What relevance does crunchiness have to other conservatives?
[Caleb Stegall  02/24 01:41 PM]

A great email with serious questions and lots of grist for our mill from my friend and colleague Dan Knauss:

Early on, I found myself wondering if this very academic (and certainly brilliant) discussion can get any traction, or even a hearing, with the red-state rank and file. Who exactly is this book and discussion for?

I live in a Midwestern city that was dominated, built and deconstructed by socialists for most of the twentieth century. (Rather crunchy and substantially conservative, religious and natalist socialists, many of whom were co-opted by the New Deal.) The city's history since the 60s is the familiar rustbelt story: post-industrial economic collapse; the turn to irresponsible and violent radicalism in the civil rights and countercultural movements; the flight of the white and black middle class; the proliferation of guns, drugs, and despair in the broken underclass communities left behind; the pathetic dance of cajoling and bribery between "protest-identity" minority demagogues and white liberals. Apart from a steady, bipartisan voting-with-one's-feet withdrawal movement, the general response to these events has been inchoate libertarianish reaction driven by cynicism and resentment on the right alongside denial and nostalgic statist dreaming on the left. Each feeds the other in the paralysis of a short-sighted politics of reaction.

Generally political disputes reduce to taxation, and this is indeed one of the most highly taxed states. On one side are those who want to pay as little as possible to perceived (and often real) sources of dysfunction and corruption. On the other side are those who think social spending is the only answer to every problem. Politics on the right focus on an understandable but profoundly unhealthy, deep-seated, and highly racialized fear and loathing of the city (our state's economic hub) that they've all but abandoned. The left ignores the material realities of the inner city and economic infrastructure to sermonize about tolerance and diversity.

As witnessed by an extensive network of conservative bloggers in my region, the primary discontent with the GOP at the national level is that it is not serious about small government. Aside from city-suburb conflicts, the most beloved regional conservative political initiatives center on downsizing and tax cuts at the county and state level, including initiatives that actually increase spending and bureaucracy in order to legislate taxing and spending constraints on legislators! Now it may be clear to crunchy cons of an urbanist stripe that this rust-belt world of sub/exurban conservatism has a drunken incoherence all its own, but it's far from clear to conservatives who are not already in the crunchy choir. Ideas of community and common good are not in the political discourse because of our culturally balkanized situation. I have a hard time seeing how "crunchy cons" can even begin to penetrate these kind of on-the-ground realities.