“Crunchy Cons.”

This is the next book about American political culture that I want to read. 

When a National Review colleague teased writer Rod Dreher one day about his visit to the local food co-op to pick up a week’s supply of organic vegetables (“Ewww, that’s so lefty”), he started thinking about the ways he and his conservative family lived that put them outside the bounds of conventional Republican politics. Shortly thereafter Dreher wrote an essay about “crunchy cons,” people whose “Small Is Beautiful” style of conservative politics often put them at odds with GOP orthodoxy, and sometimes even in the same camp as lefties outside the Democratic mainstream. The response to the article was impassioned: Dreher was deluged by e-mails from conservatives across America—everyone from a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican to an NRA staffer with a passion for organic gardening—who responded to say, “Hey, me too!”

… At a time when the Republican party, and the conservative movement in general, is bitterly divided over what it means to be a conservative, Dreher introduces us to people who are pioneering a way back to the future by reclaiming what’s best in conservativism—people who believe that being a truly committed conservative today means protecting the environment, standing against the depredations of big business, returning to traditional religion, and living out conservative godfather Russell Kirk’s teaching that the family is the institution most necessary to preserve…

Crunchy Cons is both a useful primer to living the crunchy con way and a passionate affirmation of those things that give our lives weight and measure. In chapters dedicated to food, religion, consumerism, education, and the environment, Dreher shows how to live in a way that preserves what Kirk called “the permanent things,” among them faith, family, community, and a legacy of ancient truths.

Amy Welborn mentioned it on her blog today and Rod Dreher showed up in the comments.  He wrote,

I interviewed a bunch of folks for it, and had them talk about the way they lived their lives as conservatives that put them outside the mainstream of American (esp Republican) life. What I discovered as I reported the book is that almost all the people who identify as conservatives but who live this countercultural way are religious. It was a trip to be on the phone with an Orthodox Jewish woman from Massachusetts who was going on and on about how much she loves this Pope Benedict, and how the countercultural stands he takes fills her with admiration.

Anyway, the book is organized into eight chapters, each exploring this sensibility as it expresses itself in various aspects of our daily lives. The first chapter defines the phenomenon. Then we get into Consumerism, Food, Home, Education, The Environment, and Religion. The final chapter is called "Waiting for Benedict," a title I got from the final two paragraphs of the Thomist philosopher Alasdair Macintyre’s book "After Virtue." Macintyre says that our culture is so fragmented now that recovery in the short term is not really possible, so the only thing for men and women of virtue to do is to create their own communities, like the monks of the fifth century, did to preserve the faith and civilization against the coming of the Dark Ages. Macintyre says the world needs a new St. Benedict to inspire communities of virtue in the same way.

My view is that the only way any of us are going to preserve for ourselves and our families our faith and our values is to live intentionally countercultural lives, and in turn to build up our own communities. I don’t advocate neo-Amishness, but I do advocate more or less seceding from the media and the mall, but not in a fearful sense; rather, I find positive joy in the good things we have, and believe that we’ve got to work to create communities where those things are preserved and affirmed, even celebrated, in our families and communities.  [emphasis mine – E.]

I have resisted the label "conservative" for years, but all this appeals to me… I might be willing to call myself a crunchy con! 

I read Dreher’s article — the one that spawned the book — soon after it appeared in July 2002.  An excerpt:

After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We’d go to farmers’ markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties.

We were also startled to discover how large the homeschooling movement is here in New York City, and that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the left-wing counterculture. Given our backgrounds in Texas and Louisiana, we assumed religious conservatives were the only folks interested in homeschooling. I did some reporting on homeschoolers in Manhattan, and learned that most of them did it for the same reasons we plan to: an unwillingness to trust the state schools here with something as important as our children’s education.

All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like — jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son — is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain.

The underlying quality that crunchy-cons and …. crunchy-libs(?) are both seeking, implies Dreher, is authenticity.  Another anecdote I like:

Catholic Julianne says she absorbed a lot of her "natural" ideas through her anti-abortion activism. Awe over the miracle of birth led her to study natural-childbirth practices, which hooked her up with herb-savvy Earth Mother types in Birkenstocks — "and before you know it, I was eating nutritional yeast on my baked potatoes. Eeuh! Liberal!"

Teaching her kids to read early made Julianne think that maybe the intellectually deadening public school wasn’t the best thing for them, and she became a homeschooler without quite realizing what was happening. "That’s supposed to be right-wing," she wrote. "But I was first introduced to homeschooling by John Holt, who was left-wing. How do I know? There were certain telltale phrases he used. He didn’t trust the Establishment. He didn’t trust the government schools. But that’s right wing now. Funny how I went straight from left wing to right wing without ever once passing through a phase where I trusted the government."

I can relate, oh yes.  Especially to the homeschooling connection.  Despite my protestations, I can’t deny that I’m a "religious conservative" in the pop-cultural sense, although it’s more precise just to identify as an orthodox Catholic.  (I mean, does "religious conservative" imply that I’m opposed to the teaching of evolution or that I want public-school teachers to lead students in prayer?  For the record, um, no and no.)  And yeah, part of the reason I homeschool is because the school environment isn’t conducive to developing moral values.  But it’s not just morality I value here — I want each child of mine to develop a skepticism towards pretended authority, a strongly independent mine, and confidence in the goodness of his own self as well as that of others.   Not to mention the fact that I want to give them so much more intellectual freedom than I had as a child.  These are, cough, liberal concerns (but shouldn’t they be everyone’s?)