A "Crunchy" Conservative Manifesto

Crown Forum ^ | n/a | Rod Dreher

[Pyro7480]

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.”

[Pyro7480]

The original article: Birkenstocked Burkeans: Confessions of a granola conservative

Rod Dreher now has a book expanding on the thesis of the article. It is titled, Crunchy Cons.

[denydenydeny]

I can't argue with any of these points on the surface, but the problem is that crucnhy cons and Dreher in particular want government intervention to bring about their agenda.

Dreher always gets my libertarian spines up.

[Onelifetogive]

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

No it doesn't...

As bad as Big Business can be, it has NOWHERE near the monopoly power (especially the power to kill, main and imprison) that government has.

Big government is directly responsible for AT LEAST 100,000,000 deaths in the past 100 years (or so.) When such a statement can be made about big business, I'll listen.

[Pyro7480]

You commented on the original FR thread. Ping!

[Onelifetogive]

main...

maim...of course!

[Old_Mil]

I have no argument with the points made here.

[Pyro7480]

Big government is directly responsible for AT LEAST 100,000,000 deaths in the past 100 years (or so.) When such a statement can be made about big business, I'll listen.

True, but the big business has contributed to the chaos in modern society over the past 30 years. One example: they colluded with the feminists to get the women in the workforce, while not having to increase wages as much.

Also, they are amoral organizations. They have no problem donating to left-wing causes, or promoting what passes for popular culture these days.

[Onelifetogive]

True, but the big business has contributed to the chaos in modern society over the past 30 years.

Agreed, but so has small business, individuals, etc. Unless the government is involved, we generally have the choice of giving our business to other businesses...

[ex-snook]

"As bad as Big Business can be, it has NOWHERE near the monopoly power (especially the power to kill, main and imprison) that government has.

True but Big Business PAC money selects government by funding both parties. Well maybe Indian tribes chip in too.

[Onelifetogive]

Beauty is more important than efficiency.

When the lights are turned out, beauty becomes worthless and efficiency is paramount!

[Rytwyng]

Beauty is more important than efficiency.

When the lights are turned out, beauty becomes worthless and efficiency is paramount!

True, but some degree of beauty is necessary in order to get into the bedroom(figuratively or literally) in the first place. Once you're there, you can turn out the lights and let efficiency take over -- but you gotta get there first.

It's like the difference between marketing and product engineering. You need good product engineering to make the 2nd sale, the 3rd sale, the 10th sale, the 100th sale -- but you do (unfortunately) need some marketing to make the FIRST sale.

[Rytwyng]

Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

Once upon a time I didn't believe this. But as time goes by and things get worse, this is becoming increasingly obvious.

Liberals err by focusing SOLELY on the dangers posed by business, and trusting an all-powerful state to protect them from corrupt business and market practices. They are tragically oblivious to the danger of state corruption.

Let's not make the reciprocal error.

[CowboyJay]

Finally!

Nice to see at least some true conservatives are tired of rolling over for big business. I'd personally like to see border security added to the platform... Also strange that they're not mentioning abortion or marijuana. Other than those little nits, this sounds like something I could get behind.

Crunch on!

[Pyro7480]

Also strange that they're not mentioning abortion or marijuana

Well, it isn't mentioned specifically, but I think abortion falls under point #9.

[Onelifetogive]

but you do (unfortunately) need some marketing to make the FIRST sale.

Good point...

[x]

You commented on the original FR thread. Ping!

Here's some of what I had to say:

The opposition between hippies, artists and academics on the one hand and slide rules, number crunchers, and hardhats on the other is the relic of the Sixties and Seventies. Before the gulf opened up -- before Vietnam, the counter culture, and the rebellions of the 1960's -- a lot of those engineers, accountants, tradesmen and industrial workers were themselves Democrats or even "liberals." The Sixties polarized things along the hippie-straight cleavage. And that line of division doesn't explain things as well today as it did thirty years ago.

...

It's also a generational thing. People who knew the Depression and WWII have different attitudes than people who came along later. In the 1960s one was forced to choose one generation, one "side" or the other. But for those who grew up after the great conflict, this opposition isn't as real or possible or meaningful as for those who lived through it.

...

I still think that's basically true. We may hate the radical 60s, but if we grew up in postwar affluence our attitudes are bound to be different than those of our parents or grandparents who experienced Depression and wartime austerity.

Real life events and experiences have a way of blurring ideological lines. Today, we've learned to fear sexually transmitted diseases, drug addiction, unemployment, and terrorism more than the hippies or radicals of the 1960s did. But we've also become more concerned about tobacco, cholesterol, sedentary lifestyles, and environmental pollutants than the straights or squares of the Fifties and Sixties.

The Yippies and SDS are gone, lamented by a few people, despised by some, ridiculed by many, and forgotten by most. But J. Edgar Hoover, Curtis LeMay, and Bull Connor are gone too, as is the limitless faith some Americans put in General Motors, General Electric, the CIA, the LAPD and the local Archdiocese. For all the bad that happened in the Sixties and Seventies, not all the changes were for the worse, and some of the distrust we have today was warranted by what happened in the past.

Consequently, a lot of the divisions of the 1960s and 1970s healed in the late 1980s and late 1990s. That was auspicious for ideas like "crunchy conservatism."

But today, things look different. The war, the Internet, and the regional divide in our politics have reopened old wounds. A lot of people look on politics as a struggle between monolithic blocs. On the one side are the South and Heartland, the countryside and new suburbs, engineers and businessmen, war hawks, evangelicals. On the other are the East and West Coasts, the cities and older suburbs, teachers, artists, and environmentalists, doves, and unbelievers.

Those divides of three decades ago are more in evidence than they were a few years ago. People may be united about many things in life, but when they turn to politics their first impulse is to see division, disunion, and animosity. So I don't think "crunchy conservatism" (kind of a stupid name, huh?) is going anywhere now.

In a sense all political ideologies are more or less hybrid. They're responses to changes in the world and they change themselves overtime. Today's liberalism isn't Jefferson's or FDR's. Today's conservatism isn't Hamilton's or Goldwater's. But realignments happen when the old cleavages come to seem irrelevant. Today, some of the old divisions have come back in force.

People on both sides of the political divide are worried that if they don't give support to every "cause" and slogan on their own side, they are letting their coalition down, even betraying it. So you get left-wing bloggers attacking every effort at moderation among Democrats and Ann Coulter supporting every conceivable "right-wing" position of the last fifty years or so, whether or not those positions are good in themselves.

Dreher's philosophy has much to recommend itself, but its more like the fine-tuning one would expect in a society that thinks it has solved most of the big questions. In that, he's not so different from Russell Kirk and other conservatives of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. In those days, there was a consensus on what the country was and where it was going, and people only asked for a little more beauty or rootedness or decency or kindness. Today, though, people are convinced that the nation is far more divided about the fundamentals than united. Whether or not that's true, it's bad news for granola conservatism as a movement.

[A Jovial Cad]

Doer, in the best American mold (as opposed to idle talkers):

"He felt, though, that the intense bombings were actually saving lives on both sides, especially if they encouraged surrender without an invasion. Even without the nuclear bomb, LeMay felt his bombers could win the war by October. His view was supported by Japan’s Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who said that "the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing." Air Power: Curtis LeMay

All the rest of this pretty, refined, philosophical bullsh*t chit-chat is just that: idle chatter on keyboards, a generation and a half after the fact.

General LeMay was an honorable warrior, period, despite what anyone else might try to tell you.

[don-o]

I had read his original essay, in fact, our very own Mrs Don-o was mentioned in it. Not sure if she made it to the book.

I'm gonna think this over some.

[don-o]

Here’s a blog. Rod is contributing.

[Mrs. Don-o]

You wrote: "...Dreher in particular want[s] government intervention to bring about [his] agenda."

Documentation, please?