Granola on the right.(Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-wing Nature Lovers, ... America)(Book review)

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party), by Rod Dreher (Crown Forum, 245 pp., $24)

A COUPLE of years back, when he still worked in New York for NATIONAL REVIEW, Rod Dreher told his editor that he was off to pick up his family's delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables from a Brooklyn organic-food co-op. "Ewww, that's so lefty," she said, screwing up her face.

That got Dreher, who these days edits and writes for the Dallas Morning News, thinking. Organic food is a leftwing cliche. But then, he realized, many things he and his wife, Julie, valued and believed in were more common among mass-culture-disdaining earthy-crunchy hippie types than among his conservative colleagues. He and Julie grooved to Cuban son and jazz on NPR and loved arty films, for instance; and they distrusted big business and despised tract houses, malls, and other aesthetically unpleasing byproducts of a consumer society. A few days after his exchange, Dreher wrote a witty article, "Birkenstocked Burkeans," for National Review Online, exploring the apparent tensions between his family's way of life and his political allegiances. A massive outpouring of sympathetic e-mails emerged from similarly "crunchy" right-leaning readers.

Crunchy Cons expands and deepens Dreher's earlier essay, making a sustained argument out of his ...