February 25, 2006

Post by Chris at Three Hierarchies. I disagree with some of what he says (and I'd offer fewer cheers for Bill Kaufman he's a brilliant and interesting guy, but way-off on a number of fronts including his isolationism and his fondness for Gore Vidal), but it's a worthwhile read.

I've been busy today with my family (even though I'm not a Crunchy Con! I must be rarer than a unicorn!).

Anyway, interesting responses from Caleb and Rod. Let me just say I don't think I'm doing nearly the question-begging that Caleb insists I am. I think I am actually dealing with the subject at hand, i.e. Crunchy Conservatism and the things said in its support. He says I'm committing the No True Scotsman's fallacy, by which he seems to be suggesting I'm making trivial or irrelevent criticisms. I say I'm dealing with Crunchy Conservatism on precisely the terms Rod lays out for us. I don't think anyone here is really doing justice to how categorical Rod is in his book in his distinction between Crunchy Conservatism and Mainstream Conservatism. If I point to evidence which contradicts Rod's caricature of Mainstream Conservatives it is not a trivial thing because Rod, and not I, is the one who starts from absolutist premises. But more about that later.

Also, it is not a trivial point for me to say that no conservative defends promiscuity nor has any conservative I know of ever taken anything like the position Berry ascribes to conservatives in that post. We are a movement of arguments and ideas, right? This blog is dedicated to dealing with those arguments and ideas, at least as they pertain to Crunchy Conservatism. Well, the position Berry takes has no spokesman on the right anywhere as far as I know. That is hardly a trivial point.

Meanwhile, it is flatly not true that conservatives do not denounce promiscuity or try to tackle it. This administration puts real dollars behind its advocacy of abstinence, here and abroad. Christian conservative Churches speak out against promiscuity. Right wing groups launch boycotts, letter writing campaigns and propose legislation for things like the V-Chip. They oppose distributing condoms in schools, precisely because they think doing so will promote promiscuity. Conservatives criticize the popular culture. And so on. Now, they may not do it enough. That's a legitimate argument to make. But it's patent nonsense to say they don't do it. That is not a trivial point.

Oh, and if we're going by the composite of a "crunchy conservative" as drawn by Rod's book and this blog, I see no evidence that crunchy conservatives have been any more active or important to the above efforts than "mainstream Republicans." Indeed, going by superficial impressions alone, it seems to me that Crunchy Cons have been much less involved in these fights than those Rod refers to in his book as Republican women with big hair. That is not a trivial point either.

I agree with Caleb that Rupert Murdoch is an illuminating example on many levels. I often refer to him when trying to rebut what I believe is the myth that corporations are "rightwing." Corporations are opportunists and little more.

But let me be clear: I don't think Caleb is making bad points. I think he's making excellent ones. But I'm increasingly very sympathetic to what I think I will henceforth call Caleb's Dilemma: He wants to argue about conservatism qua conservatism but he recognizes that the crunchy part of Rod's analysis gets in the way.

But as I said, more later.

I published it in the section I edit, but the (much longer) original ran in the magazine Salmagundi.

I was in a bookstore last night and picked up the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, one of the very best publications on the newsstand (Ross will want to see the cover story, in which Philip Longman predicts a return to patriarchy worldwide, as patriarchal cultures have an evolutionary advantage that helps them survive). Flipping through it, I ran across a short interview with Bernard-Henri
Levy, the French philosopher and author of American Vertigo, his US travelogue. BHL made an arresting observation in his FP interview, which is not (yet) available online, so I paraphrase. The mag asked him if there was anywhere on earth where the Left is a strong and vibrant force. BHL, a man of the Left, said he doesn't know the answer, but that he's sure the Left is kaput in America. He said that nothing on the Left can compare with the vitality of the Right, which has won the war of ideas; he said the Left here still thinks all it has to do is raise enough money to return to power. I wish BHL would have come right out and said it: "Ideas have consequences."

As it happens, I'm in American Vertigo. BHL stopped in Dallas during his tour, and we spoke for a couple of pleasant hours on the back patio of a neighborhood cafe around the corner from my place. He was fair to me in his report, though I can't imagine where he got the idea (as he reports in the book) that I never vote; I always vote. Anyway, though I didn't label it "crunchy conservatism" to the French philosopher, I laid out my ideas about reviving a religious-based conservative traditionalism. He didn't seem to know what to make of it, at least on evidence of the book. And I guess it's hard to blame him: he'd just come from spending time with suburban megachurch Evangelicals, whose ideas about their faith and how to live it out in society were different from mine, and of course far more mainstream.

But I'm wondering what might happen if the traditionalist vision explored in Crunchy Cons should catch on with Evangelicals, who really are the most energetic cultural segment of the Right. There's no reason why it couldn't. In fact, a couple of months ago I received an e-mail from an Evangelical seminarian who said he was looking forward to reading the book when it came out. He said that Jim Wallis had come through the seminary not long ago to talk about his Jesus-is-a-liberal book, and all the young men of the seminary found themselves agreeing with much of what Wallis said about society and the role of Christians to transform it for the better.

"But his conclusion -- that we should all be Democrats -- we couldn't accept," the seminarian said. "We're conservatives." He went on to tell me that he hoped Crunchy Cons could spur fresh thinking among conservative Evangelicals about how to address the hunger many of the younger generation of rising church leaders have to rebuild bonds of community and rethink the Church's mission as a conservative cultural and political force.

I hope the book does what this seminarian hopes it will. BHL is right about the Right, how the innovative and dynamic debates, the exchanges of ideas that stand actually to change things, are happening on our side. I have a hunch that conservative Evangelicals over the next few years will prove this in ways that surprise a lot of folks.

Martha from Dallas writes:

I just read your post from earlier today talking about parents and teachers. You know, I think your answer lies in ... dum dum dum ... smaller community! (and somewhat in it being ok to express faith publicly.) Most of the people I know who grew up in small-town Louisiana could tell you who their teachers were and where they went to church. Even where I lived, where your parents probably didn't know the teachers outside of school, you could assume that in Dallas, TX, 90% of the teachers were Christian. Knowing something about the teacher as a person, and what you share (& don't share) in common, makes it much easier to trust them when there is an issue at school.

Come on, surely you can imagine a scenario where you would always first take Matthew's side. Imagine you had sent him to the public school, there were 24 other kids in his class, he was way ahead of most of them and you knew *nothing* about the teacher's spirituality (cause of course we can't talk about that in the public schools) or even general philosophy of teaching. Your wife, like me, would go in there trying to be neutral but really ready to defend her son.

I think about when I sent Michael to school after a year of homeschooling. I was apprehensive, but quickly became comfortable, to the point where my first instinct would be to always back up his teacher. I think that is in large part because I know his teacher in some essentials pretty well. I mean, I can point to what she believes about God, (being the pastor's wife, that's not too hard, and in any case, she's pretty up front about it); I don't trust her any less because there are some differences in our beliefs. I can tell you what she thinks about educating children, at least as far as it has to do with elementary age kids; I can even tell you that she has raised her own 7 kids and they seem to have turned out well. That's because this is a small community where there is plenty of time to talk to the teachers and everyone is free to speak about their faith. If I sent him to the neighborhood public school, I would know practically nothing about his teacher -- none of them live in the neighborhood -- and I would probably know nothing about their faith or philosophy. That would make it a lot harder to trust them if a problem came up with my son. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be harder.

Jonah is right, in a sense: what serious person defends promiscuity? But by reducing the argument to such a trivial level, the bigger questions are all begged. Perhaps this is by design.

Of course, the first two words that might pop into your head upon hearing Jonah’s plea for “even a serious anecdote that makes this even the slightest bit credible” are: Rupert Murdoch. But maybe the corporate cons are really libertarians. Or just good business men. It’s all so complicated. Maybe a better approach would be to simply say that everyone swimming in the swamp (cons included) is really confused on the point of promiscuity and lasciviousness. What cool con wants to be a boy scout and side with church ladies against immodesty and in favor of real propriety which today seems too strict even for the most earnest cons? Who could articulate a coherent reason for doing so?

But that is a sidetrack. The real problem with Jonah’s response is that it amounts to a version of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. By repeatedly falling back to “that doesn’t apply to any conservative I know, mainstream or otherwise!” Jonah really begs the central question being asked, which is what makes one a “conservative” in the context of the specific issue being discussed? A better way to approach this is to go back to my original comment which prompted Rod to quote the Berry in the first place. Is it true that “our hyper-materialist post WWII economy of creative destruction made common cause with the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movements to create the political/economic/cultural order we now inhabit—and that Rod critiques”? Or as Bruce said that: “Most of society, from the local library to the museum and even the school, used to be largely in the hands of so-called "homemakers." In fact, women were more ‘community makers’ in that they ran all the civil institutions that literally civilized our lives. Now we demand a specialized degree and a salary (pathetically small though it be) for every job. This hasn't made our libraries, etc. better or more respected, far from it. But it has destroyed the fabric of familiarity, friendship and, yes, social pressure that once helped us civilize our kids (and ourselves).” Or as I remarked even earlier: “Nanny-state leftists and corporate-state rightists have long been in bed together promoting the wage-and-entitlement economy and 100% out-of-the-home servitude.” Is that true? These are the real truth claims that need to be either admitted or contested.

And once they are admitted (as they must be), then the question that drives the analysis to the bedrock is: How ought the conservative to respond to this reality? Then we will be getting somewhere. Then we may reach some clarity on the overall point about there being such a thing as “mainstream conservatives” (for lack of a better term) who vote Republican, pay lip service to a culture of life, etc. etc., but who do not actually live, act, or think in a manner consistent with conservatism.

Let me illustrate this another way by asking a different question. Who was the truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? This is how John Lukacs—one of the conservatives Jonah most wants to meet—answered the question after attending NR’s 25th anniversary dinner:

During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud Boo! ... A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died. She was the founder and saintly heroine of the Catholic Worker movement. During that glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the human predicament. Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party.

Reader Dan has a theory about why the “eyes on the street” society disappeared:

It went [away] with the kids. On my block in a very, VERY lower-class suburb of Seattle, there were 5 families with 5 or more kids, 3 with 7 or more. On how many blocks will you see that kind of family size now?

Mom turns the kids outside because they’ll drive her crazy if they stay in the house. Even so, she has to keep an eye on them, and on their friends, because nothing will get a kid in trouble faster than bad friends. Being with the kids and keeping eye on them teaches her that little Buster will lie, cheat, steal, fight, set fires or whatever other crazy thing at the drop of a hat and with no regard for consequences. So when it comes to a dispute between her kid and another adult, she knows who’s likely telling the truth. Smaller families mean that mom and dad don’t have to keep track of all the kids in the neighborhood. They can keep Buster and Marianne in the house or busy so they don’t have an opportunity to interact with the older or younger kids in the neighborhood. Paying other people to raise your kids results in not knowing them, and idealizing them, so that you can’t conceive of them doing anything wrong. And, finally, when the kids grow up, there’s no need to interact with the neighbors at all.

Rod, a piece you commissioned? Cheap example!

You’re right, Jonah: divorced from the context of the long essay, Berry’s quote doesn’t stand up so well. But his basic point is that there has been no serious and sustained conservative critique of the role the free market and business interests take in tearing down traditional sexual virtue. Jim Sleeper makes a similar point in this essay from the Dallas Morning News Sunday commentary section the other day (LRR). Sleeper, a thoughtful liberal (you might remember his book from the 1990s, Liberal Racism), blames the “pornification” of the public square on the fact that liberals are too locked in to their views on sexuality and free speech to bring themselves to oppose any restrictions, even voluntary, on obscenity, and that conservatives are similarly paralyzed by our side’s own rhetoric about the free market, as well as to business interests. Sleeper writes:

In fact, conservative moralists won't begin to seriously address what is happening in our society until they take on the very market capitalism and consumerist culture they uphold and promote. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism 30 years ago, Daniel Bell, no liberal, warned that free markets no longer make free men because "economic liberalism has become ... corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs."

Mr. Bell warned against both conservatives' and liberals' emphasis on material consumption as the engine and measure of social health.

Even economist John Maynard Keynes, who designed government-driven economic growth to increase material abundance, equality and social felicity, wrote later in life that he'd been wrong to "believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, ... who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct."

Hoping to lift humanity by removing "outward restraints" of poverty and its attendant repressions, Mr. Keynes and colleagues had "completely misunderstood human nature, including our own. ... It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life ... or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order."

Mr. Keynes' belated recognition that social life is too complicated to be redeemed through material progress alone is a rebuke not just to liberals or Marxists but also to a capitalist materialism that rationalizes the most disruptive and degrading effects of mass marketing and production.

While conservatives ignore criticism of corporate mass marketing – or, indeed, while they rationalize pumping its offerings into the national bloodstream – young people's love and libido are indeed "melting into air" as markets deliver us from censors to sensors.

By defending business at all costs, today's conservatives are tearing up the social contract they claim to defend. Corporate minions and shareholders who are busy hollowing out our children's sense of themselves as rational citizens and even as sexual beings are among the real traitors to the civic-republican society our parents and grandparents struggled with, loved and served.

Now, I know what you are going to say, “Show me the conservative who will say that business should be defended at all costs!” And when I am unable to turn up someone to make the argument that crudely, you will respond by saying that such conservatives don’t exist. But things aren’t that simple. You won’t find many liberals either who will say flatly, “I am indifferent to the way the mainstreaming of sluttiness through the mass media affects young people.” But it’s funny how the only time the Left seems to raise its voice on the matter of sexual degradation it’s to critique conservative bluenoses. And it’s also funny how the Right – with the notable exception of Bill Bennett and the late C. Delores Tucker, on the matter of rap music, and also some religious conservatives – tends to criticize artists pretty heavily, but we’re hit-and-miss about taking on the corporate interests that make money off the pornification of the public square. Or so it seems to me.

February 24, 2006

Rod -- I'm no close student of Wendell Berry's. He may be brilliant and he may not be. I only know him by reputation and scattered bits and pieces. That you put so much stock in him inclines me to give him the benefit of the doubt. Also, perhaps there is a larger context that makes the passage below into something more sensible than it appears to me now. That is as charitable as I will be. Now, look at this passage:

The “conservatives” more or less attack homosexuality, abortion and pornography, and the “liberals” more or less defend them. Neither party will oppose sexual promiscuity. The “liberals” will not oppose promiscuity because they do not wish to appear intolerant of “individual liberty.” The “conservatives” will not oppose promiscuity because sexual discipline would reduce the profits of corporations, which in their advertisements and entertainments encourage sexual self-indulgence as a way of selling merchandise.[Emphasis mine]

Me: If this is a sign Berry's brilliance and if this is what passes for "terrific" analysis, I'm sorry but you need to walk around the block and clear your head. This strikes me as juvenile pseudo-Marxist claptrap and I'm actually quite embarrassed by it. Have you ever met a conservative in your travels who won't attack promiscuity because to do so threatens corporate profits? Have you ever read an article by someone making the positive case for this? Is there poll data or even a serious anecdote that makes this even the slightest bit credible? Or is there some vast conspiracy among conservatives -- that no one we know is actually a member of or has any knowledge about -- to censor or curtail attacks on promiscuity because it would hurt the corporate bottom line?

Again, maybe in my mainstream conservatism I don't "get it" and maybe there's some larger context that makes this defenisble. But on its face it is sophomoric nonsense, in my book.

One more thought in response to those who would object to this discussion as certain people “imposing” their view of conservatism on the rest. First, regarding the word “conservative” itself and whether all this spilled ink can be justified by what is, after all, “just a word,” the answer is, yes, it is justified. The word conservative, like few others in the American lexicon, has an immensely powerful purchase on the American political/cultural/religious mind in a way that words like Tory, Whig, Mugwump, or Bull Moose just don’t. So long as that is true, debates like this will and should occur. Second, none should know this better than Buckley’s crew and their readers. As the premiere intellectual outlet of movement conservatism over the last fifty years, NR periodically engaged in these kinds of discussions exorcising first the John Birchers, then the Randians, and recently the Buchananites from the respectably conservative fold. That’s an observation, not necessarily a criticism. The point is just that the content of “conservatism” matters, and to suggest otherwise, or to pretend that no one can “impose” their version of what is conservative, is, shall we say, disingenuous.

Just got this in:

As a husband to a homeschooling wife, father of 7, and lastly a Marine, I cannot believe you let that 'joining the military' comment go without a comment of your own…what an insult to so many. It shows her lack of knowledge of the fighting heritage of American Catholics. Perhaps to bring her out of the 60's, please post the Medal of Honor Citation of Father Vincent Capodanno, a hero of mine……maybe she can take a moment to teach a quick history lesson to her children. I haven't read your book, but I am sure 'selfless service' should be a trait of 'Crunchy Cons' as it is for so many of the brave Americans of all political stripes and 'sensibilities' that I know.

You got that right. As I later posted, I strongly disagree with that homeschooling mom on the military question, and should have said so in the first instance. I’m not going to post Father Capodanno’s citation, because it’s too long, but I would draw interested readers’ attention to an NRODT cover story on military chaplains I did a few years back. Father Capodanno’s amazing story of heroism is told in the piece.

Fascinating letter from a reader named Denise:

You said that you could perhaps understand the absence of true neighbors and "eyes on the street" in neighborhoods with mobile people. My own experience contrasts sharply with this.

I am nearly twenty-five years old, and I grew up, for the most part, on Air Force bases. My father, and everyone's father (and the occasional mother) was transferred every 2-4 years. And these neighborhoods were the best I've ever known. After school, everyone's Mom (or Dad, in the case of one of my friends) was home. We ran all over the neighborhood, yelling, playing, and feeling pretty darn safe, because we knew someone was watching us. We behaved (for the most part) because we knew that someone's Mom was watching us to make sure that no one got hurt or was mean or crude. We played hard-- I don't remember there being a single obese kid in my neighborhoods. There was none of this, "Don't let the precious dears climb trees, they might hurt themselves"-- it was a military base, and this attitude was generally scorned by girls and boys alike. Girls might not climb trees because they didn't want to, but never because of prohibition.
In fact, the only neighborhood tree ban I can remember was an ornamental olive in my front yard-- dead birds kept falling out of it, so we figured we'd best stay out of it.

I'm sorry, I know this is long, but I wanted to say that the neighborhoods everybody on this blog are longing for still exist, or at least they did 15 years ago, in the most transient of places-- military bases. We all took care of each other BECAUSE we knew that no one would be there for long. Military people are forced to learn the value of community eaerly on, because we know we'd best cherish our neighbors while we've got them. They or we will be gone in a year or so. Often civilians move into a neighborhood temporarily, and don't bother to get to know each other. But in the military, this transience is a permanent state-- so we meet each other and party while we can. Some of the most treasured memories of my life are running all over the neighborhood with my friends that I knew I would never see again. The friendships are thus that much more cherished, as are the memories.

Readers rave: [Rod Dreher] Couple of emails that just flopped over the transom:

1.

As a disillusioned Democrat and a born again Christian, I have been devouring the "Crunchy Con" blog and can't wait to read your book.

Just want to say, the blog contains the kind of thought provoking debate you won't find at the "Daily Kos"!

2.

This blog at NRO is great if for no other reason than to inject some much needed LIFE into the conservative discussion. Holy cow! Long quotes from Wendell Berry, communitarian values, talk about agrarianism, anarchy … on NRO? This is great!

That’s great – exactly what we want to hear. When Kathryn first proposed this Crunchy Con blog to me, she said it would be a good way to expand the conversation among conservatives and fellow travelers about what conservatism is, was and can be. We’ve been talking about grand themes this week, but just to remind readers (and bloggers), next week we’ll narrow the discussion to consumerism and technology, the subject of Chapter 2.

Kendall Cons: Conservatives who won’t let anyone talk about what it means to be a conservative.

Kendall’s argument about the word “conservative” is almost entirely semantic. But his larger point that esoteric debates among men of letters are pointless in the face of actual on the ground politically disputed issues has merit. And actually, Rod’s book is more Kendallesque than Kirk’s writing ever was in that Rod hits the streets in an attempt to uncover what he perceives to be an emerging (recovering?) political “sensibility” (to pick a term).

The more difficult questions in this regard are those asserted here.

Interesting email:

Dear Mr. Goldberg:

Is this “Crunchy Con” thing exactly what Willmoore Kendall wrote against in his “Conservative Affirmation in America”? All of this “dim-viewing” and “yearning-away-from” the life most Americans actually lead, with the assumption that just because the fantasy that fits their sectarian ideology is nostalgic, and not futuristic, it owns the concept of “conservatism” lock stock and barrel.

I’ve cited Kendall’s book on my blog here.

You may find it interesting,

Yours,

CPA

Bruce Frohnen writes, "What today is called a busybody (or worse) used to be a decent neighbor."

Well, maybe. Part of being a decent neighbor is knowing not just when to intervene but when not to intervene. The word "busybody" has existed since long before the '50s, and it describes a person who oversteps the boundaries of a community's informal social contract. Needless to say, what is busybodyism in one community might be an acceptable intrusion in another. Furthermore, an intrusion that's acceptable from one neighbor might not be acceptable from someone else. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- the same book where she talked about "eyes on the street" -- Jane Jacobs pointed out that in a living neighborhood there are many intermediary zones between the purely public and private spheres: areas of only moderate intimacy, of conviviality without intimacy, of friendly familiarity, and of respectful distance. "Cities are full of people with whom...a certain degree of contact is useful; but you do not want them in your hair," she wrote. "And they do not want you in theirs either."

I do agree about the ill effects of professionalization. A crunchy conservative movement that challenged the dictatorship of the degreed would warm this Pringles-eating libertarian's heart.

To read a terrific explication of a closely related point, turn to the title essay of Wendell Berry’s 1992 book Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays. Excerpt:

The conventional public opposition of “liberal” and “conservatives” is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The “conservatives” promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the mainstays of family life. Under the sponsorship of “conservative” presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home – a development that was bad enough – now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of “liberals,” who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as “liberated” – though nobody has yet sent he fathers thus forced away as “liberated.” Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.

The “conservatives” more or less attack homosexuality, abortion and pornography, and the “liberals” more or less defend them. Neither party will oppose sexual promiscuity. The “liberals” will not oppose promiscuity because they do not wish to appear intolerant of “individual liberty.” The “conservatives” will not oppose promiscuity because sexual discipline would reduce the profits of corporations, which in their advertisements and entertainments encourage sexual self-indulgence as a way of selling merchandise.

The public discussion of sexual issues has thus degenerated into a poor attempt to equivocate between private lusts and public emergencies. Nowhere in public life (that is, in the public life that counts: the discussions of political and corporate leaders) is there an attempt to respond to community needs in the language of community interest.

Good points, Jonah. Our discussion on consumerism should be interesting. It may emerge that we are, as Hadley Arkes puts it, “in heated agreement” on some points.

I think what has struck me about some of the reaction to the CC thesis is that, as Bruce points out, every challenge, no matter how mild, seems to be regarded as an intrusion. I don’t like being challenged, but I don’t consider it a violation, so I’m curious about this reaction. (I don’t think you were suggesting this, but I’ll just say I don’t think I’ve made invidious comparisons between CCs and “mainstream” conservatives.)

I suppose I’m thinking of Crunchy Conservatism in the same terms in which Mark Henrie has described “traditionalist conservatism”: “It might be said that traditionalist conservatism is not yet a political theory but rather a tradition of social criticism that is working its way to a political philosophy adequate to its deepest moral intuitions.” Mark points out that just as liberalism doesn’t seem to have a satisfactory account of the moral life, traditionalist conservatism doesn’t seem to have an adequate account of politics, so there is, in a real sense, no traditionalist political program.

There are, of course, debatable ideas and principles behind Rod’s arguments, but I don’t know that they amount to a philosophy. That’s why I assent to the use of the term “sensibility”, though perhaps it’s not quite accurate. I’m reminded of V.S. Naipaul’s (insulting, granted) description of one of his characters: she had a lot of opinions that didn’t add up to a point of view. In the same way, I think one can have a coherent point of view that isn’t its own philosophy.

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.

Tim Lamer writes:

I noticed your blog comment that the country would suffer economic hardship if we stopped our current consumptive binge. I think you can rest easier on that point. Consuming less would mean saving more, which would simply shift resources from consumer goods to capital investment. This would cause some short-term dislocations, especially for retailers, but it would increase the productive capacity of the economy over the longer term. Americans today consume more than they produce, which simply cannot go on indefinitely.

I probably have a more favorable view of economic growth and divisions of labor than you have, although I agree that economic growth is not "the supreme good." But even strictly in terms of economic growth, consuming less than we do today would be a net positive.

Thanks Tim. In today’s WaPo, David Ignatius, who thinks the outrage over the Dubai Ports deal is insane, writes in his column:

The real absurdity here is that Congress doesn't seem to realize that an Arab-owned company's management of America's ports is just a taste of what is coming. Greater foreign ownership of U.S. assets is an inevitable consequence of the reckless tax-cutting, deficit-ballooning fiscal policies that Congress and the White House have pursued. By encouraging the United States to consume more than it produces, these fiscal policies have sucked in imports so fast that the nation is nearing a trillion-dollar annual trade deficit. Those are IOUs on America's future, issued by a spendthrift Congress.

I was wondering when someone would be brave enough to grab crunchy’s third rail. And Bruce has done it. There is simply no getting around the fact that our hyper-materialist post WWII economy of creative destruction made common cause with the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movements to create the political/economic/cultural order we now inhabit—and that Rod critiques.

Bruce, you’re right, this is strange and new. You perhaps could understand it for people who are mobile. But I’ve seen it happen in the rural community in which I grew up. When I was a kid in the 1970s, we always had fish-fries, barbecues and communal social events. But for some reason I find hard to explain, it all fell away to nothing after we kids grew up and either went to college or to work. Most of the kids I grew up playing with moved away. And our parents all drifted apart. Everybody seems to have a satellite dish on their house now. It’s not TV’s “fault,” but it’s all too easy to sit at home being passively entertained than to go visit your friends and neighbors. Is that it? We don’t seek out each other because we are entertained sufficiently by TV, or the computer?

A few years back, I was talking to a NYC cop friend about his life growing up in a working-class neighborhood not far from Harlem. He said that everybody’s mom was at home, and that meant many pairs of eyes on every block, watching what the kids were up to. There was mom solidarity then, and you knew that if Joey’s mom yelled at you, your own mom would back her up. That was society. That kept order. That’s now gone. A teacher friend, explaining to me the difference from when she and I were in school, and today, says that nowadays, if the teacher calls in the parents for a conference over Little Johnny’s grades or behavior, the teacher knows that nine times out of 10, the parent is going to view the teacher adversarially from the beginning. I found this very hard to grasp; as far as my parents were concerned, if they had to have a conference with the teacher, I was guilty until proven innocent. They backed each other up in terms of authority. Now that appears to be gone as well as the “eyes on the street” phenomenon on which so much depended.

How’d it go? Can it ever return? If so … how?

Mitch - I'm saving my thoughts on this mostly for next week. But you might at least leave some room for the possibility that people read Rod as proposing a philosophy, or a political or religious program not because they misunderstand Rod, but because Rod often wants to have it both ways. He cites these grand intellectual traditions and thinkers, constructs intellectual cathedrals and when people try to critique Crunchy Conservatism on the merits, Rod -- and you -- retreat into this "Hey, it's just a sensibility" defense.

Well, the relentless invidious comparisons between "mainstream conservatives" and Crunchy Conservatives in which the CCs come out as noble and good while mainstreamers fit Rod's strawman stereotypes certainly amount to something more than a "sensibility." Or at least they must be read that way if we're going to have an argument about any of this. Otherwise, the entire enterprise boils down to a debate about Rod's feelings and whether or not they are the yardstick of political and moral virtue. And I can tell you right now, they aren't.

Perhaps we have another, small, point of agreement: people today are very uncomfortable with "social pressure." We used to call it "the neighbors."
But, of course, few Americans want anything to do with the neighbors any longer.

I'd just like to point out how new this really is. Right up through the 50's kids, for example, were rarely alone. They didn't need to be carted from organized activity to organized activity, instead running out into the neighborhood. And their parents were not afraid for them, in part because they were certain other adults in the neighborhood would keep an eye on them, correct them if need be, and be obeyed. What today is called a busybody (or worse) used to be a decent neighbor. Sound creepy? Not if you actually KNEW the person; they were, to pick up on one of Caleb's points, friends of a sort, even if not your closest friends.

And Americans didn't suddenly decide this was creepy and do away with it.
Instead, we allowed it to die, by sending all the moms to work (making them feel useless if they didn't go) and by "professionalizing" all the other work moms used to do. Most of society, from the local library to the museum and even the school, used to be largely in the hands of so-called "homemakers." In fact, women were more "community makers" in that they ran all the civil institutions that literally civilized our lives. Now we demand a specialized degree and a salary (pathetically small though it be) for every job. This hasn't made our libraries, etc. better or more respected, far from it. But it has destroyed the fabric of familiarity, friendship and, yes, social pressure that once helped us civilize our kids (and ourselves). We once, not so long ago, knew one another well enough to be able to point out our foibles, now we can't even live differently without it being taken for an insult and an intrusion. Sad is what it is.

Of course, the picture we have of this old society is one of nasty old people beating anyone who got out of line. But it needn't be that way. For example, my wife and I send our oldest (6 year-old) to an independent Catholic school. We rejected the other schools in the area as either too corrupting or too punitive. But our school believes in joy--limits, yes, but also joy. And I think a big reason for this is the fact that it is run and staffed by people dedicated specifically to this school, which they started out of a desire to bring joy back into an orthodox learning environment--and to the fact that volunteering is a key part of the parental commitment.

This brings social pressure with it, but isn't that much of what community, any real life lived in common with anybody at all, is about?

A reader writes:

I couldn't help but notice that your last correspondent, with whom you agreed so much, just (perhaps unconsciously) equated joining the military with getting pregnant and getting drunk. I suspect that you would not agree with this, being a strong supporter of our War on Terror, but is this a common attitude? Are most "crunchies" pacifists, or neo-isloationists? What would a "crunchy" foreign policy look like? I have feeling that your own answer would be significantly different from most of your crunchy correspondents. Or maybe not, but at any rate, we are in a war right now, and questions of foreign policy are not irrelevant. How about it?

All together now: Crunchy Conservatism is a sensibility, perhaps even a critique, not a philosophy or a political or religious program. I wonder how many times over the next year Rod is going to have to say this.

Perhaps a topic worthy of discussion is why the distinction between a proposal that we cultivate certain dispositions and a desire to impose an ideology on the unwilling seems difficult to establish. Perhaps it has something to do with the distaste for “social pressure” (or, to borrow a phrase, the “appearance of social pressure”) that Jeremy’s correspondent mentioned earlier.

Be that as it may, I agree with Rod’s second point, but not so much with his first. What some Crunchy Cons identify as the free market run amok looks to me more like factions using the government to pervert the free market. I wonder if Crunchy Conservatism wouldn’t flourish under a market even freer than the one we have. But perhaps we’ll get into that next week.

“See” everyone on Monday.

Lots of good stuff this morning. And thanks, Jeremy, for the kind words. I’m with you on the use of soft social policy changes to mitigate against the destructive aspects of hyper-mobility, not on any statist principle, but as a concession to the reality Bruce and Mitch touched on earlier: that the state is never neutral and its policies for a long time have been actively hostile to local communities and families. Nanny-state leftists and corporate-state rightists have long been in bed together promoting the wage-entitlement economy and 100% out-of-the-home servitude. Didn’t I see Victor David Hanson making just that argument in NRO a while back?

Jeremy, your emailer also hits on an excellent point about Americans understanding the individual and the state, but not society. The kind of “libertarian/communitarianism” I would advocate for is premised almost entirely on his mode #2 with a dash of #1 thrown in. What it requires is a renewed appreciation for society; for what Wendell Berry calls “membership”—a network of social interconnectedness and shared obligation. It’s what the old English jurist Fletcher Moulton called “obedience to the unenforceable.” It is tradition in this sense, in the societal sense, that is required for order. Social context and membership within it is not something which can be simply valued or appropriated. Tradition must be inheritable, or always-already inherited, to be wholly itself. It is a gift of givenness, given to the point of being so formative of the order of man’s soul that it is ineradicable even from those who turn against it. So, yes, the individual remains free to choose, but in the choosing he is always choosing against an important part of himself. Or, as Voegelin put it: “One can throw out a tradition only by throwing oneself out of it.”

There is a political, not just social, point to be made in all this regarding the health of the republic. That point is made excellently by Jeremy in his article on agrarianism where, following Cato, Vergil, Jefferson, and John Taylor, among others, he says that “the practices associated with the agricultural life are particularly—and in some cases uniquely—well-suited to yield important personal, social, and political goods.” Among them, “the personal and civic virtues associated with farming—economic independence, willingness to engage in hard work, rural sturdiness, hatred of tyranny.”

Along those lines, I am headed outside to my woodlot from my home office with my boys, my chainsaw, and my axe, to chop some wood for the woodstove. We have a warm spell here just now, but being Kansas, it’s sure to turn cold again before spring. There are many virtues in this, I think, and among them is a political virtue, one I do not practice enough.

Jonah, I’m talking about a society that places material comfort and sensual pleasure as the summum bonum of existence, or at least cares about these things inordinately.

Jonah asks:

So: I wonder, is there any good thing which contradicts Crunchy Conservatism or any bad thing which supports it?

Bad thing which supports it: The first thing that comes to mind is what the reader in Connecticut identifies as a tendency for some people who identify with this sensibility to get really cranky and dour moralistic and hung up on non-essentials. And possibly even a sense of separation motivated by an unhealthy fear, and lack of charity. Reader Michael DiResto has written to say he loves the book and agrees with most everything in it … but that he thinks the book is too focused on separating from society, and not enough on the obligation we have to serve the community. There’s a point there.

Rod writes:

Crunchy Cons is a fairly folksy book, but it takes seriously the warnings delivered to the West by both Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II: that the threat to our civilization from allowing market values to rule our culture, at the expense of spiritual values, is potentially as great as the threat from the ugly and brutal materialism forced on people by the Marxists. Put another way, they warned that the feel-good dystopia of Brave New World was just as devastating as the totalitarian misery in 1984.

Me: Rod, Huxley's Brave New World was hardly a free market nirvana. And you're stealing a lot of bases if you're going to say that a free market society is the equivalent of Huxley's world state.

A great post from a Catholic homeschooling mom in Connecticut. Hey, I wrote the book, but I think I’m an HACC like her:

You have no idea how many of us there are out here. Half-assed crunchy cons. Trying to look at the teachings of the Church and asking ourselves, "Where is this all leading?" "How can we get ourselves back, not to the garden, but to villages with gardens?" A lot of the problem has to do with so-called orthodox Catholics who set up these "communities" where all the gals are wearing dresses and the menfolk are making all the gals wear dresses. And you know what? Everyone is so busy pissing and moaning about how bad the government is and how bad vaccinations are and how bad the whole world is that they aren't even noticing that their teenagers are joining the armed forces, getting pregnant and getting drunk. Then there are shotgun weddings, war casualties and traffic accidents. And these people look crunchy. A lot of them are trying to do the family farm thing. But the judgmentalism, the fussiness with non-essentials, the lack of charity--it's disconcerting, to say the least. But, my chickens are dead and we have never grown enough for the winter, so this is a lot like the pot calling the kettle black. The question is, how do we go about transforming the communities we find ourselves in, how do we perform the works of mercy, how do we live our lives both in and out of the public square?

As a Catholic wife and mother, my ideal has become Chestertonian: "The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for the ideal of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion or extravagance. The mind that finds it's way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its' way back is the lunatic's. There must, in every machine, be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeabale. And many of the the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the center and pillar of health." My husband does not have time to learn Latin or a musical instrument, but I do, and I have been studying both. I have introduced my children to the Greeks and the Romans and the great minds of the Middle Ages. They know about the Guilds. They know about the Saints. And in American History, they are learning about the economic impact of slavery and the effect that Reconstruction and later, the robber barons had on our economy. They are learning about the Constitution and about the lives of the Founders. …

I look forward to reading your book. Our homeschooling group is full of mothers very much like me .... crunchy cons.

Rod, I've seen a great deal in this blog from you and others pointing to all sorts of good things and how they confirm the thesis of Crunchy Conservatism. I've also seen mention of many bad things which confirm the thesis of Crunchy Conservatism. I now see that Crunchy Conservatism explains the travails of Europe and provides a pathway to social regeneration as well. So: I wonder, is there any good thing which contradicts Crunchy Conservatism or any bad thing which supports it? Or is Crunchy Conservatism that great and elusive grail: the total philosophy of life? Because that's the way it's coming across to me.

Crunchies just finishing Rod’s book and looking for their next fix may want to mark their calendars for Look Homeward, America by former Reason editor and self-described “Reactionary Radical and Front-Porch Anarchist” Bill Kauffman, due out from ISI Books in May. Closer to the release date The New Pantagruel will feature a lengthy excerpt, but in the mean time, here’s a taste to whet the crunchy appetite:

I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist. Not a sallow garret-rat translating Proudhon by pirated kilowatt, nor a militiaman catechized by the Classic Comics version of The Turner Diaries; rather, I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn.

Like so many of the subjects of this book, I am also a reactionary radical, which is to say I believe in peace and justice but I do not believe in smart bombs, daycare centers, Wal-Mart, television, or Melissa Etheridge’s test-tube baby.

“Reactionary radicals” are those Americans whose political radicalism (often inspired by the principles of 1776 and the culture of the early America) is combined with—in fact, flows from—a deep-set social "conservatism.” These are not radicals who wish to raze venerable institutions and make them anew: they are, in fact, at antipodes from the warhead-clutching egghead described by (the reactionary radical) Robert Lee Frost:

With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new

These reactionary radicals—a capacious category in which I include Dorothy Day, Carolyn Chute, Grant Wood, Eugene McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and a host of other cultural and political figures—have sought to tear down what is artificial, factitious, imposed by remote and often coercive forces and instead cultivate what is local, organic, natural, and family-centered.

In our almost useless political taxonomy, some are labeled “right wing” and others are tucked away on the left, but in fact they are kin: embodiments of an American cultural-political tendency that is wholesome, rooted, and based in love of family, community, local self-rule, and a respect for permanent truths. We find them not at the clichéd “bloody crossroads” but at thrillingly fruitful conjunctions: think Robert Nisbet by way of Christopher Lasch, or Russell Kirk by way of Paul Goodman. Think, always, of things tending homeward.

Prof. Fox write me again:

Leave aside for the moment that Jonah is completely dismissing the possibility that the articulation of a "common good"--on any level--might actually involve some democratic participation and representation, thus resulting in something more than just an arbitrary "picking." (Though that's a pretty revealing glimpse into his very estimation of human ordering in the first place.) Let's just address his libertarian-communitarian distinction. There is some good sense to his argument, but finding it requires a lot more thought than this comment of his betrays.

Is communitarianism—in this case, meaning a concern for consensus, identity, authority, and the pursuit of a common good—good or bad? If it's good, then why do you want libertarianism on the federal level; wouldn't you rather try to bring forth whatever kind of communtarian feeling is possible on any level of government? Obviously a national body can't be communitarian or republican or concerned with a common good in the same way a small locality can--that's an understanding and an argument which goes all the way back to the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. But why does that mean such language should be wholly abandoned once one leaves the local level, save only for matters of "general welfare"? (Was fighting a war to end slave power in the South a matter of the "general welfare"?) Or maybe because Jonah actually thinks communitarianism is bad? That it infringes upon his bedrock individualism? If so, why would he want localities to be communitarian at all? Sure, national governments can oppress people terribly, but it's not like local communities can't be pretty oppressive as well. Maybe Jonah thinks communitarianism is a necessary evil, that we need it to form the sort of civic virtues and habits of the heart that make a libertarian society sustainable? In which case, we would want communitarian communities, so as to provide citizens like Jonah the opportunity to escape from such when they grow up, so they can enjoy "real" freedom. But that, of course, raises the question of how to keep said local communities going from generation to generation, if the real pay-off of American society is to be able to escape into a wider, more libertarian polity. And moreover, if that's the way he thinks, then shouldn't he have reluctantly written that local communities should only be as communitarian "as necessary," rather than saying they should be as communitarian "as feasible"?

Basically, Jonah here seems to be tossing the crunchy cons, the philosophical conservatives, the communitarians, some sort of bone, praising what they make possible locally, but insisting that if the common good ever aspires beyond that level (and wait--what about all the intermediate levels in between: states, regions, etc.?), then it should be actively discouraged; when it comes to the nation, we want libertarianism. The only way to make this coherent is to argue that the very meaning of "community" and "the common good" fundamentally alters when it is expanded beyond a particular level, such that the harms associated with it start dramatically outweighing the benefits. That's a valid argument to make. But it needs to be made, rather than simply asserted as Jonah does here as if it's some sort of obvious, prudent truism.

A concept that may be useful to introduce into the discussion in this regard may be that of philia politike (political friendship) which Aristotle considered the most basic public virtue.

Paul's observations cut to the heart of the Crunchy Cons thesis, which has less to do with the pedigree of one's vegetables or the one's favored style of footwear, and more to do with the core strength of our civilization. Crunchy Cons is a fairly folksy book, but it takes seriously the warnings delivered to the West by both Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II: that the threat to our civilization from allowing market values to rule our culture, at the expense of spiritual values, is potentially as great as the threat from the ugly and brutal materialism forced on people by the Marxists. Put another way, they warned that the feel-good dystopia of Brave New World was just as devastating as the totalitarian misery in 1984.

Kirk and other traditionalist conservatives, while certainly supporting the free market, warned that we dare not let the spiritual and moral core of our civilization erode, because if we do, the market won't be enough to save us. Theirs was not a call to abandon the market by any means, but only to realize that commercial interests must not be allowed to dominate us. If we lose our religion--whether literally, as in Europe, or whether we lose it by degree by hollowing it out such that it doesn't do anything to restrain our materialist impulses, as is happening in much of America--we put the survival of our culture in grave danger. Mind you, I am second only to Derb in cultural pessimism, and I freely admit that I could be seeing our current condition in the US as much worse than it actually is. But other voices--I'm thinking of George Weigel's at the moment--have also warned that the kind of secular-materialist values that rule Europe now, and which predominate in Blue State America (a term I've grown to dislike, but anyway...), could lead to the same sterility and despair now overtaking Europe.

Weigel told me last year that Europe is now living out an experiment to see if a civilization can survive luxury. So, I'd say, are we, though we still have enough cultural reserves to form a resistance. In Crunchy Cons, I suggest how little things like how we educate our kids, where we buy our goods, etc., has something to do with the survival of our culture. But mostly Crunchy Cons is about the need to figure out how to hold fast to our cultural traditions in a fast-moving, globalizing, commercially-dominated world in which doing so is harder than ever.

Maybe if Europeans are interested in Crunchy Cons, it's because they're now living through where a loss of cult, and with it culture, will do. Western civilization was built on three cities: Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. And the greatest of these was Jerusalem. That's not a religious statement; that's a sociological one.

Paul Belien at the indispensable Brussels Journal suggests (inadvertently) why the themes in Crunchy Cons may resonate in contemporary Europe. Here's an excerpt from a must-read post, with my commentary to follow:

Europe's current problems are entirely self-inflicted. This does not mean, however, that the result will be less catastrophic. By subverting the roots of its own Judeo-Christian culture - a process that started with the French Enlightenment (as opposed to the Scottish Enlightenment, which was not anti-religious) - a religious and cultural vacuum was created at the heart of European civilization. The collapse of faith in its own values has, not surprisingly, led to a demographic collapse because a civilization that no longer believes in its own future also rejects procreation. Today, a new religion and culture is supplanting the old one. There is little one can do about it, but hope for a miracle.

America's immigration problems pale in comparison with what confronts Europe. America's major ethnic minorities - Blacks as well as Hispanics
- are Christian, while the meanstream culture is also rooted in Christianity. In Europe a secularized post-Christian culture is facing a Muslim one. The secularized culture is hedonist and values only its present life, because it does not believe in an afterlife. This is why it will surrender when threatened with death because life is the only thing it has to lose. This is why it will accept submission without fighting for its freedom. Nobody fights for the flag of hedonism, not even the hedonists themselves.

One could also put it in a slightly different way: Europe lacks what America still has, namely the so-called "conservative reserves," or as the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen explained over 30 years ago, "the reserves in national energy and self-confidence, primitiveness and generosity, wealth and potential of every kind." Every so often I travel to the U.S. to recharge my batteries, and I am not the only European Conservative to do so. From time to time one needs to breathe the air of freedom before submerging again in the stifling atmosphere of Europe.

America's "conservative reserves" are far stronger than Europe's, because America, unlike secular Europe, has remained rooted to a larger extent in traditional Christian values. I do not doubt that if these values continue to decline in the U.S., American culture will collapse as European culture and civilisation have collapsed. However, America can learn from the impending European catastrophe, and avoid a similar fate.

Thanks for that, Joao. You come from one of the world's most beautiful cities. Mrs. Crunch and I honeymooned in Lisbon, and thought the place sublime. If ever there arises a need for a speaker to come rally the crunchy Lisboans, I'll be on the first plane out. I continue to be fascinated by the early interest in Crunchy Cons from Europe. I've mentioned the January essay that the Sunday Times (London) commissioned from me on the topic. The other day, Corriere della Sera in Milan published in its glossy magazine an excerpt of the book. At first I am left scratching my head as to why a book by an American written for an American audience has resonance with Europeans. But it does--when I was visiting Fred Gion in Paris in December, he told me (after he finished the galley copy) that the call to political renewal through cultural recommitment was a powerful theme in Europe. If there are any European readers of the Crunchy Con blog who can explain this, let us hear from you.

That reader to whom I responded in my last post, still pestering me, now writes the following, which fleshes out his critique of the call to homecoming and merits consideration:

In promoting the genuine goods of tradition, community, public beauty, local variety and family integrity on which most conservatives agree, it's important to disentangle three modes of promoting the perceived Good:
1) Personal suasion, religious teaching, conversion, appeals to beauty and justice;
2) Social pressure, the threat of ostracism, moralistic disapproval;
3) Governmental diktat.
Most of us as Americans are comfortable (as I'll admit I am) with modes 1) and, oddly enough, mode 3), and deeply resistant to mode 2). As a nation of frontiers, where one may always "light out for the territories," we have little patience with the intrusive force of the Gemeinshaft; in Switzerland, a former U.S. ambassador to that country informs me, if you litter or jaywalk, little old ladies really will come up and reprimand you. As an anecdote, this is charming; I don't recommend trying it in New York City.
While we might be annoyed at mode 1), for instance, when someone tries to convince us of the virtues of some course of action (to pick an almost random list: regular exercise, breast-feeding, organic food, vegetarianism, racial tolerance, regular church-going), we might also be attracted or persuaded.
Conversely, when a social problem (such as, for instance, racial discrimination in the 1950s) is brought sufficiently to public attention--by means of personal and public witness (mode 1), we do not pause to permit the evil to melt away under the pressure of disapproval (mode 2), but leap immediately to mode 3), legislation. Conservatives disapprove of this rush to legislate, but it has its reasons--namely, the weakness of social pressure, the resistance most Americans feel towards such pressure, the rebelliousness which it provokes. Of the four English groups which settled America (David Hackett Fisher), the Scots-Irish type is surely the one which left the deepest mark upon us, for better and worse. Because of this, we (probably rightly) do not trust that social consensus will arise to promote what we believe is a crucial societal good. People who really believe abortion is evil don't just want to discourage it; we want to ban it, and put its medical practitioners in prison for a very long time. Of those who vote pro-life, a much smaller fraction get involved in the (wonderful,
admirable) efforts of pregnancy centers to offer abortion alternatives. This is not just because it's more work; in our distrust of social power, we perceive the need to invoke the state.
All of which means, in terms of this debate: Crunchy-cons will work to convince their friends and neighbors to embrace the particular traditionalist values which they consider important. They may never conceive that they intend to promote these by means of law. But should the number of people who agreed with them ever reach a critical mass, I believe that they would shift quickly, and in a classically American fashion, towards imposing them by means of the state. Think of how the Temperance movement went from a religious revival to legislative machine imposing Prohibition on the entire country. That's what happens to ideas in this country--they either remain the preserve of a funky subculture, or they get enacted into law. There is a middle ground, but no American wants to live there. We understand the individual, and we understand the state. We don't understand society. And perhaps we never will.

Hello all--Sorry to enter the (good) conversation so late, but I figured that I ought not to follow the model of Rod's Amazon readers by commenting on a book I hadn't even yet seen, much yet read. It finally arrived in good order on Wednesday, so now I can, in good blogging fashion, start voicing my ill-considered opinions as a piece of performance art. How fun!

I was surprised by the reader's reaction (quoted by Angelo) to Caleb's remark about the desirability of remaining at or returning to hailing distance of one's home (especially since I know that reader personally, and know that he lives a few hundred steps from his childhood home). I don't think it was quite fair to leap to the conclusion that Caleb, or anyone here, is chomping at the bit to build a barbed-wire fence around the county line, with County Mounties posted at checkpoints to inquire why folks were leaving. That would be an odd thing for Caleb to do, at least, who has published the following article on anarchism on tNP, and who has written beautifully about community as well.

The point, I think, was that it would behoove us to at least consider, if only as individuals, that hanging around the farm--or even the ol' suburb--is a mighty good and noble thing to do often, if not always. Further, Caleb might be willing--I certainly would be--to use social policy, at least in a soft way, to encourage a certain amount of immobility, or at least stop discouraging it. E.g., I've long thought that it would be good policy for localities experiencing brain drain (we might refer to these localities as "every small town in the Midwest") to offer to pay off a certain portion of student loans for those of its own who come back to the community after school. I can't see what's "statist" about this.

Anyway, can't wait to start talking 'bout Rod's political hero and his famous, and famously underrated, speech....

I'd like to echo Mitch's excellent point. In Catholic social thought they talk about the service function of the state--we aren't here for the state, it must be here for us. But what does it serve? Traditional conservatism said it was here to serve us as social beings. That is, it's primary purpose is to protect families, churches, and local associations--the groups in which we live, the only places in which we can lead decent lives. Liberals, libertarians, and too many conservatives believe it is there only to serve individuals--protecting them from, among other things and perhaps especially, their families, churches, and local associations.

The charge I'm now expecting is that I'm in favor of some kind of local fascism. Someone no doubt will bring up some horror story about a local tyranny, whether in a town, a church, or a family, so let me be clear: injustice is injustice, no matter who's in charge or at what level. The question is, who do you trust, on the whole, to protect a decent life? Today's individualism (as Tocqueville predicted) leaves each of us pretty much alone to fight it out with the government which, frankly, is run by a few powerful interests. And that's precisely because the central government has all but stomped out a wide variety of local communities that used to have power--rights, responsibilities, and yes, real political power.

Liberalism and its variants are about liberating individuals from the ties that bind. Unfortunately, this not only leaves those individuals lonely, it also leaves them alone when the chips are down and the central government decides it would rather spy on them, put them out of business, or worse.

Real, crunchy, liberty means what Robert Nisbet referred to as a multiplicity of authorities--a variety of possible protectors (and possible oppressors, too), and with them real, substantive choices concerning ways of life and protections against the state.

From the mailbox:

All this Crunchy Con business reminded me of Gertrude Himmelfarb's "One Nation, Two Cultures". She even mentions the very crunchy concept of "selective separatism":
"...selective separatists: people who vote, pay taxes, have ordinary jobs, and do community service, but who choose...not to participate in those parts ot the culture that do not bring glory to God...

...the strategies that might be thought of as countercultural - homeschooling, building up a self-contained pop culture are flourishing....parents attempt to shelter (but not isolate) their children from what they regard as an un-Christian and immoral culture...

...a great many people who, to varying degrees, have exempted themselves from the worlds ot Disney, network TV, videogames, movies, fashion, People magazine, and the other cathedrals of pop culture. They have done so...because they are offended by one or another aspect of the culture ...The quiet rebellion against the arrogance of pop culture will continue..." (pp. 154-155).

Best Regards,

João Noronha
Lisbon, Portugal


P.S. Look forward to reading the book - it's still flying over the atlantic. Things would be much easier for us clients of gigantic online book shops if the manufacturer of the big, global atlantic would have instead produced a small pond.

February 23, 2006

Would I live in an HOA? Not if its chief concerns were making sure my house didn't display any signs of character and that I didn't park my car by the curb. Would I live under another voluntary local authority?

Sure. My neighborhood in Baltimore has a community association, and while I don't always agree with the stances it ends up taking, I'd be very happy if the city were to devolve substantial power to it.

Even without that, there's plenty of local activity that I'm pleased to support and sometimes to take part in, from organized weekly crimewalks and park cleanups to less formal sorts of mutual engagement, like the neighborhood moms' groups that sometimes meets in our home. I don't consider myself a model local citizen by any means, but I do think it's much more important to engage in such neighborly give-and-take than to, say, vote.

Your original message declared that "the libertarian fears not only government telling him what to do but also all other institutions like family, church, community standards, neighbors, role models, etc." I wouldn't dream of speaking for all libertarians, but in my experience that simply isn't true. I seek out some intermediary institutions, I avoid others, and some I just learn to live with. (You can choose where you live, but you can't choose your relatives.) There's a complicated relationship between mobility and rootedness, one that libertarians are if anything more likely to appreciate.

If there's a truth buried in that generalization, it has to do with a distaste for busybodyism, which I share with most libertarians. There are choices that have an impact on other people's lives (say, if I habitually get drunk and stagger noisily through the local playground), and there are choices that just aren't my neighbors' business (say, if I quietly enjoy a beer at home). Of course, everyone draws that line in a different place -- some people people think it affects their lives terribly if the guy next door paints his house the wrong color or if two men kiss in public, and they'll do all they can to make life miserable for the offenders. I don't want to live in a community like that, but that doesn't mean I don't want to live in a community.

Jonah writes: “A government which believes that neutrality is a myth, and that everything is a power struggle between champions of ‘what's good for you’ and what isn't has in effect been granted a warrant for totalitarianism.”

Perhaps a distinction between neutrality and impartiality is in order. Every form of government, every piece of legislation, is based, unavoidably, on a certain view of man and his place in the social order. By definition, laws and policies assert that things are to be done one way rather than another, or perhaps not done at all. But to answer the question why we should have a particular policy (or not), one would at some point have to explain the good promoted or the evil avoided. I’ve never heard a policy justified with the argument, “Well, it’s different, anyway.”

This is the sense in which neutrality is a myth. But I don’t think this makes politics into a power struggle, because laws should be impartial, that is, not favoring any interest or faction over the common good. I’m not saying, of course, that everyone will agree on what the common good is, but that doesn’t mean there is no common good that reason can discover. In any case, some notion of the common good will be adopted by default. Indeed, you can only define “interest” and “faction” with respect to some idea of the common good. Are families an “interest”, a lifestyle choice seeking a tax break, or are they part of the common good?

Prudence is always a limiting factor. Not every good must be pursued or every evil avoided. It’s likely, too, that different pieces of legislation and different policies within (especially) a democratic regime will be based on different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, understandings of the human person. But this is why we have free government: to sort these things out.

Well, rats, my radio interview in DC got cancelled this afternoon, so I won’t be able to go to the Danish Embassy to show my solidarity at the Christopher Hitchens event. But I also found out this afternoon that C-SPAN will be at my Crunchy Cons reading here in Dallas this coming Tuesday night, taping the talk and the Q&A for Book TV. I have it on good authority that someone planning to show up is going to bring me some organic oatmeal cookies. Oatmeal cookies are the Queen of All Cookies! Not for me those vulgar chocolate-chip biscuits. Anyway, if you live in Dallas, the fun gets underway at 7pm on Feb. 28 at the Borders store on the corner of Preston and Royal. And despite the fact that it’ll be Mardi Gras, I want to discourage young distaff crunchies from doing that French Quarter thing to get the guys to toss them beads. Or organic oatmeal cookies. You know what I’m saying.

More Rich Shipe:

In response to Jesse Walker: You are right, I should have used the word "practice" rather than "concept." You are right, as a concept libertarians like HOAs, but in practice do they? Would they live there and if not why? Would you live in one? If not, why?

That would be Jimmy Carter, whose energy portion of the dreaded Malaise Speech I praise as prescient. Why? Because in it, he spoke of breaking our dependence on Middle Eastern oil as a national security priority, and to that end conserving oil as a patriotic act. Nobody bought it, in large part, I think, because Carter was such a weak and confused figure in most respects. As the conservative military historian (and sometime NR contributor) Andy Bacevich has noted, the Carter Doctrine, the post-Soviet invasion of Afghanistan policy committing the US will intervene to protect the Middle Eastern oil fields from attack, has been reaffirmed by every president since then--in part, Bacevich argues, because they knew from Carter’s experience that asking the American people to cut back seriously on their energy consumption was a losing proposition. Bacevich has said that we shouldn’t scapegoat Carter, Reagan, George W. Bush or the neocons for our Mideast military policy, because the fault is largely our own. This from an interview:

Part of the reason that I try to argue against the notion of identifying a scapegoat like President Bush, or even the neo-conservatives, is because I do believe that we're all kind of complicit here. I have no doubt that we as a people are devoted to freedom, but it's chiefly our own freedom and it's a freedom as we design it for ourselves. You have your notion of freedom and I have my notion of freedom, but in many respects, what pays for this freedom is the material abundance of the United States. It's the political economy as it plays itself out, which allows us to, as individuals, pursue our own definitions of freedom.

There are a lot of explanations for where that affluence comes from, but one very important one in the post-war era is the availability of cheap energy. So, when these pesidents are tripping down this path of militarizing U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf, they are in a sense doing what we want them to do, because we want cheap gas. We've not really been willing to face up to what the total cost might end up being. We just want cheap gas.

From an e-friend:

Jg,

I'm going to help you out here. (To which you're delighted, I'm sure.)

If I may leap into your brain for a moment, I think your initial garlicky reaction to the crunchy stuff may be because it lacks at it's base, robust humor and embracing joy.

There is an ineffable stiffness to the whole treatise, that seems to leave little room for the true God-given grace that enables a diverse enjoyment of mankind.

I have some major Biblical objections to the whole thing, namely, Jesus told us not to worry about what we were to wear - or eat tomorrow - for that matter.

Hence, my topsy-turvy objection to CC's superfluous qualifiers. It is an attempt to define an "authentic" spiritual life which in certain ways, is in direct opposition to what The Handbook says.

Angelo Matera asks:

"Before we move on, can we agree that Bruce is right, and societies and governments are never neutral? Can we agree to get past the coercion issue? If so, can we couch our arguments in the language of the common good? Might that be a good definition of a conservative?"

A federal government which considers neutrality a dogmatic first principle will still violate that principle out of necessity (and error) from time to time. But a government which believes that neutrality is a myth, and that everything is a power struggle between champions of "what's good for you" and what isn't has in effect been granted a warrant for totalitarianism. As I've said many times paraphrasing Buckley and Chesterton, a society that argues seriously over whether it is a good idea to privatize lighthouses will not argue about whether to socialize medicine.

One of the flaws of the Crunch paradigm as I understand it is that it rejects libertarianism (and hence fusionism) as a useful standard. I'm no libertarian but I think no major government decision should ever be made unless there's a libertarian in the room explaining to people why he thinks it's a bad idea. The libertarian won't always be right, but he'll be right often enough that he should always be listened to.

The issue on HOAs, it seems to me, is one of purpose. My neighborhood has a pretty intrusive HOA, which imposes a lot of rules. In some ways I'm unhappy about that because people should know not to leave their trash out all week and the like. Unfortunately, common courtesy being all but dead, it actually may be best to start out with everyone knowing the rules; my hope is that good customs will come to displace those rules, and I'm satisfied that I live in as true a neighborhood as I could find around here, that is, one in which we all recognize to some reasonable degree our need to be decent to one another and try to promote our local, common good. To this extent HOAs are a good thing. But when, as in every gated community I know of, the whole purpose of the "community" is to keep "different," generally less affluent people out, or more generally to replace the public square with the private neighborhood board (in essence seceding from the town, county, etc.) then we have, to my mind, something destructive of any true community--and by the way generally populated by people who are there only during the few hours each day they can spare from work, commuting, and vacation.

"Ok, that's it! If Europe is now being held up as a moral exemplar, I'm through with this discussion."

Wait until he sees what John Podhoretz in The Corner today called the crunchy "cliffhanger" earlier today--the politician whose wisdom Rod praises in the last chapter of the book!

Jesse Walker from Reason chimes in on homeowners associations:

Rich Shipe writes: "I have never met a self-declared libertarian who likes the concept of an HOA."

Mr. Shipe needs to get out more. Some of the most interesting writing about HOAs and similar associations has been done by libertarians:

Robert Nelson (*Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government*), Fred Foldvary (*Public Goods and Private Communities*), etc. Many libs do criticize HOAs, of course, but their criticism generally takes the form of "I wouldn't want to live in one" -- or "I don't have a problem with the idea of living in one, but I wouldn't want to live in one with those particular rules" -- not "I hate the very concept." Others -- Spencer MacCullum, for example -- explicitly like the idea of a local, non-governmental authority; they just have trouble with the HOA as an organizational model.

More broadly, there's a long history of libertarians discussing whether non-governmental "social coercion" (a problematic phrase, but I'll use it anyway) is a good, bad, or neutral thing, with most libs (or at least the most sensible libs) coming to the conclusion that it can be any of the above, depending on the content and context of the pressure. Since most people, even us libertarians, value more things than just liberty, you really don't have to travel far into libertydom to find these conversations.

Anyway, I haven't read *Crunchy Cons* yet, but I'm looking forward to it -- I suspect I'll agree strongly with some parts and disagree strongly with others, as I usually do when reading essays in a traditionalist or distributist vein. Even if I end up disagreeing with everything, I figure anything that undermines those noxious Red America/Blue America stereotypes is doing at least some good.

Before we move on, can we agree that Bruce is right, and societies and governments are never neutral? Can we agree to get past the coercion issue? If so, can we couch our arguments in the language of the common good? Might that be a good definition of a conservative?

I think that feels strange to some because both political parties are about “what’s in it for me.” Neither one has a sense of the common good that transcends the individual (which obviously reflects our Protestant heritage).

For instance, Pres. Bush based his embryonic stem cell speech not on transcendent values, but on utilitarianism, on whether or not the benefits are worth it. Europe, on the other hand, can be more restrictive on abortion, and Italy has imposed restrictions on in-vitro fertilization that are unthinkable here, because they can at least speak the language of the common good, they at least have some residual sense of metaphysics--what is the nature of reality?--left in their systems. We don’t.

Justice David Souter has triumphed: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

In the end, though, we still get a public philosophy that favors some and not others, but one that’s stitched together via Karl Rove-style constituent group pandering, not public debate. So let’s all come clean. If you agree with Souter, you’re a liberal. If not, you’re a conservative, and you agree we can talk about reconstructing a public philosophy, and base your arguments on the common good, not “leave me alone.” It may very well be that on a particular issue “leave me alone” is best for the common good. But can we at least agree to argue on conservative terms?

A lawyer pal in New Orleans (who sent in a bawdy crunchy-con light bulb joke that didn’t make it through the fascist censors) writes:

Aren’t all conscious choices at least potentially political? I hate to paraphrase from my organic dish soap bottle, but isn’t it foolish not to consider the effect of our choices on future generations? Choices won’t always be political in a conventional sense (and maybe that’s your point), but they can be. Random example:

My orthodox Jewish buddy won’t buy a new car until he can get a hybrid, because he doesn’t want to buy more oil than necessary and thereby fund the nuts who are dedicated to killing his fellow Jews. Looks like a fashionable yuppie consumer choice, but is actually a political statement.

I don’t know the answers to this, but did Jonah buy a lot of French products in the spring of 2003 because his lifestyle choices are irrelevant to his politics? Is he neutral on the purchase of Danish items now? Has he seen Sean Penn’s recent films? Aren’t those political decisions expressed through lifestyle choices?

That said, I do believe that Lawyer Guy is correct about the unavoidable consequences, pro and con, of even small choices. And that is why we are now eating Lurpak butter from Denmark in my house, even though our usual butter tastes better. Buy Danish early and often.

There’s an interesting article on Leo Strauss and “neoconservatism”, in the March 2006 Prospect. The author’s description of Strauss’ view of democratic society sounds familiar:

Strauss was not the "profoundly tribal and fascistic thinker" described by [critics]. But neither is he a figure with whom liberal democrats can feel entirely comfortable. His support for them is at best pragmatic and provisional; it amounts to little more than the recognition that "at present democracy is the only practicable alternative to various forms of tyranny." Nowhere does Strauss acknowledge freedom or equality as intrinsic goods. Their value, for him, is instrumental; they create a space in which excellence can flourish. "We cannot forget… that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence. No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone."

Strauss, in short, is an unashamed elitist, in the best tradition of the German professoriat. This in itself is enough to mark him as a fascist in the eyes of some commentators.

A reader writes:

Whenever someone criticizes the speech of a leftist or liberal -- say, Ward Churchill or the Dixie Chicks -- the immediate response is often, "But they have a right to free speech." It's been pointed out on National Review many times that this response is silly: No one is proposing to use the force of law to throw Ward Churchill in jail, and if free speech means anything, it means that I too have the right to use speech to express my disagreement with his speech.

It strikes me that a lot of your correspondents and critics are making exactly the same error. Rod and his compatriots put forward various suggestions as to how people should structure their personal lives, the moral decisions that they should make, etc., and the visceral reaction from some people is, "But I have a right to live that way," or "how dare you tell me what to do."

Well, you may be legally entitled to let your kids watch television in their bedrooms all day long, but that's irrelevant. It's still a horrible way to raise children, and the rest of us have the right to say so.

The stuff I’m getting from readers is way more interesting than anything I have to say today. Let me point out again that this week we’re talking crunchy-ism in general, but that next week we’re going to try to focus on Consumerism (while still including general commentary). Here’s something from a conservative reader named Steve:

Have you read Ian Angus? He is a far-leftist (anarchist) who makes a point that is in many way parallel to yours. He makes the simple point that experiences produce identity. These identities then have long-term political consequences. For instance, spending a summer at an ecology camp might be a one-shot deal but will produce an identity as an "environmentalist" that brings with it a whole set of political expectations. On our side, participating in a pro-life march or regular family attendance at church does the same thing.

While serious ideologues like Jonah (a compliment) may reject this as shallow, it is in fact how most people in most places have always determined their political affiliation. Having an intentional place where people who are exploring these lifestyle and commitment issues creates a more solid basis for creating this "identity." It is difficult for progressives and conservatives to have much of a dialogue because they don't share enough assumptions about what is good. When you have a group of people who do share enough assumptions, they can help each other think and pray through their ta