Even if the Coalition of Crunch was calling for the most common sense policies in the world (and they may be), they can’t see that they’re often using the exact same language and justifications as the most power-hungry liberals and the Hillaryite do-gooders. I keep waiting for someone to justify something by saying, “it’s FOR THE CHILDREN,” and have no idea why that message is no longer compelling to a conservative audience. We’ve seen every policy proposal that comes down the pike justified under “building a stronger community,” “it’s for the common good,” “it’s for the children,” “what, do you hate children or something?” and “If you don’t support HR12345, innocent puppies and kittens will suffer.” ~Jim Geraghty, Crunchy Cons

I’m sorry, but why does anyone find this sort of rhetorical gamesmanship credible? Mr. Geraghty doesn’t like the “arrogance” of the crunchy manifesto. Well, I don’t like the faux humility of the critics who act as if they have never engaged in cultural criticism or never pointed out the flaws with other conservatives. They do it all the time, and are doing it even as they are resentfully pouting about the mean, old crunchies.

Personally, I am sick to death of people who think that comparing someone to Hillary Clinton constitutes a serious argument. That was hilarious back in, oh, 1995. Get some new material, please. For my part, I think Rod mistakenly gave his critics an easy target by favourably quoting That Woman, but I understand he was trying to be “provocative” while also reclaiming the language of community and the common good from the very sorts of government welfarists and leftists who have so damaged these ideas by casting their ruinous policies in those terms.

Finally, I am getting very bored with the constant recourse to complaining about the incipient centralised state coercion of the crunchy revolution. To my mind, that has nothing to do with what Rod is talking about, and anyone who had read even a small part of the book (unlike Mr. Geraghty) would know that. Modern conservatives are so hopelessly inured to reacting allergically every time someone mentions the commonwealth, which they mistakenly take to mean Leviathan or Big Brother, that it seems that they are almost literally incapable of understanding that most people of conservative mind have viewed the world according to the principles that Rod describes rather than according to whatever it is that his critics happen to invoke at any given moment.

Fundamentally, the prizing of the self, the individual, that takes place in modern American discourse across the spectrum, is simply hostile to the true dignity of the human person and the community. Very intelligent and thoughtful men who used to write for NR long ago knew the difference between individualism and personalism, on which the difference between Left and Right in some respects ultimately depend. Even a classical liberal such as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who was one of the first to acquaint me with this distinction between individual and person, understood and embraced more of what Rod calls the “crunchy” sensibility than most of the “mainstream” NR folks today. The critics desperately want to reduce this entire debate to Rod’s idiosyncracies or eclecticism, because they do not want to contend with the larger claims that are echoing the ideas of some of NR’s best past contributors. No one likes being shown to be oblivious to the intellectual inheritance of his own philosophy, but daily this is what the anti-crunch folks are finding. So they respond the only way they can remember how: they start shouting about hidden leftism and warning about the encroachment of the state (while simultaneously being a, shall we say, less-than-vigorous critic of the most wasteful, profligate administration in our lifetime), when if anything most of the crunchies with whom I’m acquainted are far, far more hostile to state intervention than most of the folks at NR. Thus, when Mr. Geraghty starts invoking the defense of the Constitution, a document that NR has managed to ignore or side-step in its many alleluias to Mr. Bush’s foreign and security policies, we are galloping into the realm of the disingenuous.

Crunchy Cons is not a book on policy as such, and does not propose to enact a way of life by means of policy. Not only would this be impractical and contrary to their principles in many ways, but the crunchy cons who really believe as Rod does don’t necessarily think their ideas need to be promoted via policy. They work from the assumption (and we might question this assumption) that what is called crunchiness is a natural growth rooted in the conservative persuasion, and that conservatives, if they paid better attention to their philosophical heritage, would recognise that and live accordingly. Not according to something Rod Dreher dictates to them, but according to what they already believe to be true but have not been living out as well as they could be. It’s really not that hard to understand. It undoubtedly helps if you read the book before invoking the bogey of Hillary and her minions.