Granola on the right

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.

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

Arts and Crafts bungalow--inexpensive one-story homes that became standard for suburban families in the early 20th century--in a closer-knit neighborhood? The typical bungalow boasts a porch and large windows, offering homeowners "a greater connection with nature" and with their neighbors, plus a fireplace and nice backyard garden. Cozy, humane, simple but attractive, such structures make it easier to transform your home into a "refuge from the outside world" and respect "the sacramentality of domestic life."

Crunchy cons always put family over prosperity. They think it crucial, if financially possible, to keep a parent home with the kids, even if that means giving up on getting a new plasma TV or SUV. Better still: Toss out the TV and home-school the children, argues Dreher, who, with his wife, does just that for their two young boys. Done properly, home-schooling enables parents to mold their children in the right spiritual and moral beliefs and strengthens the family. Home-schoolers often hear the question: "What about socialization? Won't your children become social outcasts?" "The screamingly obvious response," Dreher retorts, "is, look at the values predominating, in youth culture today; is that really working, for us ?"

However you choose to educate your children, keep in mind the Permanent Things, Dreher advises. One doesn't have to be religious to be a crunchy con, but most crunchy cons are religious--and orthodox in their chosen faith. Crunchy cons want to serve God, not the self or the market. "If one's religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place," Dreher writes. He movingly recounts his own 1993 conversion to Roman Catholicism, rescuing him from youthful anomie.

What to think of all this? Crunchy Cons splendidly conveys the wild variety of American conservatism. In one of his best sentences, Dreher writes: "There are many mansions in the American conservative house, and some of them are old and funky and smell like a pot of organic mustard greens cooking down on the stove." The book abounds in vivid profiles of counter-cultural conservatives. The reader gets to know, and like, lots of interesting people--an evangelical organic-livestock farmer in Texas, a Jewish ex-hippie home-schooling mother in Amherst, a South Dakotan sportsman and conservationist, and many, many more.

But Dreher's novelistic feel for conservative diversity makes his frequent rhetorical use of a market-obsessed, materialistic "mainstream" conservative-he tellingly refers to none by name--frustrating. Deifying the market? I know many pro-market conservatives; I'm one myself. Most of us defend free markets not because we think they're perfect (they're not) or because they shower society with dazzling new toys, but because they allow people--including organic farmers and home-schoolers, it's worth noting--the freedom to build futures for themselves and their families. Far from increasing envy, open economies diminish it. Lower taxes help families get by on one income and thus do what Dreher rightly believes best: keep a parent home with the children, at least while they're young. Dreher notes that the point of life isn't "to become a more satisfied shopper." Few conservatives of any type would say that it is.

Dreher leaves unanswered, too, the institutional question raised by his critique of capitalist society. What's the alternative? Dreher asserts that capitalism ravages the environment (he even favorably references Jimmy Carter's infamous malaise speech). Yet the environmental record of heavily regulated economies isn't better. More important, market-driven technological innovation will forge the clearest path to a greener world. He blames capitalism for our cultural crisis. But contemporary nihilism is imported into the market; its connection with capitalism is an accident of history. Reform the culture, and people will avoid the seductions of consumerism. This shift is already taking place: Social indicators moved in a mostly positive direction over the last decade, even as the economy boomed.

And are "mainstream conservatives" really religious phonies, as Dreher charges? It's unwise to judge other people's relationships to God hastily. Nor should we assume (and I don't think Dreher does, though sometimes he seems to imply it) that only supporters of back-to-nature farming who live in Arts and Crafts homes can adopt a sacramental stance toward reality. One could even be a corporate executive or a TV producer or--horrors--live in one of those slapped-up McMansions and still live one's life in a God-fearing, morally decent, and politically responsible way.

None of this is to say Crunchy Cons isn't a bold, interesting book. Dreher, one of the sharpest young thinkers on the right, is grappling with the Big Question of how best to lead a meaningful life. His book's answers may not please everybody, but they will certainly lead many readers to reflect on their own lives and choices, whether it's what you eat or how you feed your soul.

Mr. Anderson is senior editor of City Journal and author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt against Liberal Media Bias.

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