Quick Refresher Course on Crunchy Conservatism

I'm planning to post something soon about the libel flair-up which we've been discussing over here, but I've been too busy to do so, so I'm throwing this out there for now. Not apologizing—see number three here.

I came across this review in New Criterion while googling the phrase "platonic ideal of chickenness". It's seven years old, but I don't remember reading this review when the book Crunchy Conservatives first came out. I might have read it, but either way, I think it's good to read it again and note that Dreher's ideas, his tone and his manner haven't changed very much even though, from what I know, he doesn't use the adjective crunchy that much anymore unless he is referring to his earlier book. WSJ's Joseph Rago, the author, read the book and came to the same conclusions that we did. Here are some excerpts, but the entire thing doesn't take long to read.

The major thinkers, to be sure, may be reinterpreted to meet the conditions of contemporary life. New discoveries must be made. But Dreher’s findings are slight. The novel thing about a “Birkenstocked Burkean,” it seems to me, is not the Burke but the Birkenstocks. Dreher is preoccupied by lifestyle signifiers—the way people dress, the homes they live in, and, particularly, the food they eat. For reasons I can’t comprehend, he has a voracious obsession with the “right” kind of organic food. At one point, he tells a story about a really delicious free-range chicken he ate with his family: “It was … almost the Platonic ideal of chickenness.” Eating is for Dreher a fundamentally political act. “There are many mansions in the American conservative house,” he writes, “and some of them are old and funky and smell like a pot of organic mustard greens cooking down on the stove.” This gives you a taste of his ersatz cracker-barrel folksiness.

Style over substance—check. The phrase which jumped out at me was "Dreher’s findings are slight." This was something we were always noting back in the Contra-Crunchy days. Whenever Dreher said something we agreed with it seemed like others had said it already and usually better and less obnoxiously.

One thing he marginally adds in this is the notion that under our current political alignment, not all conservative ideas belong usufruct to the Republican Party, and indeed the GOP often does things that are not conservative. He further reminds us that not all ideas emanating from the left are bad ones, particularly in regards to the stewardship of the environment. True enough. The traits crunchy cons mainly borrow from the left, however, are sanctimony, condescension, and impermeable self-regard.

Sanctimony, condescension, and impermeable self-regard—check, check, check. Nothing to add to this observation. Crunchy snobbery deserves no more than this bulls-eye waiting room diagnosis.

This is most evident, and most insulting, when Dreher draws distinctions between crunchy cons and regular cons. If you’re not wearing the Birkenstocks, so to speak, you’re not getting Burke. Only those who have been inducted into the mystery cult of crunchy conservatism are leading rich, fulfilling lives. Dreher’s mainstream conservatives are “really” spiritually arid and “really” desire only filthy lucre. “[M]ost people who call themselves conservative today,” he summarizes with by-God certainty, “aren’t really conservative in a deep sense.”

These are severe charges. Regrettably, Dreher is not analytic but impressionistic in his writing. He relies heavily on interviews, which lend to his arraignment an air of sociology, but little evidence or argument. You could say that the crunchy cons believe they’ve cornered the market on virtue—but then, they don’t believe in markets.

Here the money clause is "little evidence or argument". Dreher was incensed at the time because Jonah Goldberg basically denied the existence of crunchy conservatism as a political reality, and challenged him to give evidence of its existence. But proving a theory is beneath the Believer who has unshakeable faith in the object of his Belief. Or maybe what seems like faith is merely disguised delusion based on "impermeable self-regard".