Download e-book for iPad: Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its by Rod Dreher

whilst a National Review colleague teased author Rod Dreher at some point approximately his stopover at to the neighborhood nutrition co-op to choose up a week’s provide of natural greens (“Ewww, that’s so lefty”), he all started brooding about the methods he and his conservative relatives lived that placed them outdoor the limits of traditional Republican politics. presently thereafter Dreher wrote an essay approximately “crunchy cons,” humans whose “Small is gorgeous” variety of conservative politics usually placed them at odds with GOP orthodoxy, and infrequently even within the comparable camp as lefties open air the Democratic mainstream. The reaction to the object was once impassioned: Dreher was once deluged through e-mails from conservatives throughout America—everyone from a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican to an NRA staffer with a fondness for natural gardening—who replied to assert, “Hey, me too!”

In Crunchy Cons, Dreher experiences at the extraordinary intensity and scope of this phenomenon, that is redefining the taxonomy of America’s political and cultural panorama. At a time whilst the Republican social gathering, and the conservative circulation generally, is bitterly divided over what it ability to be a conservative, Dreher introduces us to those who are pioneering a fashion again to the long run by way of reclaiming what’s most sensible in conservatism—people who think that being a really devoted conservative at the present time potential holding the surroundings, status opposed to the depredations of massive company, returning to conventional faith, and residing out conservative godfather Russell Kirk’s instructing that the kin is the establishment most important to preserve.

In those pages we meet crunchy cons from all over the place the US: a Texas extended family of evangelical Christian free-range farm animals farmers, the coverage director of Republicans for Environmental safety, homeschooling mothers in big apple urban, an Orthodox Jew who helped commence a kosher natural farm within the Berkshires, and an ex-sixties hippie from Alabama who grew to become a religious Catholic with out wasting his antiestablishment sensibilities.

Crunchy Cons is either an invaluable primer to residing the crunchy con means and a passionate confirmation of these issues that provide our lives weight and degree. In chapters devoted to foodstuff, faith, consumerism, schooling, and the surroundings, Dreher indicates find out how to dwell in a manner that preserves what Kirk known as “the everlasting things,” between them religion, kin, neighborhood, and a legacy of historical truths. This, says Dreher, is the type of roots conservatism that progressively more americans are looking to perform. And in Crunchy Cons, he permits them to understand how a ways they're from being alone.

A Crunchy Con Manifesto

1. we're conservatives who stand outdoors the conservative mainstream; hence, we will see issues that subject extra clearly.

2. sleek conservatism has develop into too inquisitive about funds, energy, and the buildup of stuff, and insufficiently involved in the content material of our person and social character.

3. great company merits as a lot skepticism as colossal government.

4. tradition is extra very important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that doesn't perform restraint, humility, and solid stewardship—especially of the usual world—is now not essentially conservative.

6. Small, neighborhood, outdated, and specific are often greater than significant, international, New, and Abstract.

7. good looks is extra vital than potency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven popular culture deadens our senses to actual fact, good looks, and wisdom.

9. We percentage Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the establishment such a lot necessary to preserve is the family.”

From the Hardcover edition.