What Is A Granola Conservative?

Rod Dreher's "Birkenstocked Burkeans" article in the July 12, 2002 National Review offered the initial sketch of the phenomenon. His Sept. 30, 2002 follow-up, "Crunchy Cons," developed it further. Some excerpts:

"It never occurred to me that eating organic vegetables was a political act, but my colleague's comment got me to thinking about other ways my family's lifestyle is countercultural. Julie is a stay-at-home mom who is beginning to homeschool our young son. We worship at an "ethnic" Catholic church because we can't take the Wonder Bread liturgy at the Roman parish down the street. We are as suspicious of big business as we are of big government. We rarely watch TV, disdain modern architecture and suburban sprawl, avoid shopping malls, and spend our money on good food we prepare at home. My wife even makes her own granola.

And yet we are almost always the most conservative people in the room..."

Dreher realized he was on to something when his e-mail inbox began filling up with "Me, too!" notes. But why? By their books shall ye know them:

"The crunchy-con bookshelf — and because they eschew television, they have lots of bookshelves — sags with works by conservatives like G. K. Chesterton [JK: vid. "Ballad of the White Horse"], Richard Weaver, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Southern Agrarians, and Michael Oakeshott. They also read books by more contemporary thinkers like the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry; Jane Jacobs, who championed particularity and diversity in urban planning over the dominant trend toward mass abstraction; media critic Neil Postman; and James Howard Kunstler, whose choleric jeremiads against America's strip-mall Babylon have made him a left-leaning prophet with honor among crunchy cons. They favor books on the environment that reflect a manlier, Rooseveltian (Teddy, the good one) stance toward the natural world, which respects nature without worshiping it.

Of all the thinkers and writers favored by crunchy cons, Kirk may be the most reliable guide to their sensibility. He grasped the essential truth that conservatism was not primarily about a political agenda, but instead "a complex of thought and sentiment, and a deep attachment to permanent things." It was a fundamental stance toward reality. For crunchy cons, the quest to live "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" is not just a nice idea - and because of this, they don't always line up with Republican orthodoxy. As Carson Gross, a 25-year-old San Franciscan, says, "I'm always explicit with people that I'm a conservative, not a Republican."

There are four basic areas that are touchstones for crunchy conservatives: Religion, the Natural World, Beauty, and Family..."

This sometimes results in seemingly odd alignments, and an orientation that believes modern conservatism may have become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff:

"Boston College professor Peter Kreeft discovered this phenomenon a few years ago. Kreeft said he and three friends fit John Courtney Murray's four American political types: radical, liberal, traditionalist, and conservative. One day, Kreeft, a traditional Catholic, discovered a close affinity with the Marxist atheist in the group. What did it was driving around Cambridge and judging everyone's reaction to a new housing development the conservative Republican had moved into...."

You may want to read the rest of that one.

Crunchy Cons: "Save the Environmentalists!"

Yet the biggest and most obvious cleavage between "crunchy cons" and their fellows on the right lies in their approach to the environment. They're not economic illiterates, and their approach leans hard toward the free market. But there's something else at work here, and their books noted above provide a clue. Catholic blogger Mark Shea got one aspect of it when he wrote "The Cheapness of Granola Conservatism" in July 2002:

"Lewis, Tolkien and other point a very different way. One which restores Nature to her place as our sister, not our Mother, and which is as hostile to the denigration of nature as to its worship. Sooner or later, serious conservatives are going to have to go back and take a look at Tolkien's attitude to trees (and their attitude toward us in his fiction) and Lewis' attitude to vivisection. They are definitely not PETA or Earth First types. But neither would they be thrilled with Rush Limbaugh. Yet conservatives adore them both. Time to stop compartmentalizing here and deal with their sacramental attitude toward nature. It will only make conservatism healthier by giving it a less reactionary and more intelligent view of conservation that isn't simply defined by opposition to the lunatics of the Left."

The result is an important service to environmentalism, at least if one's goal is to raise environmental issues above their current vanishing point in political debate. It's an important service to the Republican Party, too.

After all, a political movement which is often in the spotlight working to block serious action against murderous dictators, and which alternates between sneering at and actively battling against anyone trying to take them on... such a movement deserves the label it will justly earn - as a shill for murderers and tyrants. A label that no amount of "framing" and spin can really fix. The Left has earned this label justly - and will keep it, unless they make behaviour changes with real substance.

Likewise, a political movement which is often in the spotlight working to block serious action toward corporate accountability in matters of the environment, safety, et. al., and alternates between sneering at and actively battling against those trying to take these issues on.... such a movement deserves the label it will justly earn - as a shill for big business. A label that no amount of "framing" and spin can really fix. The GOP has earned this label justly - and will keep it, unless they make behaviour changes with real substance.

One can remedy this situation without being in thrall to the Left's well-financed lobbies, or defined by the Left's failed shibboleths. Indeed, one must if real progress is to be made on the issues.

For an fine illustration of why, look no further than the sterile discussion we had here with Tom Volckhausen over an August 2005 Winds article re: the endangered Tigers of India. Before he was done, Tom had proposed as the solution the very component that was failing in the real world, referred to the free market as "mythical," and placed his faith instead in a lack of corruption among government officials - all in a poor area where illegal trading in tiger parts is hugely profitable. As I eventually noted:

"I guess I'm disappointed by this kind of traditional gatekeeper/ "la la la I can't hear you" liberal-left stance when confronted by challenges to its orthodoxies. Challenges that note the fact that the interests and goals it claims to represent are not being given priority, and indeed are being sacrificed to its politics. Disappointed - but not surprised."

Nor am I alone, and that impression is having real effects. As evidenced by the recent "death of environmentalism" memo that first circulated in 2004 at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference. Not to mention New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who wrote that:

"...it's critical to have a credible, nuanced, highly respected environmental movement. And right now, I'm afraid we don't have one... environmental alarms have been screeching for so long that, like car alarms, they are now just an irritating background noise."

Crunchy-con Stephen Hayward is also quick to note that environmentalism's decline, and the accompanying negative reactions on the right to many Crunchy Con traits, aren't co-incidence. As he explained to a mostly-puzzled crowd of lefties at at the Philanthropy Roundtable Meeting in Big Sky, Montana on June 20, 2005:

"It is often recalled that most of the landmark environmental legislation of the early 1970s passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities, which contrasts sharply with today’s near-total legislative gridlock. It is amazing to recall that Barry Goldwater had been a long-time member of the Sierra Club--something that is unthinkable today even for his maverick successor John McCain--and one of the chief co-sponsors of the Endangered Species Act was Bill Buckley's brother, Senator James Buckley.

At that time, the environment was seen as the new consensus domestic policy issue around which the nation could move forward in a bipartisan fashion after the train wreck of social policy in the 1960s. The irony, of course, is that by the 1990s, we had re-forged a consensus on several highly contentious areas of social policy such as welfare, crime, and to some extent education, while the environment has become a highly polarized domestic policy issue. In opinion polls the single greatest gap between the two parties on domestic issues is the environment."

In "Conservative Environmentalist" an Oxymoron? How to End Environmental Policy Gridlock, Hayward looks at how this happened, what we're facing, and what might be done on both the left and right to restore environmentalism to relevance and move it forward. I recommend his article highly, and if you've read this and followed some of the links, all of the "Granola Conservative" themes discussed here will jump right out at you.

Conservative blogger Orrin Judd also threw out a few ideas in his 2002 essay "Towards a Conservative Environmentalism," then closed with this:

"It seems apparent that a conservative environmentalism would be much different than Environmentalism in tone and in policy, yet it should serve to alleviate the legitimate concerns of voters that conservatism is nothing more than pro-business, pro-development, and anti-environment. A conservative environmentalism would still favor economic growth, but it would seek to check human appetite. It would be just as strictly law and order when it comes to polluters as it is when it comes to drug dealing. In all of this, it would bring conservative views on environmental issues into line with conservative views on social issues and restore some coherence and consistency in place of what has all to often in recent years been a tendency to petulantly oppose anything that Environmentalism supports and to take that opposition to extremes. Just because Environmentalists think spotted owls are more important than people does not require conservatives to actively seek their extinction, but this has often been the seeming reaction. A conservative environmentalism would provide a framework for considering such issues that would be independent of the lunatic Left and allow for a proactive rather than a reactive approach."

One hopes so. We'll see.

On The Bus...

While it may provide the clearest example of cleavage and the greatest opportunity for a different and productive approach that moves public policy forward, it should be remembered that true environmentalism is only one aspect of the CrunchyCon world view. Family, Beauty, and Culture also matter a great deal - and just as they reject the left's failed domestic "Environmental War" approach, they reject the right's failed "Culture War" approach as well:

"Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives."

In both cases, therefore, they favour a more human approach that emphasizes stewardship values, greater local control, and the primacy of involvement that leads to real local improvement as the goal rather than political commitment. From higher levels, they look for a combination of no-nosense enforcement, plus incentive patterns that promote local virtues rather than actively undermining them. To ask for more would be to expect too much from government, which is at least as flawed as big business in institutional terms.

There's considerable overlap here, and even socio-cultural commonality, with the neo-liberal Communitarian worldview promoted by thinkers like Amitai Etzioni. While that group may be very much on the eclipse within the Democratic Party, its adherents haven't gone away and can still point to "Third Way" successes in areas like welfare reform. See The Communitarian Network's web site, the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, and especially Amitai Etzioni's 1992 "A Communitarian Platform" [PDF format] in the DLC's New Democrat magazine.

A very interesting liberal-conservative discussion may be about to develop.

Having said that, "Granola Conservatives" know their roots - and those roots are conservative. By drawing on those deeper roots, they may even find allies in places that outside observers would consider unlikely. If they do, the face of American conservatism is likely to undergo a second evolution - even as the left remains firmly stuck in the 1960s, and continues to drag the rest of the Democratic Party right back there with them. Absent all the fun parts, of course; they aren't into that any more.

Still, resonance is real in politics, and movements often have echoes across political lines. Depending on how things break, the result could be an intellectual current that's about to affect both of America's major political parties.

The ride ahead certainly promises to be interesting. Are You On The (hybrid) Bus?

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg rips the "Crunchy Cons" concept - and some of his criticisms are valid. But it's still worth paying close attention to, and here's why.