Crunchy Cons: Picking up organic vegetables in your National Review tote bag - eclectic conservatives

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Rod Dreher

One day this summer, I told a colleague I had to leave early to pick up my weekly fresh vegetables from the organic food co-op to which my wife and I belong. "Ewgh, that's so lefty," she said. And she was right: Organic vegetables are a left-wing cliche. Early last summer I had made fun of neighbors who subscribed to the service, which delivers fresh fruits and vegetables from area organic farms to our Brooklyn streets.

But then the neighbors gave us one week's vegetable shipment, and we were knocked flat by the intense flavors. Who knew cauliflower had so much taste? It was the freshness of the produce, not its organic status (of dubious nutritional advantage), that we were responding to. But you can't get produce that delicious in grocery stores here, so when this summer rolled around, we signed up enthusiastically. Now, Julie picks up our weekly delivery in her National Review tote bag.

It never occurred to me that eating organic vegetables was a political act, but my colleague's comment got me to thinking about other ways my family's lifestyle is countercultural. Julie is a stay-at-home mom who is beginning to homeschool our young son. We worship at an "ethnic" Catholic church because we can't take the Wonder Bread liturgy at the Roman parish down the street. We are as suspicious of big business as we are of big government. We rarely watch TV, disdain modern architecture and suburban sprawl, avoid shopping malls, and spend our money on good food we prepare at home. My wife even makes her own granola.

And yet we are almost always the most conservative people in the room - - granted, not much of a trick if you live in New York City, but wewe're still pretty far out there. So how did we get to be so "crunchy" -- as in "crunchy-granola," a slang term for earthy types -- without realizing what was happening? Much of our crunchy conservatism comes from simply being carried along by the tide of our lives, and discovering by trial and error things that work well. But it's also grounded in the basic attitudes we've long held. That, generally speaking, Small and Local and Particular and Old are better. That beauty in all its forms is important to the good life. That the bright glare of television and the cacophony of media culture make it too hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. That we are citizens before we are consumers.

And most important of all, that faith and family are the point of life. We agree with Russell Kirk, who observed, "The best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and read to them o' evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, 'We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.' The institution most essential to conserve is the family."

I confessed that I was a Birkenstock'd Burkean in a National Review Online essay, and talked about how displaced I felt as a conservative who liked both Rush Limbaugh and Garrison Keillor. My in-box quickly filled up with literally hundreds of replies from across the country, nearly all of them saying, "Me too!"

There was the pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican who wanted to find somebody to discuss the virtues of George W. Bush with over a bowl of dal. An interracial couple, political conservatives and converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, wrote to say they loved shaking up the prejudices of liberal friends at their organic co-op. Small-town and rural crunchy cons checked in, and so did their urban counterparts from Berkeley to New York to London. "I used to listen to Rush while driving around following the Grateful Dead!" someone wrote. Wrote another, "We thought we were the only Evangelical Christians in the world with a copy of 'The Moosewood Cookbook.'"

Clearly, there are a number of thoughtful, imaginative, eclectic conservatives who fly below the radar of the media and Republican politicos. Who are these people? What do they stand for? And do you have to tune in to NPR as well as to Rush, turn on to whole grains, and drop out of mainstream society to join them?

The crunchy-con bookshelf -- and because they eschew television, they have lots of bookshelves -- sags with works by conservatives like G. K. Chesterton, Richard Weaver, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Southern Agrarians, and Michael Oakeshott. They also read books by more contemporary thinkers like the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry; Jane Jacobs, who championed particularity and diversity in urban planning over the dominant trend toward mass abstraction; media critic Neil Postman; and James Howard Kunstler, whose choleric jeremiads against America's strip-mall Babylon have made him a left-leaning prophet with honor among crunchy cons. They favor books on the environment that reflect a manlier, Rooseveltian (Teddy, the good one) stance toward the natural world, which respects nature without worshiping it.

Of all the thinkers and writers favored by crunchy cons, Kirk may be the most reliable guide to their sensibility. He grasped the essential truth that conservatism was not primarily about a political agenda, but instead "a complex of thought and sentiment, and a deep attachment to permanent things." It was a fundamental stance toward reality. For crunchy cons, the quest to live "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" is not just a nice idea -- and because of this, they don't always line up with Republican orthodoxy. As Carson Gross, a 25-year-old San Franciscan, says, "I'm always explicit with people that I'm a conservative, not a Republican."