Rod Dreher: Crunchy Cons

Rod Dreher: Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots (2006; paperback, 2006, Three Rivers Press)

I've been working on compiling a list of recent political books, and ran across this little item. Someone named Rod Dreher has a book called Crunchy Cons (Crown) which champions a species of conservative that is out-of-goosestep with the political right these days. Dreher includes "A Crunchy Con Manifesto":

  1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
  2. 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.
  3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
  4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
  5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship-especially of the natural world-is not fundamentally conservative.
  6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
  7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
  8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
  9. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that "the institution most essential to conserve is the family."

Actually, at least some new lefties managed to see common ground and complementary perspectives in both right-identified (libertarian) and left-identified (communitarian) anarchists -- the Murray Rothbards and Murray Bookchins, if you will. I can't say as I ever had the least bit of interest in Russell Kirk, but aside from that there's not much obviously wrong with this manifesto. The big realization in #3 starts you off on a critique of power itself. The idea that there's anything outside of politics and economics puts you somewhere beyond Marx and Smith and all the other dismal scientists. I'm still not inclined to use words like "authentic truth" and "beauty" because they still strike me as overly arbitrary and often prejudicial, but I've come to respect conventional standards much more than I used to. So these Crunchy Cons seem like decent folks. A little weird, but hey, we don't all hatch from the same eggs.

posted 2007-01-25