While I haven't read it yet, a beautiful woman I know did and highly recommends "Crunchy Cons" by Rod Dreher. I came across this review of it from Crisis magazine and thought I'd throw it up here. (BTW, I mean an extremely beautiful woman.)
Crunchy-Con Awakening
Thomas S. Hibbs
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 counter-cultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party)
Rod Dreher, Crown Forum, $24, 272 pages
With the publication of Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher—previously an editor at National Review and now an editor and writer for the Dallas Morning News—brings into public view a movement that’s not really a movement, a sensibility rather than an ideology, a phenomenon that’s perhaps best captured in the book’s eclectic subtitle: 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). Crunchy Cons, which mixes the anecdotal and the philosophical, is a great read. Despite a lingering fuzziness about what precisely crunchiness is, Dreher’s book is a compelling and hopeful portrait of the way many Americans are altering their lives, in conscious opposition to the culture, in order to recover what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.”
Dreher’s book details a kind of awakening of many Americans from a certain naïveté about the market and popular culture. There is a disconnection, or perhaps a hidden connection, between the material prosperity of our culture and our inarticulacy about what matters. Perhaps there was a time when that inarticulacy did not matter as much; now, it does. Dreher mentions the regular occurrence of well-intentioned parents who hand their kids over to public or private schools and to our popular culture and then end up shocked at the results. The objection is not to the market in all forms, only to the market as infiltrating all spheres of human life, particularly marriage, the family, and the rearing of children. Crunchy Cons is full of stories of active resistance to the culture and the market: parents who throw out their TVs and decide to homeschool their kids, join a food co-op, or take up farming. The task, as Dreher describes it, is to “imagine life outside the boundaries set by our media culture.”
As Dreher notes, there is a palpable overlap of crunchiness and a particular strain of religious conservatism. The clearest way to bring out what’s distinctive in Dreher’s book—and the central place of religion in it—is to compare it with the best work of cultural observation in recent years, David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster, 2000). Like Brooks’s bobos, crunchy cons combine the bourgeois and the bohemian. Like the bobos, the crunchies turn shopping into an art, prefer “intuitive and organic modes of thought” to the mechanistic, and celebrate “the intimate humanism of the pre-industrial craftsman.” They also both love “texture,” which is just a more refined word for crunchiness.
On the surface, both groups long for a kind of romantic authenticity and risk turning their way of life into a new trend in shopping, precisely the thing the crunchies profess to abhor. And yet the crunchies depart in striking ways from the bobos, nowhere more dramatically than on the topic of religion. For the bobos, religion must be measured by its contribution to the expansion of the self; thus, bobos engage in the (at best paradoxical) task of erecting a “house of obligation on a foundation of choice.” As Brooks hilariously imagines it, bobo heaven would involve not a last judgment, but a final conversation, a dialogue with the angel of death, not about one’s piety or even one’s moral character but about one’s taste in interior design, coffee, and food. Brooks’s unsurprising conclusion is that bobo “spiritual life is tepid and undemanding.” Although he does not cite the bobos, the following terse statement from Dreher is apt: “A God no bigger than our desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship.” That’s a pretty good description of bobo religion.
A troubling feature of Brooks’s new elite can be seen by asking a question Brooks never poses. What happens to bobo paradise when tragedy strikes—when a bobo gets fired from work in an embezzlement scandal, has to care for a seriously disabled parent, has a kid who develops a drug addiction, or worse, has a child killed in an auto accident? These sorts of tragedies never so much as surface as possibilities in Brooks’s narrative.
Not all readers will be moved to imitate the sort of choices made by the crunchies, but one at least can admire the sacrifices made and especially the sense of missionary devotion to the family; for example, giving up a lucrative position in business to run a local farm or sacrificing a second income to homeschool kids. They also demand a great deal of time and imaginative energy. It is not surprising that these choices either result from, or lead to, profound changes in self-understanding. One interviewee after another speaks of realizing a “calling.” Far more than the bobos, the crunchies and their children will be prepared, to the extent that anyone can be prepared, for tragedy.
Still, Dreher’s argument is a bit unclear about the status of crunchiness in relation to mainstream America. There is a tension between the goal stipulated at the end of the book’s prolix subtitle, “to save America (or at least the Republican party),” and the impulse, rooted in a sense of impending cultural decay, to retreat to communities at the margins of society. Dreher’s crunchy cons are trying to recover a sense of community, a sense of human association not entirely ruled by government or big business. In the words of the economist E. F. Schumacher, whom Dreher frequently quotes, “Small is beautiful.”
The crunchies are also recovering a sense of self-governance. Alexis de Tocqueville warns of the way in which individualism and centralization conspire together to squeeze out room for citizenship. And Irving Kristol observes the way in which the bourgeois consumer has replaced the bourgeois citizen. But crunchy cons seem more pessimistic about American culture than Tocqueville was. While they are by no means indifferent to the public good, crunchies are not interested in associations as instruments of political health, but as ways of recovering a sense of personal purpose.
Do the crunchies want to save America or the Republican Party or, having acknowledged the short-term irreversibility of civilized decay, do they plan to “retreat behind defensible borders”? Of course, Dreher and most of his crunchies are somewhere between these two options, just as the contemporary Republican Party is between social conservatism and libertarianism. To the extent that the crunchies aspire to opt out of the wider culture, they are vulnerable to the free-rider objection: that of creating little enclaves that are nonetheless dependent on the society that they have abandoned for services and protections. As I say, this is clearly not Dreher’s ideal, but it is a difficulty the crunchies should face squarely.
But these sorts of questions might well inform a Crunchy Con sequel. Such a book would indeed be welcome, as it would provide Dreher an opportunity to argue further for the contemporary viability of Kirk’s permanent things. The great merit of Dreher’s book, after all, is to remind us of a permanent truth about which large portions of our culture suffer chronic amnesia. The bourgeois virtues may satisfy the needs of the political order, but they will never satisfy the longings of the human soul.
Thomas S. Hibbs is the author of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld (Spence, 2002).
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