Meet the Crunchy Conservatives

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We agree with the conservative philosopher Russell Kirk, who observed, “The best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and read to them o’ evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise: The wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, ‘We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.’ The institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

I first confessed that I was a Birkenstock’d Burkean in a National Review Online essay and talked about how displaced I felt as a conservative who liked both Rush Limbaugh and Garrison Keillor. My in-box quickly filled up with literally hundreds of replies from across the country, nearly all of them saying, “Me too!”

There was the pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican who wanted to find somebody to discuss the virtues of George W. Bush with over a bowl of dal. An interracial couple, political conservatives and converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, wrote to say they loved shaking up the prejudices of liberal friends at their organic co-op. Small-town and rural crunchy cons checked in, as did their urban counterparts from Berkeley to New York to London. “I used to listen to Rush while driving around following the Grateful Dead!” someone wrote. Wrote another, “We thought we were the only Evangelical Christians in the world with a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook.”

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

Of all the thinkers and writers favored by crunchy cons, though, it is conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, who may be the most reliable guide to their sensibility. He grasped the essential truth that conservatism is not primarily about a political agenda, but instead “a complex of thought and sentiment, and a deep attachment to permanent things.” For crunchy cons, the quest to live “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” is not just a nice idea—and because of this, they don’t always line up with Republican orthodoxy.

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