"Crunchy Cons"--? Ye gods and little fishes--
These people are pathetic beyond belief.
There's a lot more serious stuff going on out there in the news, as ever, but this hits particularly close to home for me - there but for the grace of God I - and it's in its own way emblematic of the whole problem of reality-based vs. wishthink-based communities, and the fundamental incoherence of the US conservative movement, writ small in this one segment of it.
I haven't told this story for a while, I think, so here's the background: a few years ago, as I was becoming more politically aware (and active, in the sense of arguing with my co-workers as to why the idea that Iraq was likely to nuke us or invading them to make us more secure was asinine, and convincing one of them, on my own authority) I read an article in a copy of National Review that was lying around in the break room (this was the employer who: lied to me pre-job about the terms of employment; regularly lied to customers about their orders to cover their own errors; used the store as their family's private shopping center, writing off the inventory as lost; was beyond stingy in their treatment of us peons; had Rush Limbaugh and other Clear Channel bigots on the radio whenever they were around, thereby turning at least one center-left "fiscal moderate" into a flaming liberal.)
This article made it clear to me that even had I wanted to go back, there was no place for me in the 21st century conservative movement: they wouldn't want me, because what used to be permissible, even the norm, in our corner of academic conservative Catholicism, had become not just heterodox, but heresy.
What I refer to is the (as it turned out) very small subset of American conservatives who didn't have a clue as to what capitalism or conservativism was all about, and so were against Big Business and corporatism and factory farming and mass production, embracing a William-y Morris-y/GK Chestertonian style of living (at least in thought) and mostly just talking about the glories of small-town, back-to-the-land Arts and Crafts Movement living, where everyone grows their own food and makes their own furniture and clothes and music and reads and writes poetry and walks to the library to get books on the birds at their feeder and goes fishing and is at one with Nature because it's Civilization In Harmony With The Universe, as it was meant to be - and was, in the imagined Good Old Days of Yesteryear.
--Whether TGODOY are imagined to be the 19th century of Laura Ingalls, or the 18th century of the colonists, or the High Middle Ages, or the pastoral romancers' vision of Magna Graeca. It doesn't matter, it all flows together in our their heads, anyway. No eight-lane superhighways, no little Mordors of smog-belching factories, no megamarts filled with fatty, flavorless, preservative-packed FOODS™ or made-in-China-by-enslaved-bishops plastic tacky crap - no chopping down trees to put in telephone poles just because it's cheaper than burying the wires, no vast wastelands of identical subdivisions covered in vinyl siding surrounded by astroturf Chemlawned into sterile birdkilling green, no deathly cement hives of tenements filled with worker proles kept numb with the soma of 24/7 televised inanities--
This is not, in itself, a contemptable vision of the ideal human society. It may be lacking in appreciation for both the Goods of the City (using Good when capitalized in the philosophical sense, meaning benefits in a more abstract and non-subjective sense) and the ills of that eulogized pastoral life, and it may be lacking (particularly depending on the individual doing the dreaming) in any sense of the practicalities involved in making it work or happen, but it is the sort of world envisioned by everyone working for the Fair Trade and Slow Foods movements, the people who are actually working to make it possible for individuals to live off the work of their hands as artisans not sweatshop serfs, for families to live off the produce of their farms instead of going deeper into debt to keep the altars of Mammon piled high with Profit hecatombs, for rivers to be made safe for fish, and fishing, and there are still woods for those feeder-birds to breed in and resisting the turning of "wasteland" into more superhighways or big box store staffed by more underpaid serfs who can't afford to have their own organic gardens or make their own clothes, much less the time to read and enjoy the cultural treasures of Civilization--
In short, it's a very Leftist utopia, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of it.
But the Goods of it are not unappreciated by many who self-identify as Righties, or Conservative: there are (despite the self-congratulatory talk of all too many liberal snobs) more than a few Anarcho-syndicalist Ent-loving Shire-wanting Republican voters out there (even if a lot of them self-identify as "Libertarian" out of a fancied political nonconformism) and they mostly just want (or think they want) to live "the simple life" in the country, on the outskirts of the town, but some of them actually are well-off enough to manage it, and do, (although most of them that I knew/know personally were/are not.)
This creates, as you might imagine, a certain amount of tension for them. But that is actually of relatively recent date, and results from the everything-that-rises-must-converge situation which is a combination of the increasing political success of the conservative movement, and the boundary-breaking newly-crowded cocktail party of the Internet. You can't really avoid knowing about what everyone else thinks these days, unless you take yourself out of circulation deliberately, and by "these days" I mean the past ten years, when I as johnny-come-lately to the 'net started poking about and finding a lot of things I had taken as gospel (as conservative, as Catholic, as American) being debunked by collision with reality.
So on the one hand, if you're a conservative blogger repeating the usual canards (not knowing they're canards) about godless-commie-feminazi-hippie-fags and never stopping to think how some of them contradict each other (or are contradicted by various documents out there) or about how superior and innocent of all the wrongs that the Left accuses the Right of your side is, you have to actively resist being corrected, since a link can go round the world before you have time to make a cup of tea, and choosing to have a no-comments blog with no contact info is an act of will, not the other way round these days.*
At the same time, it's not just your adversaries that you have to watch out for contradiction from - and again, that is in no small part a consequence of success. Every political movement in history - and every other movement, too, all sorts of fandoms that there are - faces the problem of self-definition made more difficult by the fact that human beings are, when you come down to it, not very social animals at all. We can't live without each other, but we can't hardly stand each other, either. Much of successful civilization depends on being able to overlook the things that annoy/irk/offend/displease us, and the closer we are in contact the harder this is. (This is one major reason why working for your family is not usually a good idea, and also why intense-at-first relationships often lose their romantic bloom.)
So, back in the day - the 1970s, that is - it was quite possible for a self-identified conservative ex-Bohemian rebelling against the '60s rebellion and the '70s mandatory happy face optimism to a) self-identify as conservative, b) be in favor of recycling, organic gardening, greenspace, protecting endangered species, opposed to DDT and dioxin and MSG and oversugared foods and air pollution and big cars, c) have no idea that voting Republican to "save the babies" or "convert Russia back to God" was a vote for the hated factories, the auto industry, industrialized agriculture, developments without regard for small town economies, and against ecological protection of all sorts.
--Yes, in retrospect, looking over old Corpo writings and what truth was out there even in the pre-internet era, I do realize (as I did not when I was seven) that a literate, informed adult (as the pro-organic-gardening/recycling/peregrine-falcon Republican-voting contingent was then) would have had to work hard to ignore the goals and activities of their party leadership and the GOP's Corpo allies. But putting fingers in the ears and humming is not new, not unknown, and not limited to conservatives only (as the old Left's disregard for Stalin's offenses demonstrates) and it wasn't limited to just this sort of disconnect between incompatible economic paradigms - racism, sexism, xenophobia, all of it could be ignored on the basis of "well I don't hate gays, none of my friends are for segregation, of course women should have the vote, I don't know what you're talking about!" It's kind of like ignoring your strange bedfellows and pretending you're all alone in the bed, even after they start snoring loudly and taking all the covers.
But that was then. It really started happening right after The Reagan Revolution, but it was possible - admittedly with some effort - to go on pretending that the Corpos weren't running the show, that the bigots weren't the majority, and that Somehow there would be this synthesis of all the Goods of Conservativism, Morality™ and Justice™ and Freedom™ and and Decency™ and Prosperity™, and those Good Ends the liberals managed to accomplish by accident somehow despite simultaneously being both too stupid and gullible to realize how they were being used by the Shadowy Forces of Evil and too evil themselves to take a break from trying to destroy Western Civilization™ by every means possible, like protecting the environment and the arts and civil liberties for third-world farmers and seamstresses.
--Mind you, even then, you had to preface any praise for ecologically-sound practices like organic farming and recycling with "but of course I'm not like those whacko environmentalists who want there to be no humans on the planet." But it was a spontaneous and unrequired thing, back then, or at least a more-self-conscious statement of orthodoxy rather than one done in fear of being attacked, rising from discomfort at seeing "environmentalist" and "tree-hugger" become synonyms for the Devil as the years went on, and the Soviet Union's role as Chief Bugbear waned.
So reading that Rod Dreher and his family are discomfitted and feeling harrassed for holding to those old Anarcho-syndicalist ideals (carried on in America largely by the Fugitive Poets/Agrarians and their admirers - if you've never heard of the Fugitive Poets, well, that shows you how small a pond it is/was) by their fellow conservatives, as suspiciously heterodox, that was amusing to me. How the Steel Was Tempered, I thought - the inadvertant ironies and revelations of a movement circling ever inward in its quest for purity. How long before the purges of NRO editors caught with "decadent art" on the walls, or copies of unapproved books on their shelves?
All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like - jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son - is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain. We found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation. Two weeks ago, some conservative friends were driving me down the Pacific Coast Highway, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty, as they are. "I'm afraid we have to tip our hats to the tree-huggers," said one. "If it weren't for them, much of what you see would be covered with tract houses and malls."
There were a lot of things in this pathetic bleat which were informative, on several levels of meta. For one thing, it turns out that Dreher is actually a couple years older than me, so he has even less excuse to be shocked, shocked! at the "Ewww! Hippies! Traitors!" reception of all too many of his fellow conservatives (as seen here in this page of letters in response to an interview with him in the Wall Street Journal called "The New Counterculture.") It wasn't new when my parents were subscribing to Rodale's in 1978 and I was the only third-grader who knew what dioxin and DDT were and why they were bad, and it certainly wasn't new in 2002. And being a Prominent Catholic Conservative Academic, there's no way he could have missed the rash of Olin-funded defenses of DDT and GM foods in conservative Catholic magazines in the late '90s, either. Even if he was head-in-the-clouds enough to not wonder about them, and go and find out that Olin used to make a lot of money making DDT, as I subsequently did, he had to be aware that there were reasons that the powerbrokers of conservativism in this country were against environmentalism, and that the memes of "wacko tree-huggers" against which he was contending didn't come out of nowhere.
The folks at Alicublog talking about this don't realize that Dreher represents a Lost Splinter Group of conservativism, like some Stone-Age tribe or prehistoric species found living in the depths of the jungle, rather than a new development, and if they'd been paying attention to what their enemies had been writing and saying for the past 30 years they would have realized this was an inevitable development. Dreher himself has no excuse for not realizing that he is merely a tolerated tag-end of what has become (always was, but now utterly marginalized) the fringes of American conservativism. They're the last die-hard Trotskyites, thinking they're going to win back any day now, not recognizing that no one's bothered to go after them with an ice pick because they're so completely irrelevant and not a threat to the Hegemony at all.
The WSJ profile says, "Because Mr. Dreher offers no detailed blueprint for cultural renewal, some may dismiss his book as just another lifestyle manifesto. This would be a mistake. Like it or not, Mr. Dreher raises concerns that will not go away. America today is more broadly free and prosperous than any society in human history. We are gloriously "free to choose." But choose what?"
And here you have the core of the problem. "No detailed blueprint for cultural renewal" - well, of course not. You'd have to first be able to analyze and understand in the least degree how interlocked economic systems work, or at least kludge along, then posit what an ideal, or at least improved, version of it should look like, tackling all the pros and cons for everybody and that would get you into seriously politically incorrect territory as a fiscal conservative. You'd have to ask cui bono? over and over and over again, and the answers would be pretty scary and lead you to the fact that it's you and your little merry band of Birkenstocked Burkeans facing off against the whole massed array of the Hegemony, the long-trained, long-prepared heirs of Andrew Carnegie, who wasn't shy of shooting people who dared challenge the Barons, and only don't now because they've managed to so so much discord in this country that they don't need private Pinkerton armies any more, we'll bite off our own heads in haste to Be Like Stalks rather than show a hint of treasonous Socialism.
And that's not a safe place to go. You'd have to be really deluded, more out of touch with reality than old Frank Fukuyama or Andy Sullivan ever were, to think that a handful of romantic Catholic converts with fantasies about living in some small-town pastoral 19th century idyll and nevermind the "dark satanic mills" and other helotries necessary to the standard of living they want, and the massive networks of transportation and money that subsidized them, the clipper ships and the railroads and the East India Company before them, the profiteers who don't care what slagheaps the miners' children live and die under, how many seamstresses burn to death in the Triangle, or how many nameless strangers starve, sicken, and despair around the globe - or how their endless sacrifices to Mammon spoil the quality of living for the petit-bourgeoisie, who lose the green space and the good food and the scenic views and the high culture to the devouring maw of the Great God Corporate Profit--
--could stand up to and defeat these guys, who own all the money, all the sources of capital, who run the country and have run it into the ground all to ensure that the line of sacrifices to the altar of Tashlan never falters, so that they can go on living in the style to which they have become accustomed. They don't care if you're stuck in some pit of a ticky-tacky bungalow forced to drive 40 miles on the tarmac in asthma-causing fumes to your soul-killing job (if you're lucky), "day-labouring out life's age", so long as they can enjoy their own few spacious ranches and palaces protected by gates and guards and distance from the increasingly-pressed hoi polloi. Just look at Brazil.
If you "go there," then either you're going to end up an outcast, given the verbal equivalent of the ice pick, as you battle your own side and everything it really stands for, and try to turn the whole stampede 180 degrees - try to turn the Uruk-hai who have been going "Urh! Urh! Tree-huggers Bad! Kill!" for decades into tolerant, ecology-embracing souls - or you're going to realize that at once, and become a liberal, which is to say, recognizing and admitting that you never belonged over on that side of the trenches in the first place.
But Dreher and the rest of his tone-deaf "Crunchy Cons" - bozhemoi, how sad is that? "Crunchy" was a Gen-Y sneer, as "Hippie" was an older generation's, and never in the 90s when it came into currency was it used by those of the Green persuasion about themselves, only dismissively by outsiders, or those who like Dreher were sympathetic but felt embarrassed to admit it, the way young women today deny that they're feminists despite believing that they do have the right to vote, take what jobs they want, and enjoy sex, it was never a self-identifier by people who were actually growing their own amaranth or studying rings on trees in new-growth forests or buying organic only in liberal enclaves, even - are sad little Dunlendings who would be admirable in a Quixotic way, if they weren't so willfully ignorant, with the sort of arrogance that makes such ignorance invincible.**
And Dreher is definitely of the invincibly-ignorant, terminally-clueless class. (I had been thinking, I confess, that he was Gen-Y himself, and figuring that he was too young to know better, like a few others like him I know IRL. That he's actually older than me was a bit of a shocker.) Here's a great little bit of Crunchy-Con drama from Dreher, courtesy of Alicublog, showing just how hermetic that bubble can be: Dreher, who's originally from Louisiana, lived in NYC for a while bitching about it the while because of all the awful liberals and minorities crime, proclaiming that his son wouldn't have to grow up wondering what manly virtue was (no i'm not making this up) despite living among effete East Coast types, and was overjoyed at the prospect when he got transferred to Dallas.
I'm excited to be going to Dallas, moving closer to family, and putting down roots. When I wrote this a couple of years ago, I knew that it was only going to be a matter of time before we left our beloved New York. Osama helped push us out the door. My three-year-old, Matthew, thinks Texas is paradise, and is so excited to be moving to the same state that President Bush calls home). There are very good things happening on the News' editorial page, which recently came under the leadership of a dynamic new editor who identifies herself as a crunchy-con! Besides, how can a conservative (and conservative Catholic) not be excited by living among people who do things like this [link 404'd] and this? Verily, verily, thou shalt not mess with Texas.
I kid you not, he actually said that. Anyone from Texas or who's ever lived there, please stop laughing and clean your monitors so you can go on reading.
Then, when he got there, he discovered, to his shock, that Dallas is this sort of expanding megalopolis of runaway commercial development with no regard for greenspace or history or nature or any of that good stuff that he waxes rhapsodic about. Well, no shit.
It was like that in 1977, and it was like that in 1997 when I was last down there, only a lot more so, and it wasn't a trend that showed any signs of reversing direction. Any fool could have told him that, that Dallas - which has now eaten all the territory in between it and neighboring Fort Worth, which used to be open fields when I was a kid, and turned into one giant amoeba they call "the Metroplex" - has always been an inorganic runaway accretion of tarmac and ticky-tacky and pseudo-Tudor McMansions (although that word didn't exist back then, we called them "townhouses" with a sneer) all about the giant copper-glass skyscrapers that looked for all the world like someone set a bunch of kerosene cans down on the prairie. I don't know how you could manage to avoid knowing that Dallas has all of the crass of Las Vegas with none of the grotesquely-diverting carnivale, and that "respecting tradition" is meaningless in a city where there is one old building over a century old, and open space means "we haven't had time to put a subdivision there yet", that's all. The bulldozers never stop there. Whole new skylines had appeared when I went back for a visit after 20 years.
Lord, Jonah, come to Dallas. In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. Whenever the people who actually live there object to what this practice, at least in the way developers are currently doing it, is doing to the aesthetic character of the neighborhood, the developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if
people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be
building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification.
James Howard Kunstler was here a few months ago, and he said that there's nothing wrong in principle with big houses on small lots. Some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in America are composed of these kinds of houses. What rankles people, he pointed out, is that lots of these new houses are ugly, and put up with no consideration for the aesthetic character of the neighborhood. I would add that they're put up with no thought toward what consideration the individual homeowner owes to his neighbors and community. I don't see what's so conservative about that. Libertarian, yes, but as you know, that's not the same thing as conservative.
At worst Jeff is engaging in imprecise writing by deploying the word "utopian" -- though to be fair, he actually wrote "a kind of utopianism," and it seems to me clear from Jeff's piece that what he means by this is a state of affairs in which the only thing that really matters is what the free market wants. (That's one reason why we'll never get real immigration reform in this country; a lot of conservatives who don't like what's happening with out-of-control Mexican immigration will not, at the end of the day, give up cheap consumer goods and services for the sake of other conservative values that would be served by stanching the outlaw migrant flow). I think you are reading Jeff too literally here. What he decries is the economic version of the sexual libertinism that many liberals exalt. You might not see this kind of thing advocated on web sites, in think tanks or in gatherings of the intellectual right, but a crude version of it animates a lot of what calls itself conservatism today out here far from the NY-DC corridor.
I'm quoting the whole thing, more than Roy Edroso quotes, because it typifies the combination of one or two correct perceptions drowning in an Augean Stables of bullshit which is endemic not just in Dreher's writing but the whole conservative intellectual tradition.
"I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification."
Er, yes? You didn't notice that this has been your side's policy since, well, forever? Imagine Captain Renault really being shocked, shocked! to find gambling going on at Rick's, and you've got Dreher's level of awareness. Now he tries to redefine US conservativism to something a little more British and Tory, pushing off the "Greed is Good" Reaganomics model onto the shoulders of the Libertarians, leaving them holding the buck of responsibility for the past seventy-odd years of rampant overdevelopment in this country, which really got going in the post-WWI boom years of the first Republican series of mis-administrations leading up to 1929. (Urban archeology is an amazing hobby, and one that can be practiced on an amateur basis fairly easily, for the price of shoe leather and some reading and conversation with the old-timers - assuming the place is old enough to have any.) For European readers, imagine someone from London moving to Birmingham or someone from Paris moving to Mulhouse, and having no idea that they were not going to find the wholesome historic countryside when they got there.
It's like if he moved to Dallas thinking it was a paragon of conservative Catholicism and a safe place to bring up his little boy, and suddenly discovered - despite having family down there - that there had been major sex abuse cases going on for years in the Dallas archdiocese and they had made a lot of noises but little progress in the right direction. Hullo, earth to NRO, earth to NRO--
But then this is Dreher, who didn't in 2003 see any conflict between being a self-proclaimed "conservative Catholic" and a warhawk, so...
This "I-don't-like-it-so-it-isn't-REALLY-conservative" habit which is the converse of calling everything that one doesn't like either "liberal" or "socialist" or "secular" or all of the above (coughAndrewSullivancough) has gotten more and more urgent and less coherent as the Bush Mis-Administration begins to auger in faster and faster, carring with it the cargo of Conservativism Ascendant, and everyone with any sense left on the right skooches away as fast as they can from the disaster, pointing fingers every which way. But Dreher takes it to surreal extremes, although he's certainly not alone, but instead very typical of the particular subset of Catholic intellectual Neo-Trads who write for Touchstone and New Oxford Review and National Review and yes, believe their own bullshit because they're so insulated from the outside world that the possibility that their own paradigm could be, well, wrong due to misinformation just cannot occur to them. You have to go out among the strangers and shut up for a while, and just listen, for that to happen.
What he decries is the economic version of the sexual libertinism that many liberals exalt. You might not see this kind of thing advocated on web sites, in think tanks or in gatherings of the intellectual right, but a crude version of it animates a lot of what calls itself conservatism today out here far from the NY-DC corridor.
You might go "whaaa--? 'economic version of the sexual libertinism that many liberals exalt' - what does this mean???" if you're not part of the American social conservative Gestalt, in which it is taken as ipse facto by the sorts of people who use terms like "ipse facto" that part of being a liberal is to endorse uncritically a no-holds-barred anything-goes if-you-can-make-it-fit-in-any-orifice-of-any-body-shove-it-in sexual morality, sometimes shortened to "the 'if it feels good, do it' ethic" which it is assumed all good liberals subscribe, and why no one who votes Democratic is heterosexual, married, monogamous, or has children - seriously, the only way that conservatives can explain why any liberals are not engaging in "polymorphous perversity," a favorite catchphrase, with bisexual orgies 24/7 and never a screaming baby at 2am, is that those who aren't are just being inconsistent, yielding to the natural law that has given all Virtue over to conservatives, and all Fun over to liberals - except that the latter are too humorless and earnest to make any good use of it.
Curious about the possible spiritual aspect of this phenomenon, I wrote to my crunchy-right friends Julianne Loesch Wiley (a Catholic) and Frederica Mathewes-Green (Orthodox), both of whom have long been active in the pro-life movement, to ask them how they reconciled their conservatism with their countercultural tastes. Frederica responded first, saying that she embraced her "mother-earth hippie aesthetic" in her liberal youth, and has stuck with it even though she's now firmly in the religious conservative camp.
"What hooked me then, and continues to hold me, and what is the underlying theme of the contemporary liberal side of this aesthetic, is authenticity," she said. "I read a piece in American Demographics a few years ago about this, that the hook for progressives is this concept of 'authenticity,' the distrust of mass-produced sentiment or materials."
She thinks secular leftists, having emptied the world of God, hunger for something to anchor their lives, and seek it out in various manifestations of Boboism. As a believing Christian and a religious conservative, though, Frederica still feels a kinship with this longing, "because I find in the presence of the old and funky furniture and things I live with a reminder of the goodness of the material world God made, and visited, and fills."
"Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd - 'authentic.' I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You're looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty."
Now, I don't know about in 2002, back before I was reading exclusively political blogs, but it quickly became clear to me that there were two views of David Brooks and his "Bobos in Paradise" paradigm on the left, and the generous one was that he was a sometimes clever writer with genuine good-will who was a sucker for Bushco, and the other was that he was dumb as a bag of hammers when it came to understanding people, covering it by a gloss of literaryness, a shill for the Establishment with occasional glimmerings of conscience, and that his "Bobos" existed only in his head, as evidenced by the guy who went out fact-checking his claims about Middle Americana, resulting in a nettled David Brooks.
Dreher and Mathewes-Green both manage in fact to be a little less closed-minded than most of their peers, in that they qualify their generalizations - many liberals, secular leftists, rather than just liberals - although Mathewes-Green may just be saying the equivalent for her of "young babies," redundancy. The only people I've ever heard talking about "authenticity," IRL or online, outside of art historians are Catholic conservative liberal arts majors - who all have identity crises, which is why they worry so much about being authentic.** And insist that everyone who isn't them is living hollow, empty, despairing lives full of sin and the flitting worldly pleasures of the flesh - ahem!
Dreher is trying to explain why he was still freer somehow, intellectually or socially or something, than the liberal crunchies, despite the disapproval and self-revulsion of his fellow conservatives, their horror at realizing that they liked some of the same things that their ancestral foes did, Oh noes, I'm a Big-Endian at heart! by saying things like "we found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation" - oh, how to unpack these memes? "Shiite environmentalists" - take whatever you don't like, preferably the latest, Party-approved enemy of the hour, and slam it onto whoever else you don't like, hoping that like train cars this will make the coupling stick, so that no one will notice that there is no actual connection, either historic or convergent-evolution, between the two things thus juxtaposed.
Twenty-odd years ago, it would have been "Communist environmentalists," and never mind that the reckless ravaging of the environment by Moscow's government was a major concern then to ecologists and biologists; with Iraq the designated Goldstein in aught-two, meaning "strict" or possibly "those strawman environmentalists I have been taught by my Party group leaders are humorless and incapable of compromise", he calls them "Shiite" - not meaning that they subscribe to the belief that Imam Ali was the true successor to the Prophet, referring back to the original schism/dynastic feud among Mohammed's followers, or that they have different prayers and a separate spiritual tradition with their own clergy, or that ritual re-enactment of their first leader's martyrdom (aka "The Passion of John Muir") is a key part of their faith.
It's gibberish, not just to outsiders, either. This kind of linkage along with the constant resource to parodying the opposition rather than critiquing what they actually said, caused me to seriously doubt the wisdom and value of the intellectual leaders of conservative Catholic academia in the mid-90s. (I couldn't get away with that on a paper, I kept finding myself thinking disloyally, reading about the follies of "Professor Poppycock and Lulu Liberal", I'd get it thrown back to rewrite it--)
This gets taken to extremes in the exchange that Alicublog refs, where two of the Crunchy Cons are arguing about whether or not Homer Simpson is supposed to be a good crunchy or a bad crunchy.
I can't imagine any way in which Homer Simpson {!!!) could be considered remotely a crunchie. What does he do? He works at a nuclear power plant. He comes home and slobs around his ticky-tacky house drinking canned horse-piss beer and munching potato chips in front of his TV. He doesn't buy Fair Trade chocolate or shade-grown coffee or look at the labels to make sure there's no high-fructose corn syrup and MSG in the market. He doesn't read, he doesn't engage politically, he doesn't reflect on The Meaning Of Life and the Quandaries of Civilization, he doesn't worry about his health or the health of society or what kind of a world he's leaving to his kids - he's quintessential [self]parodic Ugly American, Apeneck Sweeney kicking back and enjoying himself at home. He's not meant to be an admirable crunchy or as a negative portrayal of a crunchy. It's like talking about whether or not he's meant to be a heroic or a comic stereotype of an Anarchist.
'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?'
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'
'Except----' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he
checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By 2050--earlier, probably--all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron--they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
Dreher realizes that there is a problem with the political orthodoxy of the Right (because now his ox is getting gored), projects it redoubled on the pluralistic and chaotic and utterly divided ideological Far-to-Center-Left, knows there is a problem with the dehumanizing and destructive Tashlan-worship of unfettered capitalism, and thinks he can solve them both with cheery exhortations about God and Nature and Man and Authenticity to his own side, which is composed of a middle-management corps of intellectuals and demagogues (Dreher, and his fellow Wormtongues), a larger corps of serious haters and destroyers (the Freeper Orcs and their hate-radio listening ilk) and whatever percentage of the apathetic mass of petit-bourgeoise middle-Americans with their statistically-normal minivans and season tickets to the local sports teams and salon appointments and their TIVO'd Oprah and Survivor and Apprentice can be motivated to vote by whatever combination of greed and fear is working this year, all under the reign of the Struldbruggian robber barons--
Fat chance - I mean, good luck with that.
It's like if a bunch of kids who had watched Excalibur and played swordfighting and gone camping were to hear about Pennsic and think "We could do that" without having ever organized a yard sale, and start talking about how they could do a better job than the SCA, based on the disaster stories and "You had to be there" that every major event generates, and never even bother to find out how many people, how much space, how you go about getting county permits, how you handle the plumbing-- this is, in a nutshell, why you have all these conservative Catholic utopian communities like Society of St. John in Pennsylvania and Ave Maria University and others that I know of that never got off the ground, being planned and started, and why they fall apart, too. It's not just building on no foundation, it's building with no architecture training by people who have only built cloud castles.
The only thing I can see coming out of this "Crunchy Con" ghetto at NRO is the hope that by wrangling and fussing and flaming each other - and being skewered by us sex-crazed idol-worshipping lefties - some of the saner, more reality-based may come to recognize the fault lines and intrinsic instability of where they're at, and how they're building their house not just on the sand, but according to blueprints by M.C. Escher--
They want a utopia, but they don't want to pay for it. They want other people to make their utopia for them, to sacrifice for it, and they want it to be done by those others, high and low, voluntarily, out of the goodness of their hearts and a shared recognition of the general benefits of A Clean Environment aka Beautiful Views and Affordable Healthy Food For Second-Tier Courtiers, the bracing effects of Farm Work and Rural Living, and that misty, nebulous anti-zeitgeist of Communitas. Since none of these exhortations actually swayed 19th and early 20th century robber barons (let alone Joe or Jane Smoe, stuck in Clapham or Yonkers, trying to save enough dimes to maybe take a vacation next year) - but a combination of strikes, protests, public shaming by the Left, and government regulation did, with mixed success - and they're not doing any of the work required to figure out how to make it happen, to look at the real-time, extant chains of supply, demand, artificially inflated demand, wastage, and who stands to lose and how they will be compensated for it, I don't know why they think it's feasible.
Somebody's got to pioneer these things. My wife gets a kick out of the fact that she's the only housewife in the neighborhood who carries home her organic vegetables in a National Review Online tote bag. Who knows, one of these days, maybe one of the liberal housewives doling out the Swiss chard on delivery day will ask her about the flat tax. Dare to dream, you Birkenstocked Burkeans, and pass the hippie carrots.
Yes, and I'm going to win the lottery this weekend, and then I'm going to retire and buy an island off the coast of Maine and turn it into a writers/artists colony, and fund left-wing think tanks and make an endowment to Amnesty International and Oxfam and - what? It's at least as likely as the "Crunchy Cons" converting their own side to Low Impact, let alone rescuing deluded Greens and bringing them into the fold of "MoneyMoneyMineMoney!"
But then, these are the same people who gave us the War on Terror, the New Crusade to bring peace, love, and civilization at the point of a gun to the savages Out East - and still don't understand why it isn't working, and haven't any answer save to blame liberals--
* The converse of this would also be true, except that a) most liberal bloggers do have comments, and b) when conservative bloggers show up to "disprove" that they're bigots, sexists or homophobes or racists or deluded sycophants and power-worshippers, the result is usually the opposite of what was intended. Nothing quite so heartwarming as having an angry Orc gibbering in poorly-spelled and ungrammatical Common about how stoopid LIEbruls all going to Hell, the White Hand wil give us your flesh to eat ahahahah!!!!!--
** The only American Demographics article I could find that matched to Mathewes-Green's description was this one - in which "authenticity" has nothing at all to do with the high existential angst she's positing, but rather a very basic caveat emptor scenario: are you getting what they claim to be selling? Is this a fly-by-night operation which is just trading on the trend for natural ingredients, or are they legit? Is this expensive ointment really made by monks in the Himalayas, Throat? Sounds perfectly capitalist to me! But that she remembered it saying what she wants to believe is not at all surprising, any more than poor reading comprehension among the conservative elite here.
** Okay, nigh-invincible - I got out of it, it's not utterly inescapable. But it started with me starting to go Wha--? by age 13, and instead of fleeing from the cognitive dissonance, at least some of the time seeking out the opposition's POV and counterclaims, and critiquing my own side's pundits, even before Tailhook.
There's a lot more serious stuff going on out there in the news, as ever, but this hits particularly close to home for me - there but for the grace of God I - and it's in its own way emblematic of the whole problem of reality-based vs. wishthink-based communities, and the fundamental incoherence of the US conservative movement, writ small in this one segment of it.
I haven't told this story for a while, I think, so here's the background: a few years ago, as I was becoming more politically aware (and active, in the sense of arguing with my co-workers as to why the idea that Iraq was likely to nuke us or invading them to make us more secure was asinine, and convincing one of them, on my own authority) I read an article in a copy of National Review that was lying around in the break room (this was the employer who: lied to me pre-job about the terms of employment; regularly lied to customers about their orders to cover their own errors; used the store as their family's private shopping center, writing off the inventory as lost; was beyond stingy in their treatment of us peons; had Rush Limbaugh and other Clear Channel bigots on the radio whenever they were around, thereby turning at least one center-left "fiscal moderate" into a flaming liberal.)
This article made it clear to me that even had I wanted to go back, there was no place for me in the 21st century conservative movement: they wouldn't want me, because what used to be permissible, even the norm, in our corner of academic conservative Catholicism, had become not just heterodox, but heresy.
What I refer to is the (as it turned out) very small subset of American conservatives who didn't have a clue as to what capitalism or conservativism was all about, and so were against Big Business and corporatism and factory farming and mass production, embracing a William-y Morris-y/GK Chestertonian style of living (at least in thought) and mostly just talking about the glories of small-town, back-to-the-land Arts and Crafts Movement living, where everyone grows their own food and makes their own furniture and clothes and music and reads and writes poetry and walks to the library to get books on the birds at their feeder and goes fishing and is at one with Nature because it's Civilization In Harmony With The Universe, as it was meant to be - and was, in the imagined Good Old Days of Yesteryear.
--Whether TGODOY are imagined to be the 19th century of Laura Ingalls, or the 18th century of the colonists, or the High Middle Ages, or the pastoral romancers' vision of Magna Graeca. It doesn't matter, it all flows together in our their heads, anyway. No eight-lane superhighways, no little Mordors of smog-belching factories, no megamarts filled with fatty, flavorless, preservative-packed FOODS™ or made-in-China-by-enslaved-bishops plastic tacky crap - no chopping down trees to put in telephone poles just because it's cheaper than burying the wires, no vast wastelands of identical subdivisions covered in vinyl siding surrounded by astroturf Chemlawned into sterile birdkilling green, no deathly cement hives of tenements filled with worker proles kept numb with the soma of 24/7 televised inanities--
This is not, in itself, a contemptable vision of the ideal human society. It may be lacking in appreciation for both the Goods of the City (using Good when capitalized in the philosophical sense, meaning benefits in a more abstract and non-subjective sense) and the ills of that eulogized pastoral life, and it may be lacking (particularly depending on the individual doing the dreaming) in any sense of the practicalities involved in making it work or happen, but it is the sort of world envisioned by everyone working for the Fair Trade and Slow Foods movements, the people who are actually working to make it possible for individuals to live off the work of their hands as artisans not sweatshop serfs, for families to live off the produce of their farms instead of going deeper into debt to keep the altars of Mammon piled high with Profit hecatombs, for rivers to be made safe for fish, and fishing, and there are still woods for those feeder-birds to breed in and resisting the turning of "wasteland" into more superhighways or big box store staffed by more underpaid serfs who can't afford to have their own organic gardens or make their own clothes, much less the time to read and enjoy the cultural treasures of Civilization--
In short, it's a very Leftist utopia, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of it.
But the Goods of it are not unappreciated by many who self-identify as Righties, or Conservative: there are (despite the self-congratulatory talk of all too many liberal snobs) more than a few Anarcho-syndicalist Ent-loving Shire-wanting Republican voters out there (even if a lot of them self-identify as "Libertarian" out of a fancied political nonconformism) and they mostly just want (or think they want) to live "the simple life" in the country, on the outskirts of the town, but some of them actually are well-off enough to manage it, and do, (although most of them that I knew/know personally were/are not.)
This creates, as you might imagine, a certain amount of tension for them. But that is actually of relatively recent date, and results from the everything-that-rises-must-converge situation which is a combination of the increasing political success of the conservative movement, and the boundary-breaking newly-crowded cocktail party of the Internet. You can't really avoid knowing about what everyone else thinks these days, unless you take yourself out of circulation deliberately, and by "these days" I mean the past ten years, when I as johnny-come-lately to the 'net started poking about and finding a lot of things I had taken as gospel (as conservative, as Catholic, as American) being debunked by collision with reality.
So on the one hand, if you're a conservative blogger repeating the usual canards (not knowing they're canards) about godless-commie-feminazi-hippie-fags and never stopping to think how some of them contradict each other (or are contradicted by various documents out there) or about how superior and innocent of all the wrongs that the Left accuses the Right of your side is, you have to actively resist being corrected, since a link can go round the world before you have time to make a cup of tea, and choosing to have a no-comments blog with no contact info is an act of will, not the other way round these days.*
At the same time, it's not just your adversaries that you have to watch out for contradiction from - and again, that is in no small part a consequence of success. Every political movement in history - and every other movement, too, all sorts of fandoms that there are - faces the problem of self-definition made more difficult by the fact that human beings are, when you come down to it, not very social animals at all. We can't live without each other, but we can't hardly stand each other, either. Much of successful civilization depends on being able to overlook the things that annoy/irk/offend/displease us, and the closer we are in contact the harder this is. (This is one major reason why working for your family is not usually a good idea, and also why intense-at-first relationships often lose their romantic bloom.)
So, back in the day - the 1970s, that is - it was quite possible for a self-identified conservative ex-Bohemian rebelling against the '60s rebellion and the '70s mandatory happy face optimism to a) self-identify as conservative, b) be in favor of recycling, organic gardening, greenspace, protecting endangered species, opposed to DDT and dioxin and MSG and oversugared foods and air pollution and big cars, c) have no idea that voting Republican to "save the babies" or "convert Russia back to God" was a vote for the hated factories, the auto industry, industrialized agriculture, developments without regard for small town economies, and against ecological protection of all sorts.
--Yes, in retrospect, looking over old Corpo writings and what truth was out there even in the pre-internet era, I do realize (as I did not when I was seven) that a literate, informed adult (as the pro-organic-gardening/recycling/peregrine-falcon Republican-voting contingent was then) would have had to work hard to ignore the goals and activities of their party leadership and the GOP's Corpo allies. But putting fingers in the ears and humming is not new, not unknown, and not limited to conservatives only (as the old Left's disregard for Stalin's offenses demonstrates) and it wasn't limited to just this sort of disconnect between incompatible economic paradigms - racism, sexism, xenophobia, all of it could be ignored on the basis of "well I don't hate gays, none of my friends are for segregation, of course women should have the vote, I don't know what you're talking about!" It's kind of like ignoring your strange bedfellows and pretending you're all alone in the bed, even after they start snoring loudly and taking all the covers.
But that was then. It really started happening right after The Reagan Revolution, but it was possible - admittedly with some effort - to go on pretending that the Corpos weren't running the show, that the bigots weren't the majority, and that Somehow there would be this synthesis of all the Goods of Conservativism, Morality™ and Justice™ and Freedom™ and and Decency™ and Prosperity™, and those Good Ends the liberals managed to accomplish by accident somehow despite simultaneously being both too stupid and gullible to realize how they were being used by the Shadowy Forces of Evil and too evil themselves to take a break from trying to destroy Western Civilization™ by every means possible, like protecting the environment and the arts and civil liberties for third-world farmers and seamstresses.
--Mind you, even then, you had to preface any praise for ecologically-sound practices like organic farming and recycling with "but of course I'm not like those whacko environmentalists who want there to be no humans on the planet." But it was a spontaneous and unrequired thing, back then, or at least a more-self-conscious statement of orthodoxy rather than one done in fear of being attacked, rising from discomfort at seeing "environmentalist" and "tree-hugger" become synonyms for the Devil as the years went on, and the Soviet Union's role as Chief Bugbear waned.
So reading that Rod Dreher and his family are discomfitted and feeling harrassed for holding to those old Anarcho-syndicalist ideals (carried on in America largely by the Fugitive Poets/Agrarians and their admirers - if you've never heard of the Fugitive Poets, well, that shows you how small a pond it is/was) by their fellow conservatives, as suspiciously heterodox, that was amusing to me. How the Steel Was Tempered, I thought - the inadvertant ironies and revelations of a movement circling ever inward in its quest for purity. How long before the purges of NRO editors caught with "decadent art" on the walls, or copies of unapproved books on their shelves?
All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like - jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son - is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain. We found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation. Two weeks ago, some conservative friends were driving me down the Pacific Coast Highway, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty, as they are. "I'm afraid we have to tip our hats to the tree-huggers," said one. "If it weren't for them, much of what you see would be covered with tract houses and malls."
There were a lot of things in this pathetic bleat which were informative, on several levels of meta. For one thing, it turns out that Dreher is actually a couple years older than me, so he has even less excuse to be shocked, shocked! at the "Ewww! Hippies! Traitors!" reception of all too many of his fellow conservatives (as seen here in this page of letters in response to an interview with him in the Wall Street Journal called "The New Counterculture.") It wasn't new when my parents were subscribing to Rodale's in 1978 and I was the only third-grader who knew what dioxin and DDT were and why they were bad, and it certainly wasn't new in 2002. And being a Prominent Catholic Conservative Academic, there's no way he could have missed the rash of Olin-funded defenses of DDT and GM foods in conservative Catholic magazines in the late '90s, either. Even if he was head-in-the-clouds enough to not wonder about them, and go and find out that Olin used to make a lot of money making DDT, as I subsequently did, he had to be aware that there were reasons that the powerbrokers of conservativism in this country were against environmentalism, and that the memes of "wacko tree-huggers" against which he was contending didn't come out of nowhere.
The folks at Alicublog talking about this don't realize that Dreher represents a Lost Splinter Group of conservativism, like some Stone-Age tribe or prehistoric species found living in the depths of the jungle, rather than a new development, and if they'd been paying attention to what their enemies had been writing and saying for the past 30 years they would have realized this was an inevitable development. Dreher himself has no excuse for not realizing that he is merely a tolerated tag-end of what has become (always was, but now utterly marginalized) the fringes of American conservativism. They're the last die-hard Trotskyites, thinking they're going to win back any day now, not recognizing that no one's bothered to go after them with an ice pick because they're so completely irrelevant and not a threat to the Hegemony at all.
The WSJ profile says, "Because Mr. Dreher offers no detailed blueprint for cultural renewal, some may dismiss his book as just another lifestyle manifesto. This would be a mistake. Like it or not, Mr. Dreher raises concerns that will not go away. America today is more broadly free and prosperous than any society in human history. We are gloriously "free to choose." But choose what?"
And here you have the core of the problem. "No detailed blueprint for cultural renewal" - well, of course not. You'd have to first be able to analyze and understand in the least degree how interlocked economic systems work, or at least kludge along, then posit what an ideal, or at least improved, version of it should look like, tackling all the pros and cons for everybody and that would get you into seriously politically incorrect territory as a fiscal conservative. You'd have to ask cui bono? over and over and over again, and the answers would be pretty scary and lead you to the fact that it's you and your little merry band of Birkenstocked Burkeans facing off against the whole massed array of the Hegemony, the long-trained, long-prepared heirs of Andrew Carnegie, who wasn't shy of shooting people who dared challenge the Barons, and only don't now because they've managed to so so much discord in this country that they don't need private Pinkerton armies any more, we'll bite off our own heads in haste to Be Like Stalks rather than show a hint of treasonous Socialism.
And that's not a safe place to go. You'd have to be really deluded, more out of touch with reality than old Frank Fukuyama or Andy Sullivan ever were, to think that a handful of romantic Catholic converts with fantasies about living in some small-town pastoral 19th century idyll and nevermind the "dark satanic mills" and other helotries necessary to the standard of living they want, and the massive networks of transportation and money that subsidized them, the clipper ships and the railroads and the East India Company before them, the profiteers who don't care what slagheaps the miners' children live and die under, how many seamstresses burn to death in the Triangle, or how many nameless strangers starve, sicken, and despair around the globe - or how their endless sacrifices to Mammon spoil the quality of living for the petit-bourgeoisie, who lose the green space and the good food and the scenic views and the high culture to the devouring maw of the Great God Corporate Profit--
--could stand up to and defeat these guys, who own all the money, all the sources of capital, who run the country and have run it into the ground all to ensure that the line of sacrifices to the altar of Tashlan never falters, so that they can go on living in the style to which they have become accustomed. They don't care if you're stuck in some pit of a ticky-tacky bungalow forced to drive 40 miles on the tarmac in asthma-causing fumes to your soul-killing job (if you're lucky), "day-labouring out life's age", so long as they can enjoy their own few spacious ranches and palaces protected by gates and guards and distance from the increasingly-pressed hoi polloi. Just look at Brazil.
If you "go there," then either you're going to end up an outcast, given the verbal equivalent of the ice pick, as you battle your own side and everything it really stands for, and try to turn the whole stampede 180 degrees - try to turn the Uruk-hai who have been going "Urh! Urh! Tree-huggers Bad! Kill!" for decades into tolerant, ecology-embracing souls - or you're going to realize that at once, and become a liberal, which is to say, recognizing and admitting that you never belonged over on that side of the trenches in the first place.
But Dreher and the rest of his tone-deaf "Crunchy Cons" - bozhemoi, how sad is that? "Crunchy" was a Gen-Y sneer, as "Hippie" was an older generation's, and never in the 90s when it came into currency was it used by those of the Green persuasion about themselves, only dismissively by outsiders, or those who like Dreher were sympathetic but felt embarrassed to admit it, the way young women today deny that they're feminists despite believing that they do have the right to vote, take what jobs they want, and enjoy sex, it was never a self-identifier by people who were actually growing their own amaranth or studying rings on trees in new-growth forests or buying organic only in liberal enclaves, even - are sad little Dunlendings who would be admirable in a Quixotic way, if they weren't so willfully ignorant, with the sort of arrogance that makes such ignorance invincible.**
And Dreher is definitely of the invincibly-ignorant, terminally-clueless class. (I had been thinking, I confess, that he was Gen-Y himself, and figuring that he was too young to know better, like a few others like him I know IRL. That he's actually older than me was a bit of a shocker.) Here's a great little bit of Crunchy-Con drama from Dreher, courtesy of Alicublog, showing just how hermetic that bubble can be: Dreher, who's originally from Louisiana, lived in NYC for a while bitching about it the while because of all the awful liberals and minorities crime, proclaiming that his son wouldn't have to grow up wondering what manly virtue was (no i'm not making this up) despite living among effete East Coast types, and was overjoyed at the prospect when he got transferred to Dallas.
I'm excited to be going to Dallas, moving closer to family, and putting down roots. When I wrote this a couple of years ago, I knew that it was only going to be a matter of time before we left our beloved New York. Osama helped push us out the door. My three-year-old, Matthew, thinks Texas is paradise, and is so excited to be moving to the same state that President Bush calls home). There are very good things happening on the News' editorial page, which recently came under the leadership of a dynamic new editor who identifies herself as a crunchy-con! Besides, how can a conservative (and conservative Catholic) not be excited by living among people who do things like this [link 404'd] and this? Verily, verily, thou shalt not mess with Texas.
I kid you not, he actually said that. Anyone from Texas or who's ever lived there, please stop laughing and clean your monitors so you can go on reading.
Then, when he got there, he discovered, to his shock, that Dallas is this sort of expanding megalopolis of runaway commercial development with no regard for greenspace or history or nature or any of that good stuff that he waxes rhapsodic about. Well, no shit.
It was like that in 1977, and it was like that in 1997 when I was last down there, only a lot more so, and it wasn't a trend that showed any signs of reversing direction. Any fool could have told him that, that Dallas - which has now eaten all the territory in between it and neighboring Fort Worth, which used to be open fields when I was a kid, and turned into one giant amoeba they call "the Metroplex" - has always been an inorganic runaway accretion of tarmac and ticky-tacky and pseudo-Tudor McMansions (although that word didn't exist back then, we called them "townhouses" with a sneer) all about the giant copper-glass skyscrapers that looked for all the world like someone set a bunch of kerosene cans down on the prairie. I don't know how you could manage to avoid knowing that Dallas has all of the crass of Las Vegas with none of the grotesquely-diverting carnivale, and that "respecting tradition" is meaningless in a city where there is one old building over a century old, and open space means "we haven't had time to put a subdivision there yet", that's all. The bulldozers never stop there. Whole new skylines had appeared when I went back for a visit after 20 years.
Lord, Jonah, come to Dallas. In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. Whenever the people who actually live there object to what this practice, at least in the way developers are currently doing it, is doing to the aesthetic character of the neighborhood, the developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if
people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be
building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification.
James Howard Kunstler was here a few months ago, and he said that there's nothing wrong in principle with big houses on small lots. Some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in America are composed of these kinds of houses. What rankles people, he pointed out, is that lots of these new houses are ugly, and put up with no consideration for the aesthetic character of the neighborhood. I would add that they're put up with no thought toward what consideration the individual homeowner owes to his neighbors and community. I don't see what's so conservative about that. Libertarian, yes, but as you know, that's not the same thing as conservative.
At worst Jeff is engaging in imprecise writing by deploying the word "utopian" -- though to be fair, he actually wrote "a kind of utopianism," and it seems to me clear from Jeff's piece that what he means by this is a state of affairs in which the only thing that really matters is what the free market wants. (That's one reason why we'll never get real immigration reform in this country; a lot of conservatives who don't like what's happening with out-of-control Mexican immigration will not, at the end of the day, give up cheap consumer goods and services for the sake of other conservative values that would be served by stanching the outlaw migrant flow). I think you are reading Jeff too literally here. What he decries is the economic version of the sexual libertinism that many liberals exalt. You might not see this kind of thing advocated on web sites, in think tanks or in gatherings of the intellectual right, but a crude version of it animates a lot of what calls itself conservatism today out here far from the NY-DC corridor.
I'm quoting the whole thing, more than Roy Edroso quotes, because it typifies the combination of one or two correct perceptions drowning in an Augean Stables of bullshit which is endemic not just in Dreher's writing but the whole conservative intellectual tradition.
"I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification."
Er, yes? You didn't notice that this has been your side's policy since, well, forever? Imagine Captain Renault really being shocked, shocked! to find gambling going on at Rick's, and you've got Dreher's level of awareness. Now he tries to redefine US conservativism to something a little more British and Tory, pushing off the "Greed is Good" Reaganomics model onto the shoulders of the Libertarians, leaving them holding the buck of responsibility for the past seventy-odd years of rampant overdevelopment in this country, which really got going in the post-WWI boom years of the first Republican series of mis-administrations leading up to 1929. (Urban archeology is an amazing hobby, and one that can be practiced on an amateur basis fairly easily, for the price of shoe leather and some reading and conversation with the old-timers - assuming the place is old enough to have any.) For European readers, imagine someone from London moving to Birmingham or someone from Paris moving to Mulhouse, and having no idea that they were not going to find the wholesome historic countryside when they got there.
It's like if he moved to Dallas thinking it was a paragon of conservative Catholicism and a safe place to bring up his little boy, and suddenly discovered - despite having family down there - that there had been major sex abuse cases going on for years in the Dallas archdiocese and they had made a lot of noises but little progress in the right direction. Hullo, earth to NRO, earth to NRO--
But then this is Dreher, who didn't in 2003 see any conflict between being a self-proclaimed "conservative Catholic" and a warhawk, so...
This "I-don't-like-it-so-it-isn't-REALLY-conservative" habit which is the converse of calling everything that one doesn't like either "liberal" or "socialist" or "secular" or all of the above (coughAndrewSullivancough) has gotten more and more urgent and less coherent as the Bush Mis-Administration begins to auger in faster and faster, carring with it the cargo of Conservativism Ascendant, and everyone with any sense left on the right skooches away as fast as they can from the disaster, pointing fingers every which way. But Dreher takes it to surreal extremes, although he's certainly not alone, but instead very typical of the particular subset of Catholic intellectual Neo-Trads who write for Touchstone and New Oxford Review and National Review and yes, believe their own bullshit because they're so insulated from the outside world that the possibility that their own paradigm could be, well, wrong due to misinformation just cannot occur to them. You have to go out among the strangers and shut up for a while, and just listen, for that to happen.
What he decries is the economic version of the sexual libertinism that many liberals exalt. You might not see this kind of thing advocated on web sites, in think tanks or in gatherings of the intellectual right, but a crude version of it animates a lot of what calls itself conservatism today out here far from the NY-DC corridor.
You might go "whaaa--? 'economic version of the sexual libertinism that many liberals exalt' - what does this mean???" if you're not part of the American social conservative Gestalt, in which it is taken as ipse facto by the sorts of people who use terms like "ipse facto" that part of being a liberal is to endorse uncritically a no-holds-barred anything-goes if-you-can-make-it-fit-in-any-orifice-of-any-body-shove-it-in sexual morality, sometimes shortened to "the 'if it feels good, do it' ethic" which it is assumed all good liberals subscribe, and why no one who votes Democratic is heterosexual, married, monogamous, or has children - seriously, the only way that conservatives can explain why any liberals are not engaging in "polymorphous perversity," a favorite catchphrase, with bisexual orgies 24/7 and never a screaming baby at 2am, is that those who aren't are just being inconsistent, yielding to the natural law that has given all Virtue over to conservatives, and all Fun over to liberals - except that the latter are too humorless and earnest to make any good use of it.
Curious about the possible spiritual aspect of this phenomenon, I wrote to my crunchy-right friends Julianne Loesch Wiley (a Catholic) and Frederica Mathewes-Green (Orthodox), both of whom have long been active in the pro-life movement, to ask them how they reconciled their conservatism with their countercultural tastes. Frederica responded first, saying that she embraced her "mother-earth hippie aesthetic" in her liberal youth, and has stuck with it even though she's now firmly in the religious conservative camp.
"What hooked me then, and continues to hold me, and what is the underlying theme of the contemporary liberal side of this aesthetic, is authenticity," she said. "I read a piece in American Demographics a few years ago about this, that the hook for progressives is this concept of 'authenticity,' the distrust of mass-produced sentiment or materials."
She thinks secular leftists, having emptied the world of God, hunger for something to anchor their lives, and seek it out in various manifestations of Boboism. As a believing Christian and a religious conservative, though, Frederica still feels a kinship with this longing, "because I find in the presence of the old and funky furniture and things I live with a reminder of the goodness of the material world God made, and visited, and fills."
"Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd - 'authentic.' I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You're looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty."
Now, I don't know about in 2002, back before I was reading exclusively political blogs, but it quickly became clear to me that there were two views of David Brooks and his "Bobos in Paradise" paradigm on the left, and the generous one was that he was a sometimes clever writer with genuine good-will who was a sucker for Bushco, and the other was that he was dumb as a bag of hammers when it came to understanding people, covering it by a gloss of literaryness, a shill for the Establishment with occasional glimmerings of conscience, and that his "Bobos" existed only in his head, as evidenced by the guy who went out fact-checking his claims about Middle Americana, resulting in a nettled David Brooks.
Dreher and Mathewes-Green both manage in fact to be a little less closed-minded than most of their peers, in that they qualify their generalizations - many liberals, secular leftists, rather than just liberals - although Mathewes-Green may just be saying the equivalent for her of "young babies," redundancy. The only people I've ever heard talking about "authenticity," IRL or online, outside of art historians are Catholic conservative liberal arts majors - who all have identity crises, which is why they worry so much about being authentic.** And insist that everyone who isn't them is living hollow, empty, despairing lives full of sin and the flitting worldly pleasures of the flesh - ahem!
Dreher is trying to explain why he was still freer somehow, intellectually or socially or something, than the liberal crunchies, despite the disapproval and self-revulsion of his fellow conservatives, their horror at realizing that they liked some of the same things that their ancestral foes did, Oh noes, I'm a Big-Endian at heart! by saying things like "we found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation" - oh, how to unpack these memes? "Shiite environmentalists" - take whatever you don't like, preferably the latest, Party-approved enemy of the hour, and slam it onto whoever else you don't like, hoping that like train cars this will make the coupling stick, so that no one will notice that there is no actual connection, either historic or convergent-evolution, between the two things thus juxtaposed.
Twenty-odd years ago, it would have been "Communist environmentalists," and never mind that the reckless ravaging of the environment by Moscow's government was a major concern then to ecologists and biologists; with Iraq the designated Goldstein in aught-two, meaning "strict" or possibly "those strawman environmentalists I have been taught by my Party group leaders are humorless and incapable of compromise", he calls them "Shiite" - not meaning that they subscribe to the belief that Imam Ali was the true successor to the Prophet, referring back to the original schism/dynastic feud among Mohammed's followers, or that they have different prayers and a separate spiritual tradition with their own clergy, or that ritual re-enactment of their first leader's martyrdom (aka "The Passion of John Muir") is a key part of their faith.
It's gibberish, not just to outsiders, either. This kind of linkage along with the constant resource to parodying the opposition rather than critiquing what they actually said, caused me to seriously doubt the wisdom and value of the intellectual leaders of conservative Catholic academia in the mid-90s. (I couldn't get away with that on a paper, I kept finding myself thinking disloyally, reading about the follies of "Professor Poppycock and Lulu Liberal", I'd get it thrown back to rewrite it--)
This gets taken to extremes in the exchange that Alicublog refs, where two of the Crunchy Cons are arguing about whether or not Homer Simpson is supposed to be a good crunchy or a bad crunchy.
I can't imagine any way in which Homer Simpson {!!!) could be considered remotely a crunchie. What does he do? He works at a nuclear power plant. He comes home and slobs around his ticky-tacky house drinking canned horse-piss beer and munching potato chips in front of his TV. He doesn't buy Fair Trade chocolate or shade-grown coffee or look at the labels to make sure there's no high-fructose corn syrup and MSG in the market. He doesn't read, he doesn't engage politically, he doesn't reflect on The Meaning Of Life and the Quandaries of Civilization, he doesn't worry about his health or the health of society or what kind of a world he's leaving to his kids - he's quintessential [self]parodic Ugly American, Apeneck Sweeney kicking back and enjoying himself at home. He's not meant to be an admirable crunchy or as a negative portrayal of a crunchy. It's like talking about whether or not he's meant to be a heroic or a comic stereotype of an Anarchist.
'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?'
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'
'Except----' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he
checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By 2050--earlier, probably--all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron--they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
Dreher realizes that there is a problem with the political orthodoxy of the Right (because now his ox is getting gored), projects it redoubled on the pluralistic and chaotic and utterly divided ideological Far-to-Center-Left, knows there is a problem with the dehumanizing and destructive Tashlan-worship of unfettered capitalism, and thinks he can solve them both with cheery exhortations about God and Nature and Man and Authenticity to his own side, which is composed of a middle-management corps of intellectuals and demagogues (Dreher, and his fellow Wormtongues), a larger corps of serious haters and destroyers (the Freeper Orcs and their hate-radio listening ilk) and whatever percentage of the apathetic mass of petit-bourgeoise middle-Americans with their statistically-normal minivans and season tickets to the local sports teams and salon appointments and their TIVO'd Oprah and Survivor and Apprentice can be motivated to vote by whatever combination of greed and fear is working this year, all under the reign of the Struldbruggian robber barons--
Fat chance - I mean, good luck with that.
It's like if a bunch of kids who had watched Excalibur and played swordfighting and gone camping were to hear about Pennsic and think "We could do that" without having ever organized a yard sale, and start talking about how they could do a better job than the SCA, based on the disaster stories and "You had to be there" that every major event generates, and never even bother to find out how many people, how much space, how you go about getting county permits, how you handle the plumbing-- this is, in a nutshell, why you have all these conservative Catholic utopian communities like Society of St. John in Pennsylvania and Ave Maria University and others that I know of that never got off the ground, being planned and started, and why they fall apart, too. It's not just building on no foundation, it's building with no architecture training by people who have only built cloud castles.
The only thing I can see coming out of this "Crunchy Con" ghetto at NRO is the hope that by wrangling and fussing and flaming each other - and being skewered by us sex-crazed idol-worshipping lefties - some of the saner, more reality-based may come to recognize the fault lines and intrinsic instability of where they're at, and how they're building their house not just on the sand, but according to blueprints by M.C. Escher--
They want a utopia, but they don't want to pay for it. They want other people to make their utopia for them, to sacrifice for it, and they want it to be done by those others, high and low, voluntarily, out of the goodness of their hearts and a shared recognition of the general benefits of A Clean Environment aka Beautiful Views and Affordable Healthy Food For Second-Tier Courtiers, the bracing effects of Farm Work and Rural Living, and that misty, nebulous anti-zeitgeist of Communitas. Since none of these exhortations actually swayed 19th and early 20th century robber barons (let alone Joe or Jane Smoe, stuck in Clapham or Yonkers, trying to save enough dimes to maybe take a vacation next year) - but a combination of strikes, protests, public shaming by the Left, and government regulation did, with mixed success - and they're not doing any of the work required to figure out how to make it happen, to look at the real-time, extant chains of supply, demand, artificially inflated demand, wastage, and who stands to lose and how they will be compensated for it, I don't know why they think it's feasible.
Somebody's got to pioneer these things. My wife gets a kick out of the fact that she's the only housewife in the neighborhood who carries home her organic vegetables in a National Review Online tote bag. Who knows, one of these days, maybe one of the liberal housewives doling out the Swiss chard on delivery day will ask her about the flat tax. Dare to dream, you Birkenstocked Burkeans, and pass the hippie carrots.
Yes, and I'm going to win the lottery this weekend, and then I'm going to retire and buy an island off the coast of Maine and turn it into a writers/artists colony, and fund left-wing think tanks and make an endowment to Amnesty International and Oxfam and - what? It's at least as likely as the "Crunchy Cons" converting their own side to Low Impact, let alone rescuing deluded Greens and bringing them into the fold of "MoneyMoneyMineMoney!"
But then, these are the same people who gave us the War on Terror, the New Crusade to bring peace, love, and civilization at the point of a gun to the savages Out East - and still don't understand why it isn't working, and haven't any answer save to blame liberals--
* The converse of this would also be true, except that a) most liberal bloggers do have comments, and b) when conservative bloggers show up to "disprove" that they're bigots, sexists or homophobes or racists or deluded sycophants and power-worshippers, the result is usually the opposite of what was intended. Nothing quite so heartwarming as having an angry Orc gibbering in poorly-spelled and ungrammatical Common about how stoopid LIEbruls all going to Hell, the White Hand wil give us your flesh to eat ahahahah!!!!!--
** The only American Demographics article I could find that matched to Mathewes-Green's description was this one - in which "authenticity" has nothing at all to do with the high existential angst she's positing, but rather a very basic caveat emptor scenario: are you getting what they claim to be selling? Is this a fly-by-night operation which is just trading on the trend for natural ingredients, or are they legit? Is this expensive ointment really made by monks in the Himalayas, Throat? Sounds perfectly capitalist to me! But that she remembered it saying what she wants to believe is not at all surprising, any more than poor reading comprehension among the conservative elite here.
** Okay, nigh-invincible - I got out of it, it's not utterly inescapable. But it started with me starting to go Wha--? by age 13, and instead of fleeing from the cognitive dissonance, at least some of the time seeking out the opposition's POV and counterclaims, and critiquing my own side's pundits, even before Tailhook.