Are folks who wear sandals conservative or liberal? How about people who buy organic vegetables? There are certain outward habits or mannerisms that are widely associated with left-wing politics, but really have little or nothing to do with public policy.
Now comes a new book by Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons
I haven’t read the book. (Incredibly, very few publishers bother to mail me advance copies.) But I have read Dreher’s CrunchyCon Blog, which focuses on what I assume are the themes of the book. It even contains a 10-point “Crunchy Con Manifesto”:
- 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.
Certainly, this list is open to criticism. Points 1 and 2 strike me as pompous holier-than-thou boasting, and point 5’s invocation of “stewardship” makes me wince. But “crunchy cons” do exist, and Dreher is making an honest effort to recognize them.