In the July 12, 2002 edition of William F. Buckley’s conservative “National Review,” former Reveille columnist and Hearst Award-winner Rod Dreher wrote a column, consequently evoking a great deal of discussion in Republican media circles, describing his membership in an budding Republican subgroup he dubbed the crunchy (as in granola) conservatives.
A crunchy conservative, or as David Brooks identifies more negatively as a Bobo (bourgeois Bohemian), makes lifestyle choices similar to “left-wing counterculturalists” and possesses like “disdain for, or at least a healthy suspicion of, mass culture.”
A crunchy conservative abhors “accepting bad beer, lousy coffee, top-40 radio, strip malls and all popular manifestations of cheapness and ugliness as proof that One Is Not an Effete Liberal.”
He belongs to agricultural co-ops, listens to NPR, hugs trees and tends to be more skeptical of the free market.
Yet, regardless of a crunchy con’s Birkenstock-shod feet, he still believes in the tenets of mainstream conservatism, especially in the importance of the nuclear family and religious devotion. Certainly, the rise in crunchy conservatives is related to, caused by, or a product of another change in Republican Party demographics — the explosion in the number of young people identifying themselves as conservative.
“The Economist” reported 22,000 new members joined the College Republicans in 2002 alone, with membership tripling between 1999 and 2002. “Rolling Stone” contributing editor John Colapinto dubbed these increasingly middle-class miniature Dicks “hipublicans” in The New York Times.
Ironically and perhaps hypocritically, in what Fitzgerald’s Nick Caraway would have called his “younger and more inexperienced years,” I was a member of this phalanx of infantile Republicans.
My political affiliation often molded my beliefs before I even thought about what was right. Shaking Dave Treen’s hand when I was President of the Young Republicans in high school made me feel important. Republican doctrines were my doctrines and I would argue with whoever disagreed with them.
Perhaps, I was on what Colapinto would call “a sophomoric search for self-definition.” The hubris of youth!
I often read the “National Review” and my favorite columnist was Rod Dreher, partly because he was a great defender of the South but primarily because like me, he went to the Louisiana School.
LSMSA is a special place — it’s an oasis of liberalism in a sea of North Louisiana bible-thumping conservatism, so far left Socialist students often outnumber their Republican peers. Dreher’s writing still bears the Louisiana School literary stamp — occasionally egocentric but almost always passionate, articulate and beautiful. Undoubtedly, the seeds of Rod Dreher’s crunchy conservatism began there, though his writing at The Reveille is best described as raging liberalism.
I searched through old editions of The Reveille on microfilm yesterday and found Dreher’s first column at The Reveille, which attacked everyone from Tammy Faye Baker and Ronald Reagan to Gary Hart.
He introduces the column and himself with a quote from King Lear: “Tis his own blame hat put himself from rest, and must needs taste his folly.”
I wonder what the 18-year-old Reveille Rod Dreher would think of the new Dallas Morning News Rod Dreher.
How does one change one’s political philosophy with the ebb and flow of popular opinion? I should know.
Did he fall for Kierkegaard’s trap of curing incurable despair and apply his remedy to his politics? Religion is not reason.
I should know. Before Rod Dreher named my adolescent political philosophy I was a crunchy conservative, yet I now realize crunchy conservatism cannot exist in this Republican environment. Don’t crunchy conservatives believe in international diplomacy?
Don’t crunchy conservatives believe in treating people with certain amount of respect regardless of nationality and income level?
Don’t crunchy conservatives believe in a responsible president that doesn’t get on his pulpit and deliver “truths of the matter” like Moses delivered the word of God on Mount Sinai? Don’t crunchy conservatives believe in fiscal conservatism?
Surely, crunchy conservatism or boboism encumbered the realization that I was not a Republican. Benjamin Disraeli once said, “Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.”
My opinions never really changed. Simply put, my ideologies could not be classified into one distinct political category.
Rod Dreher has tried to name a group that aligns itself with the Republican Party but in actuality is just the throw-up of the liberal “moderates” (often Catholics like Dreher) of the 60s and 70s.