Spengler on Crunchy Cons
[Rod Dreher  03/20 10:40 AM]

What a treat this is: Spengler, one of my favorite columnists, reviews Crunchy Cons in his Asia Times Online column. Excerpt:

What will China be like in 30 years, and what desires will beckon to the hearts of the Chinese? Rod Dreher's chatty account of "crunchy conservatives", or neo-traditionalist dropouts from American mass culture, deserves editions in Mandarin and Cantonese. But a generation from now, some hundreds of millions of Chinese will have lived with prosperity long enough to ask whether life holds more in store than shopping. Dreher's book will leave them wondering whether the United States of America is a role model, a horrible example, or a bit of both.

Americans are the world's great migrants, soon to be surpassed, as half a billion people shift from China's countryside to its coast over the next century.

American spirituality, I long have argued, underlies America's political and economic success. But Dreher, an editor of the Dallas Morning News, goes further, insisting that spirituality cannot survive without a radical break with consumerism.