Product Description

When a National Review colleague teased writer Rod Dreher one day about his visit to the local food co-op to pick up a week’s supply of organic vegetables (“Ewww, that’s so lefty”), he started thinking about the ways he and his conservative family lived that put them outside the bounds of conventional Republican politics. Shortly thereafter Dreher wrote an essay about “crunchy cons,” people whose “Small Is Beautiful” style of conservative politics often put them at odds with GOP orthodoxy, and sometimes even in the same camp as lefties outside the Democratic mainstream. The response to the article was impassioned: Dreher was deluged by e-mails from conservatives across America—everyone from a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican to an NRA staffer with a passion for organic gardening—who responded to say, “Hey, me too!”

In Crunchy Cons, Dreher reports on the amazing depth and scope of this phenomenon, which is redefining the taxonomy of America’s political and cultural landscape. At a time when the Republican party, and the conservative movement in general, is bitterly divided over what it means to be a conservative, Dreher introduces us to people who are pioneering a way back to the future by reclaiming what’s best in conservatism—people who believe that being a truly committed conservative today means protecting the environment, standing against the depredations of big business, returning to traditional religion, and living out conservative godfather Russell Kirk’s teaching that the family is the institution most necessary to preserve.

In these pages we meet crunchy cons from all over America: a Texas clan of evangelical Christian free-range livestock farmers, the policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, homeschooling moms in New York City, an Orthodox Jew who helped start a kosher organic farm in the Berkshires, and an ex-sixties hippie from Alabama who became a devout Catholic without losing his antiestablishment sensibilities.

Crunchy Cons is both a useful primer to living the crunchy con way and a passionate affirmation of those things that give our lives weight and measure. In chapters dedicated to food, religion, consumerism, education, and the environment, Dreher shows how to live in a way that preserves what Kirk called “the permanent things,” among them faith, family, community, and a legacy of ancient truths. This, says Dreher, is the kind of roots conservatism that more and more Americans want to practice. And in Crunchy Cons, he lets them know how far they are from being alone.


A Crunchy Con Manifesto

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #622810 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-24
• Released on: 2006-10-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Re-Thinking Conservatism, Environmentalism.
Buying organic locally produced meat is one of the most fundamentally conservative things you can do, writes Dreher. I agree. Too often the 'environment' is an issue hijacked (and misused) by the left, the same way patriotism has been hijacked and misused by neocons.
One reviewer said something to the effect that people with real jobs can't take the time to eat 'real food' or sit down to a family dinner ( i wonder how much time this guy spends in front of the TV watching football and commercials for industrialized food). If that's the case....then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we live. And that's his point - and his self-discovery.
This book isn't just for 'conservatives' but anyone who suspects that the their current 'consumerist' lifestyles aren't the panacea they are thought to be. Amazing as it seems - going back to buying from a farmer's market and sitting down to a family dinner can profoundly, postively effect your life, as it did Dreher's

I found my voice
As a lifelong conservative Republican growing tired of the way the Republican party views money as the chief end of man, I was so refreshed to read Dreher. I found myself thinking, "I'm not alone." Even though I don't agree with all he says, the book forces the reader to confront ideas and to not simply accept the things the way they are.

We Have More In Common Than You Think!
I read this book shortly after it came out and I LOVED IT. At last, someone has found a label for my belief system. As a conservative, I feel that the family is the most important building block of our society. I believe in self-sufficiency, but I also believe in sharing your gifts with others and acting as good stewards of the earth and all the blessings that we've been given. This easy-to-read, at times humorous book, tells it like it is and gives a voice to what I believe is a larger group of people than you might think. There is common ground (a lot of it) between liberals and conservatives. Perhaps by following the author's precepts, we can begin to bring our country together by focusing on what we share in common, rather than that which drives us apart. Read this and see for yourself.