Meet the Crunchy Conservatives

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A closely related flashpoint is suburban sprawl, which is more of an aesthetic issue. Bryan Greer, 29, a Baptist, lifelong Republican, and father of five, says he would worry about conservatives running his small Minnesota city’s government out of fear they would let developers gut the historic town center and call it another triumph of the free market: “I don’t feel most conservatives have much of an answer for people who feel a sense of loss when ‘progress’ destroys beauty and authenticity. To all this, conservatives can only mumble about the necessity of economic progress. They don’t seem to care that something of real value has been lost.” In the crunchy-con view, right-wing indifference to natural beauty extends to the man-made world. Today’s conservatives don’t say enough about the importance of aesthetic standards. Suburban sprawl and ugly architecture, lousy chain restaurant food, bad beer, and scorn for the arts are defended by many rank-and-file Republicans as signs of populist authenticity, as opposed to the “elitist” notion that aesthetics matter. In previous generations, it was taken for granted among conservatives that cultivating taste was a worthwhile, even necessary pursuit in building civilization. Nowadays, talking like that in front of a number of right-wingers will get you denounced as a snob.

“It’s a PR disaster for the right to allow discussions of fun and beauty and poetry and nature to be owned by the left,” says a New York publishing executive and closet conservative. “The right wing just looks unappealing. Do they not understand this?”

Jim Christiansen, the Washington lawyer, concurs: “I think a large number of people embrace leftist politics exactly because they associate them with the more attractive positions on quality-of-life issues—or, more succinctly, people vote Democratic not because the Democratic agenda makes any sense but because they want to eat fresh vegetables.”

While crunchy cons (unlike leftists) would stop well short of imputing moral inferiority to those who don’t share their own tastes in architecture, trees, or foodstuff, they would also say that it’s a serious mistake to think of these issues as mere matters of taste. A child who grows up in a neighborhood built for human beings instead of cars may think of man’s relation to his world differently than one raised amid the throwaway utilitarianism of strip-mall architecture. One’s sensitivity to and desire for beauty, and its edifying qualities of order, harmony, and “sweetness and light,” has consequences for the character of individuals and ultimately for civilization. It’s perilous to forget that.

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