Well, I haven't had much time to write but I've had my thinker on overtime lately. I just read a most interesting book, with quite an amusing title: 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)

Well. What a title. I thought it would be an amusing read.
It started out cute and amusing. Rod Dreher, the author, was living in New York, working at the National Review, of all places, and told his editor he needed to leave early to pick up his share of the organic produce co-op delivery in their neighborhood. He says his editor "made the kind of face I'd have expected if I'd informed her I was headed off to hear Peter, Paul and Mary warble at a fundraiser for cross-dressing El Salvadoran hemp farmers."

I laughed myself off my chair at that one, but as I progressed through the book, I found this one of the most personally challenging reads I've had in a very long time. Rather like the time a friend convinced me years ago to try listening to Rush Limbaugh--I didn't like him personally. Still don't. But he was talking about how Reagan's tax cuts INCREASED revenue. Well, no they didn't. I was alive during the 80's. I read the news, watched TV, voted. Reagan's tax cuts ruined the country.
Well, um, I was always TOLD that, anyway. Limbaugh challenged me (OK, not me PERSONALLY) to look it up for myself. I had just recently quit my Ph.D. program in political science--I knew where to look. Imagine my utter astonishment when I found out Limbaugh was right. It was like being told that the moon really was made of cheese, after all. Or perhaps that it didn't even exist and was just an illusion made up by the TV station.
Gulp. Well, that moment and the subsequent re-evaluating of "What do I REALLY believe, anyway?" took me from being a pro-choice ACLU member who attended Socialist Party functions, to a pro-life libertarian.
Dreher has just challenged my assumptions again.
This is NOT just a book about conservatives who want to eat healthy. I am guilty there--I'm almost embarrassed to be caught in the Whole Foods Emporium with my Bush bumper-sticker on my van. What will people think? Republicans don't eat seitan and organic radicchio. :-)
Or do they? I'd known for years that there was a fair segment of homeschoolers who took food more seriously than most, eating organic and whole foods and vegetarian and every other strange possibility out there. I knew this because I met some, and because I am one. I'd occasionally vaguely thought, "Well, isn't this odd. We're conservative mostly Republican homeschoolers who eat like hippies." But I'd never analyzed it.
Dreher has. He has taken a whole slew of atypical conservatives and boiled the phenomenon down to sets of basic principles, then illustrated how "countercultural" conservatives are living out their beliefs in the public arena today.
It was startling to me how strongly I identified with Dreher's "Crunchy Con Manifesto" and how well it explained many other rather odd things about me. For instance, my opposition to our local "Event Center" which we recently built in our community. All the Republicans were solidly behind it--it was pro-business, pro-jobs, good for the community! But to get this nightmarishly modern building, we not only took tax money, but we tore down a fine old turn-of-the-century Greek-inspired public auditorium. I LOVED that building! It had character, it had refinement. The floor boards were scratched in places, the acoustics left something to be desired, the steps to the basement were rounded and scuffed by the treading of thousands of feet. We had local craft fairs, flea markets, local performances there. Now we have this big, new, hideous glass-and-angles carpeted expensive monstrosity. The craft fairs and flea markets are not going to be able to afford the fees of this new building. What are we going to get instead? I don't know, but I'll bet it'll not be nearly as helpful to the local community nor as friendly and attractive to the average town citizen. They are hoping to attract business conferences from around the country--but we are two hours from decent sized airports.
WHY would a free-market conservative oppose such a plan? Well, it became clear to me after reading the Crunchy Con Manifesto:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the contemporary conservative mainstream. We like it here; the veiw is better, for we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. We believe that modern conservatism has become too focused on material conditions, and insufficiently concerned with the character of society. The point of life is not to become a more satisfied shopper.

3. We affirm the superiority of the free market as an economic organizing principle, but believe the economy must be made to serve humanity's best interests, not the other way around. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. (This one is the hardest for me personally to wrap my enthusiasm around)

4. We believe that culture is more important than politics, and that neither America's wealth nor our liberties will long survive a culture that no longer lives by what Russell Kirk identified as "the Permanent Things"--those eternal moral norms necessary to civilized life, and which are taught by all the world's great wisdom traditions. (Russell Kirk is new to me, but I am looking up more from him now!)

5. A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative. This is particularly true with respect to the environment.

6. A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract.

7. Appreciation of aesthetic quality--that is, beauty--is not a luxury, but the key to the good life.

8. The cacophany of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.

9. We share Kirk's conviction that "the best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and to read to them o' the evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise; the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths . . . The institution most essential to conserve is the family."

10. Politics and economics will not save us. If we are to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving these ancient truths in the choices we make in everyday life. In this sense, to conserve is to create anew.

Dreher then traces these principles through life: What does this mean for consumerism? What should we eat? Where should we live? How should we educate our children, participate in religion, view the environment?
It's eerie how many of the decisions we've made already echoe some of Dreher's conclusions. (We could stand to do better yet, though)
This book just finishes pushing me into a re-evaluative mindset that I'd already been on the verge of--what I am thinking and feeling is reverberating with what I read in Last Child in the Woods (blogged about here) and Brave Companions by David McCullough, which had a nice long article on Wendell Berry, who happens also to be one of Rod Dreher's heroes. There is magic in the air here, there is thought and ideas which are converging and reshaping ideas and opinions and principles. A sea change is in the air. Everything suddenly seems significant.