Burkenstocks.(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 )(Book review)

Rod Dreher Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers & Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or At Least the Republican Party). Crown Forum, 272 pages, $24

reviewed by Joseph Rago

You may be familiar with the "crunchy" disposition, which takes its name from the texture of the granola its adherents enjoy eating. My own exposure to the crunchies has been largely limited to the college campus, where they are a clique, a type, every bit as recognizable as, say, the frat boy or the fish-eyed "intellectual." Like these other groups, the crunchies are differentiated by their lifestyle cues. These include a certain fondness for frisbee, organic farming, the out of doors, drum circles, teach-ins, burlap apparel, and hemp jewelry.

There is a crunchy politics, of course--a sort of bohemian, back-to-the-earth eco-sensitivity--but the politics are potted, de rigueur, a way to relate to peers. You hesitate to devote any serious thought to the opinions in the same way you might hesitate to applaud performing seals: After all, they're just going through the motions.

Perhaps this assessment is unfair, but not if Rod Dreher's self-indulgent, irretrievably awful new book is any indication. In Crunchy Cons, as the title suggests, he attempts to graft the crunchy ethic onto conservatism. His "crunchy conservatism," I suppose, is only the latest contrived boutique conservatism to be inflicted on the American mind in the past few years. Remember compassionate conservatism? Or "South Park" conservatism? Crunchy conservatism is headed straight for the same garbage barge.

Dreher is unhappy with much of modern life, and he sees the encroachments of chaos everywhere. America is apparently in the teeth of "empty consumerist prosperity," a relentless, destructive materialism that is brutalizing our spiritual, moral, and aesthetic values and tearing the fabric of society to ribbons. Dreher takes up a strain of traditional conservatism located somewhere between Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, and, in parsing their thought, he reiterates several valuable points. Boundaries and limits are necessary to keep civilization in good working order. The contemplative life yields more rewards than a life lived otherwise. Luxury can be enervating. Families are important social units. Culture matters. These ideas, however, have been articulated more rigorously and more eloquently elsewhere, most notably by Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk.

The major thinkers, to be sure, may be reinterpreted to meet the conditions of contemporary life. New discoveries must be made. But Dreher's findings are slight. The novel thing about a "Birkenstocked Burkean," it seems to me, is not the Burke but the Birkenstocks. Dreher is preoccupied by lifestyle signifiers--the way people dress, the homes they live in, and, particularly, the food they eat. For reasons I can't comprehend, he has a voracious obsession with the "right" kind of organic food. At one point, he tells a story about a really delicious free-range chicken he ate with his family: "It was ... almost the Platonic ideal of chickenness." Eating is for Dreher a fundamentally political act. "There are many mansions in the American conservative house," he writes, "and some of them are old and funky and smell like a pot of organic mustard greens cooking down on the stove." This gives you a taste of his ersatz cracker-barrel folksiness.