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Granola on the right
National Review, March 13, 2006 by Brian C. Anderson
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 Forum, 245 pp., $24)
A COUPLE of years back, when he still worked in New York for NATIONAL REVIEW, Rod Dreher told his editor that he was off to pick up his family's delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables from a Brooklyn organic-food co-op. "Ewww, that's so lefty," she said, screwing up her face.
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That got Dreher, who these days edits and writes for the Dallas Morning News, thinking. Organic food is a leftwing cliche. But then, he realized, many things he and his wife, Julie, valued and believed in were more common among mass-culture-disdaining earthy-crunchy hippie types than among his conservative colleagues. He and Julie grooved to Cuban son and jazz on NPR and loved arty films, for instance; and they distrusted big business and despised tract houses, malls, and other aesthetically unpleasing byproducts of a consumer society. A few days after his exchange, Dreher wrote a witty article, "Birkenstocked Burkeans," for National Review Online, exploring the apparent tensions between his family's way of life and his political allegiances. A massive outpouring of sympathetic e-mails emerged from similarly "crunchy" right-leaning readers.
Crunchy Cons expands and deepens Dreher's earlier essay, making a sustained argument out of his earlier impressions. It is a marvelous book: thoughtful, deeply personal, funny, energetically written--even un-put-downable. It is also unfair to conservatives and in some ways wrong or at least overstated.
What, exactly, is "crunchy conservatism"? It's not a political program, Dreher informs us, but "a sensibility, an attitude, a fundamental stance toward reality, and a pretty good road map to a rich, responsible, fulfilling, charitable, and above all joyful life." At its core, that stance is sacramental, Dreher explains. "At the risk of sounding pompously metaphysical, for people who adopt a sacramental way of being, everyday things, occurrences, and exchanges provide an opportunity to encounter ultimate reality--even, if you like, divinity."
Today's "mainstream conservatives," it seems, have lost all connection with a sacramental approach to life. Instead, fetishizing individual choice and the endless acquisition of stuff, they deify the free market. "Consumerism has become our religion," Dreher proclaims, "and it is difficult to identify anything within the contemporary Republican Party that stands against the dogma of the Market Supreme." Yes, he acknowledges, the market increases prosperity. But unchecked, it also stokes envy and greed, eviscerates traditions, toxifies culture, and depletes natural resources. How is any of that truly conservative?
Market veneration distorts the lives of mainstream conservatives in other ways, too, Dreher believes. "For many of us," he asserts, education is "about no more than making sure our kids get into the right college, meet the right people, and go on to have a good (read 'lucrative') career." No longer are the True, the Good, and the Beautiful educational ends. Conservatives claim to want God back in the public square, moreover, "but for too many of us, religion is a pious veneer over our own unconscious worship of materialism." Empty, feel-good faith is pervasive on the right.
Crunchy conservatives want nothing to do with this crass, spiritually arid, and ultimately destructive worldview. When it comes to food, for example, crunchy cons reject the "fast, cheap, and out of control" culinary life promoted by the American food industry and, like Dreher himself, go organic. "Food not only nourishes the body, but it, and the rituals surrounding its preparation, nourish something in the human soul," he observes. Sure, it's more expensive. But by buying produce and meat from local farmers, you support traditional ways of life. You also free yourself from moral complicity with factory farming, with its drugged cattle and feces-covered chickens. Plus: The food tastes better.
Crunchy cons are greener in general than your typical conservative, says Dreher. Citing the 2005 U.N. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, he warns that our "consumer-crazed capitalism" is fast destroying conditions of life for future generations. A properly crunchy view of the environment understands the need to restrain man's volcanic energies. Among the heroes of Crunchy Cons are conservationist writer Wendell Berry and former George W. Bush speechwriter and NATIONAL REVIEW contributor Matthew Scully, whose recent book Dominion presents a powerful conservative defense of our duties to the animal kingdom.
Not for crunchy cons the big new homes and patios of exurban America. "Even if the houses are newer and bigger-the fabled McMansion in the newer exurbs--there is a certain sameness, an inhuman quality that makes them seem like houses, but not homes," Dreher maintains. If you're house hunting, he suggests, why not look instead for an
