Customer Reviews

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America (or at least the Republican Party)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The best way to describe the book is "reorientation." Rod, a conservative Roman Catholic, has done just that: he took a step back, reaffirmed his faith, and reoriented his life around his faith. The results were a bit surprising. But the first step is orientation (or reorientation, as the case might be): Rod argues that a return to metaphysics is in order, especially if that metaphysics is an orthodox religion. An orthodox religion, broadly speaking, is one that promotes virtue and the virtuous life; thus, in a way, we have a return to the more ancient view of living well. It is this proper orientation (virtue through faith) that leads Rod (and others like him) to be both crunchy and conservative.

Rod's faith led him to what has become the standard conservative social/domestic politics of the past few decades: anti-abortion, pro-free market, and pro-family (broadly speaking in all cases). But Rod and the Crunchy Cons claim that most Republicans (the closest thing to conservatives in the government) only pay lip service to these ideals. Thus we have the second (re)-orientation: towards family and especially towards community. Indeed, Rod even agrees with Hillary Clinton that it takes a village to raise a child (yep, Crunchy Cons have some strange bedfellows). Rod argues very strongly for a return to the communities of yesteryear, when people sat on their porches at night and had neighbors over for dinner. Nowadays, people live in their "McMansions," trying to keep up with the Jones' by buying the latest and greatest, all on the justification of the "free market" and "individual liberty." So, a return to community-based society also coincides with an attack against consumerism and license.

Rod is very clear that he is not against a free market, broadly speaking. But a free market ought not to be used to justify, for example, the destruction of old and historic neighborhoods, or the over-consumption of material goods. Therefore, some government intervention or regulation may be required to protect communities and families from unbridled consumerism/license. Of course, if the community at large re-orients itself toward religion and morality, seeking virtue instead of the here and now, these regulations would be unnecessary. Until then, Crunchy Cons need to do all they can to protect themselves, their loved ones, and society at large from rampant consumerism (really, just another form of license).

With the re-orientation through virtue towards the family, Rod discusses the issue of homeschooling. It is perfectly Crunch Con to homeschool. In fact, it's desirable: it allows children and parents to become closer, it helps manage the household better (one parent stays at home), and it provides a strong moral and religious upbringing that public schooling cannot (and will not) provide. Rod (or rather his wife) homeschools his sons and is pleased with the results. Therefore, Crunchy Cons also need to seek policies that allow for better regulations regarding homeschooling and other alternative means of education.

The last major part of this reorientation to virtue through faith is where the Crunchy really enters. Rod argues that conservatives need to be more involved in advocating good environmental policies; that is, we need to be conservationists. His plan is to advocate for conservation and pretend that the conservatives made it up (a bit facetious sure, but a darn good election strategy if you ask me). Thus, Crunchy Cons need to advocate for intelligent environmental policies: logging that prevents underbrush from gathering but doesn't destroy the forests; intelligent reduction of air pollution; and (probably the most controversial point) a move away from the "agribusiness" model of farming and a return to the traditional farm. A traditional farm is one that follows nature's way of raising animals and plants: no genetic manipulations, no hormones, open ranges for grazing, and no feeding dead animal to the animals. Right now, buying this organic/natural food is expensive, but if government changes its regulations away from large agribusiness farms towards these small farms the price would most likely change in favor of the consumer. The best part about this organic argument (at least to me) is that it makes so much sense: it's natural, the way God intended. How can a practicing Catholic not go for it?

Of course, the true essence of Crunchy Conservatism is not a strict adherence to certain policies; it is merely a reliance on metaphysics, that there is something higher than you and permanent that requires your attention over the mere physical. I have a feeling that because of this reliance on the Permanent Things, most Crunchy Cons will agree generally with the above policies, but Rod is clear to say that agreement with him is by no means required.

Elected Republicans would do well to pay attention to this book; they could most likely increase their voter base and be elected in greater numbers if they reached across the divide and attracted the liberals that vote only on issues like the environment. But he also says that maybe those of us who only vote Republican as the lesser of two evils should do the same and support those Democrats over some Republicans if they align with the Crunchy Con ideals.

It's a great book, and you should buy it now, even if you don't agree with Rod; the debate that hopefully will result within the Republican Party can only help.

With Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher has contributed something fresh and new to the standard Left-Right debate in this country. The goal of the author is clearly to ignite a conversation about just what it means to be a conservative.

Dreher argues for a conservativism that emphasizes the interests of families over the interests of big business. Business relationships should be based on more than the bottom line. Small businesses with deep ties to the community are worth conserving. The drab sameness of our suburban sprawl is sucking the life out of us. Efficiency is not preferable to beauty. If you turn your children over to "the culture" to be raised by the public schools and institutional day-care you will have little or no control over what they learn or how they turn out. Maybe the amazing beauty of this land is worth preserving. Maybe that is even conservative?

This is a thought provoking book written in a personal and engaging style. The questions it raises are important and the solutions it offers work. If you have grown tired the rhetoric that passes for political debate these days, if you are equally put off by the laissez faire morality of the left and the Republican devotion to the profits of real estate developers against all that is worth conserving, you will love this book.

A final thought... the "Crunchy Con Manifesto" at the beginning of the book, and the last chapter entitled "Waiting For Benedict" are alone worth the price of the book.

I was excited about reading Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher because we're crunchy and ideologically conservative, and the subtitle intrigued me. We got on the list at our local public library and waited it out. From the preface, the book caught and kept my attention. Dreher is a gifted and personal writer who is easy to read. Because crunchy cons are my kind of people, I often wanted to cheer as I read along.

Many of the ideological emphases of the book are ones we value in our family. We care about more than just the bottom line when we shop and are willing to pay more for products we "believe in" such as locally grown and organic foods, things that are well crafted, beauty and not just utilitarian function, etc. The process is important to us and not just the end result. I enjoyed reading the book because the many anecdotes reminded me that there are others out there who care about the things that we do, which can be hard to find the suburban South.

However, when I finished the book I was disappointed with it on several levels. First, it wasn't very persuasive and it relied on ad hominem attacks and emotionalism to make points. If I didn't already agree with Dreher, I probably would not have been swayed by him. Some of the chapters were weaker than others, for example, the chapter on home was mostly about buying a smaller, older house. Even though we are in the process of buying our first house and it is a small, 70 year old bungalow, it may not be the most crunchy thing to do for every family. Older homes aren't as energy efficient, for example. Some aren't laid out well for entertaining and building community with others. Also, the chapter on homeschooling wasn't very grounded in reality and I think it might have been better tackled if he had emphasized that crunchy con families realize that education isn't neutral and emphasized the many crunchy choices out there (alternative schools, coops, classical Christian schools, etc) along with homeschooling.

I think what disappointed me the most about the book is that Dreher didn't fufill the subtitle which reads: "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.)" How are we saving America? I'd like to know that, myself. I've seen that the paperback version that will be released in the fall has a new subtitle, according to Amazon, and I'd suspect it's for that reason. If you are looking for anecdotal, warm writing about those in the Republican Party who "act lefty," Crunchy Cons delivers. But I think I was expecting just a little bit more. (6.5/10)

Hmmm. A lot of people tend to write reviews based on whether or not they agree with the author's point of view; he's right or he's wrong. As a die-hard lefty liberal, I will say that I don't agree with everything that Dreher had to say; however I found his book to be a very interesting, well-written read. I honestly didn't realize that people who hold so many of the the ideals that I value (like environmentalism/conservationism; small-farm, locally grown foods; non-consumerism...) could also be a political and religious conservative-- like Dreher in his introduction, I thought we were all liberals and that conservatives were all free-market-driven, economy-obsessed owl-killers. (ha ha)

Dreher's argument that most people (liberals and conservatives alike)don't practice what they preach when it comes to family values, hyper-consumerism, etc., certainly rings true in this era of ever-larger houses and cars combined with less and less famly time; of Wal-mart and factory farming.

For a conservative, Dreher speaks sense!

Dreher tells us a dozen times that he is going to provide a stunning criticism of unrestrained market forces and the way they have twisted conservatives who love them. This repetitive tic gives a halting start to the book. On with it, the reader starts to say at about page 28, start doing it!

The book drips with self-satisfaction. The most modern of diseases is the absolute need most Americans have, nowadays, to cite their own choices as representing some sort of moral clarity, to have their sandwich and be called a hero for eating it. This whole crunchy con business reeks of self-satisfaction. If the food tastes better and the shoes feel nice, wear them, without the maundering on and on about how this somehow represents religious and cultural sensibilities that are vaunted, exceptional, and trenchant.

The irritating nature of the writing almost obscures the percipient central point, one that echoes numerous authors, is in no way original, but that needs to be a central thesis of social analysis in the 21st century: the market as a powerful freedom giving force for culturally-corrosive social change. This theme is found in many authors of late, from John Paul II to Rod Dreher in this book, but bears repeating... capitalism fosters freedom as a necessity for its own convenience, because mobile labor markets and contract law require choice from individuals (see Peter Berger or Max Weber). Yet capitalism has destructive sides that are harmful to labor (see Schumpeter) and corrosive to culture, values, and religion (John Paul II, Solzhenitsyn, among others).

If crunchy conservatism becomes a political movement, as Dreher seems to wish, then this book will be important as a populizer of these more intelligent voices. If it becomes merely another social commentary, there are others that are better, less irritating, and yet.

And yet this topic is so important to understanding this next century, that this reviewer says let a thousand flowers bloom, tolerate this book, read it, by all means let us have another book on crunchy liberalism... The scouring winds of the market economy, so powerful in delivering freedom and so painful and soulless, offer humanity freedom without content, and that is the internal challenge that awaits the West. External challenges face America every day in the form of Islamism, China, etc... yet this internal worry is not mere navel gazing, even though Dreher does love his own navel - in the form of especially tasty locally grown organic navel oranges, no doubt.

Dreher relies on Alisdair MacIntyre and Wendell Berry, two of my favorite authors, for his insights on the cultural and spiritual values being destroyed by unalloyed capitalism. His final chapter relies on MacIntyre's warning that we are in a dark age, waiting for a new Saint Benedict. This is once again a brilliant irritant -- his use of these authors is entirely derivative, yet they are good choices. Dreher essentially calls for a modern "tune in, drop out, but do it in a way that is grown up and moral".

As applied by MacIntyre and Berry, none of this is really Republican or Democrat. And the entire crunchy con manifesto, a catchy little set of slogans, leaves the reader curiously empty, wishing that the author had offered some advancement of the argument, or of faith, or of social policy. Dreher's role is as a populizer, an apologist for dropping out of the mainstream, a self-satisfied half-clever man who is absolutely on the right track, and maybe that is enough.

Dreher is basically asking: shouldn't a conservative's life look like one? Shouldn't conservatives try to actually conserve the things they say are so important, like family and community? And shouldn't they think some other things - the natural world, for example - are important enough to conserve? Even if that means doing some things typically associated with aging pony-tailed hippies?

Good questions all. Things like local food co-ops sometimes smack of smug liberalism, but Dreher points out how it may be more in line with conservative values to (for example) buy free-range meat there than factory meat at Kroger.

Dreher's bete noir is consumerism, and it's hard to really argue with him in a Wal-Mart-ified world, where economic efficiency is quite often the be-all and end-all of public moral decision-making. (Always low prices!) Crunchiness is highly associated with traditional religious belief, which motivates its adherents to abandon the materialism of homo economicus and to actually live as though man has a soul. That leads them to live and shop in different places, eat different foods, raise their kids differently. Dreher terms it a sacramental way of life.

I think the book (and the crunchy-con idea as a whole) suffers a bit when it gets hung up in trivial lifestyle issues (like the homemade granola and Birkenstocks that earned Dreher's idea its moniker and the unfortunate subtitle). So when you read the book, look past the details of the specific choices people make. More important (IMHO) is the issue of whether conservatives are really willing to live like conservatives and bear some social and economic costs for individual and collective social and spiritual benefits.

It's written in a conversational style, which makes for smooth reading but not the most tightly-reasoned argument possible. And given some of the concerns of crunchy's critics from the right that crunchiness is nothing but an arrogantly codified set of personal preferences, the book is probably not the best possible opening salvo in the argument. Opening the "crunchy manifesto" by saying that crunchies can see the shortcomings of conservatism more clearly than mainstream cons doesn't help the book endear itself to conservative critics.

Overall, it's definitely worth buying & reading. I think you're best served by treating it as a seed planted to start a debate, rather than a comprehensive statement of the ideas underpinning a movement. I think a companion volume could be written that shores up some loose points and treats the premise in a more intellectually rigorous fashion. To be fair, I don't think Dreher was going for intellectual rigor with this book but rather accessibility.

For further reading, Dreher hosts a blog at National Review Online where the book & ideas are discussed; very interesting is the pretty snarky reaction from some of his fellow travellers at NR. (Full disclosure: I'm an occasional emailer to the blog and participant in the debate.)

Read & enjoy, with God's blessings.

From the reviews posted here it looks like Dreher certainly and unnecessarily left himself open to easy criticism. Urban folks criticize him for urging a return to the rural, rural folks accuse him of being a rich urban yuppie, poor people criticize him for demanding people purchase expensive goods, rich people criticize him for demanding we give up material goods and live in poverty. It seems like everyone has missed the point which is that Dreher is looking to emphasize family and community and is in favor of the values that strengthen these things. Family and community used to be the soul of what we call conservativism, but it has been taken over by those forces that isolate families and destroy communities: sprawl, mass-consumerism, materialism, mass-media. The community can be urban--Drehar lived in Brooklyn and has repeatedly praised the neighborhoods there--or rural. It can even be suburban, if suburbia regains its support for small, independent, capitalism epitomized by the small business owner, and gives up the mass market, big box store, sprawling, consumerism. Corporation worshippers need to realize that big business can destroy communities, unrestrained free-marketers need to realize that the family is harmed by the values of materialism it fosters, and anti-government Republicans need to realize the the environment is worthy of protection for a good life. These are the true points of Drehar's thesis and they are not as easy to refute as his critics make out.

The essential observation of this book is that although man lives not by bread alone, both political parties act as though we did. Dreher characterizes liberals as those who refuse to admit any limits on their sexual behavior, and conservatives as those who reject any limits on their economic behavior. Both, he says, have the materialistic view that happiness is something to be gained by possession, in the one case of another body, the other material "stuff."

Dreher is what I would call a true conservative. He believes in conserving the family, the community, our traditions, our natural resources and with them our environment, the relationship between our bodies and those of the plants and animals that provide our nutrition, and most importantly, between us and our generation and the generations of our progeny yet unborn.

It is not the conservatism of the Republican party, which he endorses weakly as merely the lesser of two evils. It is the minimalism of the socialist master of the "minor arts" and father of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, who advocated that one "Have nothing in hyour houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

Dreher advocates homeschooling for several reasons. It allows parents to communicate their values faithfully to their children. It isolates the child from the worst of popular culture, the precocious sexuality of TV, the materialism of clothes and gadgets and all that stuff. It also recognizes that parents are uniquely invested in their children's futures, and that a homeschool environment is uniquely capable of adapting to the personality and individual strengths of each child.

Dreher recognizes that his set of beliefs are most often found in a package that includes religious belief. He cites examples of Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox Christian and Jewish families. He views the mainstream Protestant churches as being hopelessly compromised by the values of their host society. As Daniel Dennett would claim in "Breaking the Spell," Dreher believes in belief. He advocates belonging to a church, but rather strikingly abstains from advocating any particular set of beliefs about a God. This to me is the problem of our age. There is no logical argument to counter Dennett and Richard Dawkins' cases that mankind is no more than the end result of a blind evolutionary process. Moreover, religion is successful because religious people are breeders. They put the interests of their progeny above their own. Europeans and Blue State folks have caught on, and putting their own material interests above those of their children, they are refusing to commit to having children.

It seems that Dreher is advocating a kind of stasis, but the fact is that society is in a permanent, and accelerating state of flux. The current wave is washing away traditional morality and family structure. Who knows what comes next? All we know for sure is that the history of those who stand against the tide has not been rich with success.

Though Dreher doesn't pursue this line of thought, there seems to be a disconnect between the fact that it takes an affluent modern society to generate the kind of back-to-simplicity he advocates. Crunchy cons can no more be self-sustaining than Shakers. They need the universities, the Internet, the interstates etc. to survive. They also need to be highly intelligent and driven individuals in their own right. They don't meet the criterion of Kant's categorical imperative. It is not a way of life that could be universalized. Neither does it satisfy Dawkin's criteria for a meme that is likely to become widespread. Its propagation requires a mind with more than average discernment and with an appreciation for major themes of traditional Western philosophy and religion.

While I'm feeling increasingly uncomfortable recently with certain Republican trends (trying to police the whole planet, corporation worship and greed, manic consumerism, insane spending, etc.), I am still utterly mortified by the Democratic party's goals and their tactics. I really enjoyed reading this book, just because it felt great to know that the trepidation I am feeling is shared by many others. But Dreher seems to have written this book during a bit of a honeymoon phase with his new lifestyle changes... I think that in five or ten years he might find that the problems he thought he escaped also plague the new movements he's embraced. Recommended, and a good source of leads on more information.

I suppose I count myself in as a "Crunchy Con" because he is describing me and my family spot on. I am convinced this is the real base of self-described conservatives in America. The big business types are an influencial block, but it is those of us who are centered on "The Permanent Things" (God, marriage, family, neighbor, community, and good stewardship of the created world) who fill the so-called "Red States". Whether or not we remain within the Republican party will largely be determined by the Party's future faithfulness to these "Permanent Things." Super analysis.