Dreher's Crunchy Cons

I received today a book published recently by Crown Forum in the U.S. which I intend to review. The book is titled Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip home-schooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party) and was written by former National Review writer Rod Dreher [now at the Dallas Morning News]. It is based on a highly contentious article on new forms of conservatism that he published in National Review a few years ago and which ended up the subject of long-running debates on blogs everywhere.

There will be many things to comment on, I’m sure, once I start reading Dreher's book. Already, though, while looking over the index, a reference to a former English professor of mine, Jeffrey Hart, caught my eye. Dreher writes:

“Man is not an island. This is something conservatives used to know, before we got puffed up and arrogant. One thinks of a statement attributed to my old National Review colleague Jeffrey Hart, a Dartmouth professor:

‘It is depressing to hear cigar-smoking young conservatives wearing red suspenders take a reductive review of, well, everything. They seem to contemplate with equanimity a world without lions, tigers, elephants, whales. I am appalled at the philistinism that seems to smile at a future consisting of a global Hong Kong.’” (p.165)

Prof. Hart is right. And I’m glad Dreher chose to use this excerpt. Many young conservatives today do seem to have an entirely materialistic view of the world. Many conservatives I’ve met have no understanding of the importance of, say, rural values to conservative political values. It’s a kind of Tory Bohemianism. It's what Dreher instead calls Crunchy Conservatism.

This is worth discussing further and I know I will be coming back to these themes in the coming weeks.

Prof. Hart, it should be noted, has published several articles over the past few years which have also served to re-assess where we all stand as conservatives. He has been increasingly critical of the Bush Administration and his articles over the past few years have provoked others to re-consider what some of us mean when we say we are "conservative."

One example of Hart's recent writings is "The Evangelical Effect" written for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and dated April 17, 2005. The sub-title to the article says it all:

"The Bush presidency is not conservative. It is populist and radical, says Jeffrey Hart, its policies deformed by the influence of Christian extremism."

This is highly provocative stuff. Hart gives fuller expression to his views in his recently published history of the 50 years of National Review, titled The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times. We shall look at this particular books later this year but these are questions and themes that, again, I think are worth grappling with if we realy mean to be engaged with the world.