers' food co-op might be more authentically conservative than joining the Republican Party.
COMPARED TO the conditioned reflexes of today's politics (our values versus their values, or our Swift Boat Veterans against their Swift Boat Veterans), there's something noteworthy and redemptive in the character type that Dreher sketches. It reminds me of many Protestants my age (I'm 36) whose dabblings in Dostoevsky and other Russian writers eventually took them toward Eastern Orthodoxy and homeschooling or whose discovery of Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy as they emerged from Baptist youth groups took them all the way to G. K. Chesterton and Roman Catholic catechism.
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