Crunchy Cons
by Rod Dreher
(Crown, 259 pages, $24)
The complete title of this book is Crunchy Cons: 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).
Makes you wish for She by H. Rider Haggard, doesn’t it?
Or better yet, It by Elinor Glyn.
It takes an unusual writer to confuse his readers before they
even finish the title, but Rod Dreher, as we shall see presently,
is never at a loss for confusion. He has written a book about
conservatives with hippie tastes, so knowing that Birkenstocks are
hippie sandals, I thought “crunchy” had to do with granola. But no;
“crunchy” is slang for “earthy,” he states, and leaves it at that.
The reader is left to assume that he means “earthy” in the agrarian
sense of “the good earth”; he couldn’t possibly mean earthy as in
blunt speech in view of his rapture-on-every-page tendency to
cascading wordfalls. I tried two dictionaries and a thesaurus but
all of them relate “crunchy” to loud chewing or grinding, or to
accounting, as in numbers crunching. Dreher never does explain, so
we will have to conclude that his dictionary is not as other
dictionaries, which wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Now an editor with the Dallas Morning News, Dreher used
to work for National Review, where he was teased about his
practice of buying organic vegetables from a co-op. A co-worker
called him a “lefty,” while the other customers at the co-op did a
double-take when he loaded his vegetables into his National
Review tote bag. Feeling misunderstood all around, he wrote an
article called “Birkenstock Burkeans” to prove his contention that
true conservatives are countercultural. The piece drew hundreds of
enthusiastic letters from the kind of readers National
Review never knew they had: a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist
Republican; a couple, both engineers, who not only baked their own
bread but ground the wheat themselves; and a woman who used to
think she was the only person in the world who owned a copy of
The Moosewood Cookbook until she discovered that Dreher
owned the other one.
His thesis is that conservatives ought to conserve something,
but that all too many of them would pave over the Garden of Eden
and fill it with shopping malls and McMansions in their kneejerk
obeisance to growth, progress, and the free market’s sacrosanct law
of supply and demand. What passes for conservatism today is
actually destructionism: Agribusiness is destroying the family
farm, suburbia is destroying old urban neighborhoods, the car
culture is destroying the air we breathe, and television is
destroying everything.
He blames the Reagan era for promoting the kind of conservatism
that holds environmentalism in contempt, and for popularizing
mockery of environmentalists as “tree-hugging kooks” as a means of
proving one’s right-wing bona fides. Just as the Democrats are the
“Party of Lust” who refuse to limit sexual freedom, Republicans are
the “Party of Greed” who refuse to limit economic freedom. Both
parties are driven by materialist ideologies in the sense that both
stand for “the multiplication of wants and the intensification of
desire” that have brought Americans to our present state of “empty
consumerist prosperity.”
IF THIS ALL SOUNDS FAMILIAR, it is. Except for its hosannas to
homeschooling as a means of strengthening the family, Crunchy
Cons is a back-to-the-future trip to the 1950s when similar
books were all the rage. Reading Dreher is like re-reading The
Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd, The Affluent
Society, and all the various Split-Level-this and Two-Car-that
alienation scenarios that poured off the presses during the
Eisenhower years. The only one it does not resemble is The
Crack in the Picture Window, which was mordantly funny.
The earnest Dreher, by contrast, is prone to unintentional humor
(“Cheap chicken is not worth a compromised conscience”), and
describes his every emotion and experience with such lyrical excess
that he seems to be ever on the verge of groaning “Oh, the aching
wonder of it all.” Shopping at the farmers market is almost too
much for him to bear:
…when you’ve seen the face of the woman who planted
it, and shaken the hand of the man who harvested it, you become
aware of the intimate human connection between you, the farmer, and
the earth. To do so is to become aware of the radical
giftedness of our lives….Learning the names of the small
farmers, and coming to appreciate what they do, is to reverse the
sweeping process of alienation from the earth and from each other
that the industrialized agriculture and mass production of
foodstuffs has wrought.
This kind of sing-song bliss quickly becomes hypnotic. The moment
you come across one of his launch words you know the rest will
follow, and you start to sway… authenticity,
stability, spirituality, connectedness,
instinctive, traditional… Stand by, here come
some more… timeless, preservation,
nature, richer and fuller, living and
breathing, enhancing, treasuring, and above
all, community.
All of his crunchy con friends talk the same way. Said one:
“There is a wisdom that comes into a culture when many of its
people have a direct connection to the land and to life, to the
living cycles. I see many of the political agendas today as being a
total failure to understand life, seasons, accountability, and the
connections of life and people to our community. There’s just no
connection….”
Even his wife’s explanation of why she chose to get pregnant —
“…this instinct welled up in me: We should be bearing
fruit” — took on the same undulating rhythm, like a ripe pear
tree yielding to an insistent wind. Only a pithy classical sentence
could break the spell, a polished maxim by someone who understood
the rigorous use of language, i.e., someone Dreher does not know
personally. Only one such sentence is to be found in the entire
book, when, miraculously, he quotes St. Thomas Aquinas: “Wine may
lawfully be drunk utque ad hilaritatem” (to the point of
cheerfulness).
DESPITE THE VERBAL ECSTASY squirting out of him like ink from a
squid, cheerfulness is not Dreher’s long suit. In between affirming
‘n’ connecting to a richer ‘n’ fuller meetedness, he takes obvious
pleasure in describing in lurid detail the slaughtering techniques
at agribusiness holding pens. Making people feel guilty is the
liberal’s specialty, and it sounds as if he’s turning into one.
He sometimes seems to suspect it himself, and falls into the
trap of protesting too much. He has decided that Jimmy Carter got
it right in his famous “Malaise speech” and regrets that ignorance
and ideology blinded him to it for so long. “Don’t get me wrong,”
he hastens to add; he’s grateful to Reagan for restoring optimism
and confidence, but now we need to change the culture to “reclaim a
way of life that’s — [sway alert] — richer, more
satisfying, more grounded, more sustainable, more meaningful and,
in the end, more authentically joyful.”
How? Take to the hills, he advises, except that he classes it up
with the story of St. Benedict, who in the late Roman Empire urged
citizens of collapsing Roman cities to leave and establish
monasteries in the countryside. It would be so easy to do nowadays,
Dreher rhapsodizes, because of — the Internet! Thanks to
broadband, everybody can now work at home, making it possible for
crunchy cons to form virtual monastic communities.
How do you like them unsprayed, unwaxed apples? After spending
an entire book condemning heartless modern innovations that zap us
with so much alienation and unconnectedness that we can’t tell
life’s aching wonders from a hole in the ground, he now wants to
build his brave new world on the device that keeps more people
glued to more screens for more hours than television ever did.
