Crunchy Conservatism

For weeks now I have been pretending to know what a "Crunchy Con" is without really having the slightest idea of what people were talking about.  I finally took the advice I give everyone else and looked it up.

I went to the site of National Review Online, which I really do read on occasion.  How I didn’t actually click the section that said CRUCHY CON right in front of my eyes until now is something I will never be able to explain.  Let’s chalk it up to have too much and too many things to do at the same time?

Anyway, I have discovered that I am a Crunchy Con.  Here is Rod Dreher’s Manifesto:

A Crunchy Con Manifesto

By Rod Dreher

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

….  Sounds about right to me!

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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4 Comments

  1. Henry Edwards says:

    Actually, Father Z, all things considered — beyond just those listed by Rod Dreyer — I believe that you (like me) are much too conservative to be crunchy.

  2. Tim Ferguson says:

    I think the category that most suitably defines me politically and sociologically is: Black Guelph with ultramontane, Jacobite and anti-Federalist tendencies.

  3. dad29 says:

    Umnnhhh…Dreher’s selling Chesterton’s works as his own, eh? Coes “Crunchy” stand for thieving?

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