I happen to be enjoying a new granddaughter, Rachel. So, I am simply going to post a review of a book from 2006 and a manifesto that came from that book. This is 2009, and little (yet) has come of the manifesto. But, I post it to say that many of the things that Rod Dreher said should have been listened to more strongly. [Please note that I did not say everything he said.]
From Publisher’s Weekly:
What do you call people who vote for Bush but shop at Whole Foods? Crunchy cons. And according to Dreher, an editor at the Dallas Morning News, they’re forming a thriving counterculture within the contemporary conservative movement. United by a “cultural sensibility, not an ideology,” crunchy conservatives, he says, have some habits and beliefs often identified with cultural liberals, like shopping at agriculture co-ops and rejecting suburban sprawl. Yet crunchy cons stand apart from both the Republican “Party of Greed” and the Democratic “Party of Lust,” he says, by focusing on living according to conservative values, what the author calls “sacramental” living. Dreher makes no secret of his own faith in Christianity, and his book will resonate most with fellow Christians. His conversations with other crunchy conservatives—e.g., the policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a Manhattan home-schooler, the author’s wife—are illuminating, but the book fails to offer any empirical evidence to connect these individuals to a wider “movement.” Instead, it works best as an indictment of consumerism and the spiritual havoc it can wreak. While his complaints about consumer culture are similar to those advanced by liberals, Dreher frames his criticism of corporate America in explicitly conservative terms, painting rampant consumerism as antithetical to true conservatism.
The “Crunchy Con” manifesto as posted on the Facebook® description for the group “Crunchy Conservatives”:
A Crunchy Con Manifesto
By Rod Dreher
- We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
- Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
- Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
- Culture is more important than politics and economics.
- A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
- Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
- Beauty is more important than efficiency.
- The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
- We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.
- “Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.
One of the bricks on the road to Orthodoxy for me. Not because he was “Orthodox” but because he initiated (along with a bizarrely coincidental reading of GKC’s “Orthodoxy”) a review of things I hadn’t touched since my Great Books series in College.
I don’t agree with him completely. I think he can be as bourgeoisie as anyone. But much of the raw material for great things is in his book. Maybe he and I are more alike than I would admit. We both find stuff by people much smarter than us and point people to it (as long as they can get past the gate of our own egos).