INTRAMURAL BRAWL has broken out at my alma mater National Review (where I served briefly as publisher a decade ago) over a cover story by senior writer Rod Dreher called “Crunchy Cons.” The title comes from Dreher’s discovery that he actually likes granola bars—the crunchier the better. After that came organic fruit. He soon found he shared more than just a love for health food with lefty-types.
What he shared was an appreciation of the good life and how it is lived. In that, he found himself increasingly out of sorts with people whose idea of conservatism is a narrow capitalism. Nothing wrong with the free market as an economic system, but as a philosophy of life, it is barren. Its product is a mindless, consumerist ethic that is dispiriting and dehumanizing. Yet for far too many people, this is what “conservatism” has come to mean. In contrast, Dreher presents an authentic conservatism based on five premises: “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 that faith and family are the point of life.”
In Dallas, Texas, in the year 2002, far too few people who claim to be conservatives would understand what Dreher is talking about. Instead, the conservatism they know means property rights before community rights, lower taxes even if it means degraded services, and the right to do what I damn well choose no matter what the consequences. That is a conservatism that more and more disgusts me, and I am happy to see a revolt in our ranks. Dreher reminds us that one of the founders of the modern conservative movement, Russell Kirk, warned of “a world smudged by industrialism, standardized by the masses, consolidated by government.” Sounds to me like a warning about the pollution that has turned Dallas into one huge Allergy Zone and the sprawl of Dallas’ each-one-the-same-as-the-next-one suburbs. He could have also warned about conservatism’s dangerous identification with the Republican Party, which in Texas has become the hired servant
of the anti-environment and insurance lobbies.
Dreher’s National Review colleagues were quick to jump on him, claiming that, poor sap, he’s obviously been co-opted by the left. Dreher’s response is that his colleagues live in a kind of ivory tower where theory is untouched by reality. In short, they are unaware of what “conservatism” has degenerated into out in the country—how it has become anti-beauty, anti-culture, anti-community, and even anti-intellectual.
If the battleground is anywhere, surely it is in Dallas. I know plenty of “crunchy” conservatives in this town. (I also know plenty of the other sort.) Take, for example, the Park Cities Preservation League—no hotbed of liberalism there. But here is a group willing to announce that old is good, that the community has rights equal to property owners, and that aesthetic standards matter. The same movement is represented in the fight over the M Streets. May their work and ideas flourish.
I look to what so many people are trying to achieve downtown, and I see the spirit of Jane Jacobs—a “crunchy” conservative if there ever was one—is alive and well. I look at what senior editor Adam McGill discovered in Portland (see p. 93), where tough building codes have resulted in one of the world’s most beautiful and liveable cities, and I see the same spirit.
Rod Dreher is stirring a controversy that has been too long in coming. He has climbed to the top of the ivory tower and started clanging an alarm bell. It is a wake-up call that all who care about conservative ideas should heed.
