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Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com. This summer I am joined by Keir Wilmut and Omar Soliman.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Crunchy Cons: Worth buying just for the title
Rod Dreher, formerly of National Review (he left for the Dallas Morning News soon after 9\11) is out with his much-anticipated book, and what a mouthful of a 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.)
Dreher is also out with a blog at the now blog-stacked National Review Online. The blog has a description of what exactly a Crunchy Con is, in case you are wondering:
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.”
10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.
Dreher has been writing about this for a few years now, so I'm glad to see him put out a book on the subject, since he obviously cares about it deeply. I actually find this pretty neat. It appears to be an ideology loosely based on the idea of marrying a devout Catholic lifestyle/belief system with modern free-market conservatism. I'm going to pick it up, and hope you might too.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 5:31 PM
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