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The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots
Three Rivers Press
November 2006
On Sale: October 24, 2006
256 pages
ISBN: 1400050650
EAN: 9781400050659
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Political
When a National Review colleague teased writer Rod
Dreher one day about his visit to the local food co-op to
pick up a week’s supply of organic vegetables (“Ewww, that’s
so lefty”), he started thinking about the ways he and his
conservative family lived that put them outside the bounds
of conventional Republican politics. Shortly thereafter
Dreher wrote an essay about “crunchy cons,” people whose
“Small Is Beautiful” style of conservative politics often
put them at odds with GOP orthodoxy, and sometimes even in
the same camp as lefties outside the Democratic mainstream.
The response to the article was impassioned: Dreher was
deluged by e-mails from conservatives across
America—everyone from a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist
Republican to an NRA staffer with a passion for organic
gardening—who responded to say, “Hey, me too!”
In
Crunchy Cons, Dreher reports on the amazing depth and
scope of this phenomenon, which is redefining the taxonomy
of America’s political and cultural landscape. At a time
when the Republican party, and the conservative movement in
general, is bitterly divided over what it means to be a
conservative, Dreher introduces us to people who are
pioneering a way back to the future by reclaiming what’s
best in conservatism—people who believe that being a truly
committed conservative today means protecting the
environment, standing against the depredations of big
business, returning to traditional religion, and living out
conservative godfather Russell Kirk’s teaching that the
family is the institution most necessary to
preserve.
In these pages we meet crunchy cons from
all over America: a Texas clan of evangelical Christian
free-range livestock farmers, the policy director of
Republicans for Environmental Protection, homeschooling moms
in New York City, an Orthodox Jew who helped start a kosher
organic farm in the Berkshires, and an ex-sixties hippie
from Alabama who became a devout Catholic without losing his
antiestablishment sensibilities.
Crunchy Cons
is both a useful primer to living the crunchy con way and a
passionate affirmation of those things that give our lives
weight and measure. In chapters dedicated to food, religion,
consumerism, education, and the environment, Dreher shows
how to live in a way that preserves what Kirk called “the
permanent things,” among them faith, family, community, and
a legacy of ancient truths. This, says Dreher, is the kind
of roots conservatism that more and more Americans want to
practice. And in Crunchy Cons, he lets them know how
far they are from being alone.
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