Rod Dreher, editorialist for the Dallas Morning News, has written in the London Times' Sunday edition about "crunchy conservatism." A book of Dreher's on the subject will be published in February, the author's Times article to herald the release. Crunchy con? Dreher and his wife's epiphany came with the realization that "[S]ome of the things we uncritically admired as conservatives, or at least accepted without protest, served to undermine the family and the institutions that we would need to raise good children." Where to? Out-of-the-way stores, institutions and associations. Why would anyone take flight? "Humankind will always seek after the good, the true and the beautiful." What stands in the way? Drudgery and material riches, the "huckster society," argues Dreher.
One sees a characteristic smudge to his delineations. Gaudy mercantilism, the grotesque that Dreher makes out of rightism and American tradition, has been the property of the left for decades. Popular culture, contrary to Dreher's claim, preaches cynicism and socialism — anyone under 40 years old should know from personal experience. By way of Wal-Mart and asphalt, Dreher accuses capitalism of spoiling the land. Really? Why is a less productive China disproportionately more effluvial than the United States — because industry alone consumes, whereas private interest, market incentive and the common good temper industry for husbandry. One may as well blame the invention of electricity for house fires.
Dreher writes that conservatives are suspicious of big business. No, historically the right distrusts unions and populists that succor incompetent and insolvent establishments. A rightist is a "strident libertarian"? — hang on, wasn't the Republican Party being led astray in Washington by tax-and-spend bureaucrats? Or something? I occasionally buy organic lemons and green onions from the grocer but if iconoclasm is lagniappe I have yet to bring that home, too.
It is as though Dreher observes the right secondhand, so there is disjuncture in Dreher's asking the right to contrive "economic and social policies that would make it easier for traditional families...to form and stay together." What more can a legislature do than to mitigate tax burdens, resist the alloying of marriage and prevent entitlement programs from discouraging commitment in the home and neighborhood? How is the complication of law for one purpose any different from that for another? How to extricate via intrusion? Dreher doesn't elaborate, so we must guess. Compulsory weddings? Enforce a fifteen-mile radius beyond which neither spouse may be employed? Relegate annulment and divorce as felonies with a mandatory sentence of house arrest and a marriage retreat?
As inchoate as Dreher's proposal is its intended delivery. Anybody who talks of "anti-political politics," jettisoning laws of contradiction, misinterpreting the reluctant compromises that are made between political and ideological opponents, all to organize some kind of transoceanic powwow, is peddling autocracy or sophism. It is sophism for Dreher, who must be waiting for the new order to try out anti-political politics. He is the one, recall, who compared President Bush's Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers to Caligula's horse.
Concluding, Dreher reaches for the absolute, quoting Peter Kreeft: "Beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of" — of what, the American way? No, beneath "human nature," that "will inevitably open up some day and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape." One does not invoke mankind without implication, and Dreher's aphorism makes the "crunchy conservative" overture an affront. "The ideals we stand for," Dreher writes, "are the most real things there are." Much more real to him than forbearance, diligence and consistency.
Last August, Rod Dreher's ululations in the days after Hurricane Katrina's landfall — drawn from spurious media reports — reflected a man unacquainted with the injury and tragedy that attend mortal life. There is ideal, then there is practice. American rightists have been leading, in Iraq and Afghanistan, something quite like Dreher's pursuit of "idealism" and "common purpose," insofar as every honest man on every continent will live and work in peace if his government allows. After three years in Iraq, the universality of peaceful and democratic self-determination looks promising but the experiment has been laborious and, at least for contemporary hearts, costly. Those for whom "the good, the true and the beautiful" among "humankind" in the Near East was a velleity have disavowed the enterprise. Who is one of them, who has called Iraqi renaissance a "debacle," a "rolling disaster," all part of President Bush's "frog-march[ing] liberal democracy around the globe"? Rod Dreher.
Rod Dreher can derogate free markets, proprietors and customers. He can have his farms and hamlets. Impelling revolution he will find difficult. With whom, to what end and by exactly which means? Have we got to wait for the book? And Dreher had better tighten up his perorations so no one confuses the ideals therein with the passions of certain men and women who, though they agitate for betterment not so far removed from Dreher's, are supernumeraries in his most glorious, impossible dream.