First, the need for order. Kirk called this the first need of all. Unless we feel relatively safe, we won't be able to participate in public life, won't care very much about politics beyond law and order, and won't be keeping a lookout for our freedoms. Frightened people move to the suburbs, understandably. Frightened people also tend to vote for more and more centralized government (e.g. federalizing more and more crimes) to keep their streets safe, even though safety only comes from local, community control. Divorce rates over 50%, rampant drug use, rampant violence and increasingly random violence from suburban youths, do not make order. They make chaos, and if people don't give up the practices that lead to this, the result will be increasing calls for government programs to deal with the problems — mostly to drug, support, and eventually incarcerate our kids.

Second, the need for order in the soul if there is to be order in the commonwealth. If our lives don't make some kind of sense, don't fit together to make a coherent whole, we are going to find ourselves, and especially those who depend on us, falling into destructive habits. At the lowest level, we are going to find that we can't trust one another any longer. We no longer can count on people's promises — even if we get them in writing. Believe it or not, people used to look to lawyers as people who told the truth. Now that sounds like a joke in search of a punchline. As we become increasingly isolated and mistrustful, those of us with money can still lead relatively comfortable lives, filled with all kinds of diversions, but an awful lot of our kids are turning to destructive lives of alienation and/or sheer dishonest selfishness — viz. the stats on the prevalence of cheating in our schools. Again, disorder brings the need for more government, which we are getting, in part through an explosion in litigation, with all its related costs.

Third, in a lot of ways people don't think of local politics as politics — and in a way they are right. Libertarian dreams to the side, towns have always been things in themselves; the people in them always have seen them as entities that need protection and nurture. To the extent that towns are disenfranchised (and they have been, almost completely, in
America) people will simply go up the latter to more distant governments to get what they want.

All these factors make good, solid, conservative people willing to vote for more and more centralized government. Add to this the very real problems of corporations that have forgotten the value of employee and customer loyalty, and you have a recipe for increasing regulation.

The "crunchy" view (which to me is just traditional conservatism with enough of a funky twist to get a hearing in the mass markets) says "let's put the focus where it belongs: on how we want to live our lives, and what we need to change to be able to do that better."

This isn't a call for more government intervention, it's a call for LESS government intervention. The more we organize our own lives in ways that make sense, that help us treat one another in a decent fashion, and that keep control in the hands of a lot of local people rather than a few people in Washington, the more free AND decent and morally ordered our lives will be.

People in general will not long accept a system in which their lives don't make sense. They will look somewhere for order. The people about whom Rod writes (most of them far funkier than I) are looking to their local communities to forge meaningful ties. Better this than look to the government, no? And better this than live with no ties, such that we raise another Lord of the Flies generation.

I am at best slightly crunchy. But I'm very happy that Crunchy Cons was written, and I hope it gets a fair hearing.