The Crunchy Mystique

You wouldn’t expect a cultural conservative to quote Henry Miller in referring to certain aspects of modern existence as “the air conditioned nightmare.” But then, challenging your expectations is one thing this book will likely do. As a sustainability activist there were many times when I turned the pages and nodded my head in strong agreement. In fact, there are many points of convergence between this newly identified brand of crunchy (slang for counter-cultural) conservative creature and the eco-hippie crunchy liberal and author Rod Dreher, former columnist for the National Review, readily acknowledges this. He discusses the social and environmental breakdown caused by a corporate consumerism run amok and the antidotes of simple, small, local, and organic that is in many ways indistinguishable from Greens. And he’s even peak oil aware, citing the inevitable decline of cheap and easily accessible crude as one of several events that will require an eventual reorientation of American society toward a more local and conservationist way of life.

But perhaps the biggest strength of Dreher’s book is that it characterizes the “crunchy con” phenomena as more of a sensibility than a set of doctrines to be followed to the letter. Using personal narratives as the primary means of conveying its basic essence, both his own and some of the hundreds of kindred spirits who responded to his initial essays identifying crunchy conservatism in the National Review Online, Dreher describes a rich and growing diversity among conservatives. In an interview with Godspy.com about the book, he explained:

We’ve gotten to a point in our politics today where the left and the right are too quick to slap a negative label on a challenging or unfamiliar idea, so they don’t have to deal with it. For too many of us on the right, calling something liberal and making fun of it is a way of avoiding having to question our own prejudices. It’s reactionary. Liberals are the same way — checking any new idea against their knee-jerk ideological sense, and rejecting it out of hand, often based on superficial reasons. There’s a lot of diversity that exists among conservatives that the media hasn’t reported on, in part because there’s an advantage to seeing us all as cartoons.

I could personally relate to this sentiment, having grown up in a family with class, social and political divisions where conventional doctrines and their resulting prejudices were constantly chewed up and spit out. My mother’s side of the family was upper middle-class, suburban, and conservative Republican while my father was descended from blue-collar country folks who were reliably Democratic. Consequently, independent inquiry and critical thinking were encouraged by parents who sought to escape the stale partisan limitations they grew up with. This probably explains why, even though I have developed sympathies for many left-leaning positions over the years, I have never felt completely comfortable with the more hardcore lefties I sometimes associate with. Self-righteousness, intellectual complacency and ideological rigidity lurk on both ends of the spectrum and this contributes little in the way of meaningful solutions to address the very real challenges we face as a society.

Dissident Voice