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Crunchy Clarification

Crunchy Cons is meant to be a book about culture, and how our most basic ideas about what people are for dictate the way we choose to live in a number of areas. T.S. Eliot wrote about how the shock of 1938 forced Britons to reconsider their confidence in their “unexamined premises,” and to wonder […]

Crunchy Cons is meant to be a book about culture, and how our most basic ideas about what people are for dictate the way we choose to live in a number of areas. T.S. Eliot wrote about how the shock of 1938 forced Britons to reconsider their confidence in their “unexamined premises,” and to wonder if there was more to their civilization than an aimless group of people interested in nothing much more than advancing prosperity and its fruits. September 11 forced me to do this kind of thinking, and still does. If I made a mistake with the book, it was in not making this theme more explicit. The thing is, I didn’t want the book to be grim and heavy, because that’s not how I am, and that’s not the spirit in which I live out my convictions. The people I know who call themselves crunchy cons are among the most joyful and confident people you’ll ever meet. It was my hope that Crunchy Cons would provide a genial entry point into a discussion of the way we live today, and how it reflects deeper convictions we have — and in particular, how we conservatives can and should change our lives so that we can better honor what we say we believe in. To the extent that the way I wrote the book leads people to think I’m just trying to baptize organic broccoli and Birkenstocks as right-wing, I regret it. ~Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons

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